Additions:
Door Dash “Dash Pass” - (activated when adding card into door dash app), active now. Minimum 12 months, up to 24 months.
Lyft Pink Membership - effective 1/12/2020.
Rumors:
Annual Fee change to $550, effective 1/12/2020 for new card members and renewals starting in 4/2020.
Door Dash credits - $60/yr for only 2020 and 2021. Split up monthly or such.
Travel credit change?
I never use lyft myself, but if I figure out a way to transfer the membership, there’s actually a relative that could use (and was/is just signing up for lyft pink today or tomorrow). Not sure that I want to add my credit card to their account, but that might work and I’d give a 10% discount for the 10UR+1delta+3hiltonpesos.
The Reserve still makes sense for me personally even with no added value and with the fee $100 higher. But it’s a little tougher sale.
Overall seems less terrible than Amex’s changes. The Aspire has gotten worse (with more difficulty in using airline credit), they better not raise that fee to $550, and they damaged the priority pass with no “non-lounge” priority pass lounges (such as restaurants). The Amex Delta cards all had their annual fees raised, coupled with removed benefits. Plus Amex destroyed their other perks (like reducing extended warranty).
If you’re near the 48 months (I think it’s almost 48 months since the CSR was first introduced), maybe instead wait and do a fresh CSP (with referral) for 60k+20k UR. But then you’ll have to wait another year if you want to upgrade to a CSR.
I don’t understand why they would do this. All of these credit card benefits are all “temporary” as has been made very clear from the sweeping changes made by Citi, Amex, and Chase very recently. Why would they explicitly say they’re temporary?
My chase experience has been no reduction in benefits for several years (and UR value). That’s a big part of going almost fully with their rewards ecosystem. I prefer and expect the advanced notice from them. It’s nice they even gave a little advance notice before the new fee kicks in for new applicants.
They probably got the 1yr free trial lyft and doordash credits at a deep discount.
Accounting for the $300 travel credit, the change to $250 in annual fee is a tough sell if you don’t use Lyft or DoorDash. Compared to the CSP $95 AF, the extra perks especially +1% points on travel/dining and priority pass were rather easily worth the extra $55 in annual fee. But it’s going to be harder to make up $155 unless you heavily use the new benefits.
I’m guessing Chase threw in those cheap added perks to deflect the bad PR of raising their AF on CSR. And they probably hope inertia and loyalty is enough to make back some of the 100k points they gave out while launching it.
Personally, we cannot get the sign-up bonus for a few more months (September 2020 IIRC), so we’ll see what offers are up on CSP and CSR around that time. We’re not using Lyft or DoorDash so it’s definitely gonna be a closer deal. Now if they still throw around 100k points for CSR vs 60k points for CSP, twist my arm…
My understanding was that if you have one of the Sapphire cards, you can’t get a signup bonus on any other Sapphire card. I think this was a relatively recent change. So one good thing out of this news is that after I cancel CSR I’ll be able to churn again, which is usually worth quite a bit more than not churning.
