In early December American Express resurrected and relaunched the Choice Card from American Express TM. This is their no fee reward cards that just recently just took second spot in the Top No Fee Travel Rewards Credit Card category in our 2021 Travel Credit Card rankings. When it was relaunched it came with a decent 10,000 point welcome bonus but as of today that’s getting a 25% boost to 12,500 points when you spend $1,250 on the card within the first three months of having it. That’s equivalent to a $125 credit towards any travel booked on your own or $87.50 when using it to redeem for any purchase that isn’t travel related. It also equates 15,000 Marriott Bonvoy points which is a pretty sweet deal as we value Marriott Bonvoy points at no less than 1 cent a piece so that makes the welcome bonus worth at least $150 but wait that’s only a minimum. Read on to find out more.
This card earns Membership Rewards Select points at a rate of 1point per dollar spent on
eligible purchases which means it provides a 1% return at a minimum for
travel (can go as high as 2% when using Fixed Points for Travel or a 0.7% return as a cash back return for Use Points for Purchases. Membership Rewards Select Points differ from your standard or First MR points in that they cannot be converted directly to airline programs like Aeroplan, British Airways etc. However the Select program has all the other options including converting to hotel programs like Marriott Bonvoy and Hilton Honors. It is the Marriott Bonvoy program where you can extract a lot of value out of this card.
I won’t go into major detail here as I wrote a whole post about the Marriott option which you can read about here but in that post we show where redeeming the points earned from the welcome bonus could be redeemed at a value of 3.5 cents each. If we take that value to this new welcome bonus of 12,500 points you are looking at $437.50 of value and that doesn’t include the points you earned making the minimum spend to get the bonus. Over $400 places this card well above any other no fee cards and in fact beats out many of the premium annual fee cards even with their first year free offers. This card is truly a hidden gem and the fact that it has no annual fee ever there is not much harm in having it in your wallet!
This offer is available for new applications made by May 5, 2021