Behind a paywall unfortunately, and the 12 ft ladder is broken
Warning to Australians who use credit cards to earn airline points
The generosity of rewards schemes could be scaled back if a proposal to ban surcharges for card transactions goes ahead.www.smh.com.au
That is true. The easier you make it for people to earn points the harder it is to find a reward seat (even economy).
The whole Credit Card Points thing is a genius from the airlines perspective. They get extra revenue with only a marginal increase in needing to service airline customers. It's a pure financial/banking play. QF seem to take it up a level with the lofty promises of business class reward seating. They just don't admit that cheap reward seats are rare and never when anyone actually wants them. But the public buy into the whole "I'm getting points for free" so it's a win-win for the airlines. My approach is - well I have to fly anyway so earning these points is a by product of that. Same argument, but from a different perspective.
From my perspective I'm happy about the changes because it'll make things a lot less fiddly. When I'm presented with a card surcharge I'm basically being given a choice:
Their ultimate goal was to push interchange rates down. Surcharging was viewed as a way of giving price signals to help push it down.
Fair enough. Note this card will not survive the reforms. There's no way HSBC will be able to afford giving 2% back once interchange rates are crushed.
Just note that credit card point earning will not get better under these reforms. They will get significantly worse, mirroring what has occurred in Europe.
The only reason I've got it is because of the surcharges, so I know that if I pay with it I'm no worse off than if I'd paid cash instead. If the surcharges go I'll happily ditch it. I wouldn't recommend HSBC as a bank, they're kind of awkward to deal with and their online services are quite dated, but (as far as I know) they're the only Australian bank offering cashback at 2%, rather than points.
Mayhap. However, we comparing reality vs ostensibility. The reality is, before Surcharging, nobody were screaming enshittification, no business were screaming high CC cost as they all accepted that's the cost of doing business, and most of all, everyone was peaceful.
You're getting hung up on surcharges, and weekend surcharges are a separate matter, and they won't go away.
This is a start. Like everything, it needs to start somewhere. If we start to accept surcharging has been more of the pain than the gain (however late that be), then inevitably (or hopefully perhaps), it would flow onto other surcharging.
