I used to have a Bank of America credit card which gave me points on Amazon. I racked up about £50 worth of Amazon gift certificates in around 6 months, which, even for someone who’s an avid Amazon shopper, still surprised me.

However, round about October time, our lovely partnership came to an end. Amazon were no longer offering the card and I was going to get sent some useless MBNA one instead with no benefits at all.

So, I canceled it. Not that it stopped them sending me one of course… And I began the hunt for a rewards card that would give me some value. Actually, there isn’t a lot out there. And certainly nothing of interest that doesn’t require an annual fee, which was disappointing.

After a few weeks of comparing, doing some basic sums and dithering quite a bit I decided on the Santander 123 credit card. Although it has a lousy £24 annual fee, it does allow you to accrue cashback on supermarket shops and most importantly for me, transport. So I can get cashback from using TFL and rail services which makes sense. We’ll see if I actually manage to get the return on my investment in a years time, but after two months I’ve managed to get back almost £10 so it looks promising.

This wasn’t enough for me though. One of the things I spend most of my money on, is food. Restaurants. Santander isn’t offering me anything for that. Not to mention it’s convoluted sign up process (I actually locked myself out and had to wait for another password before I could use the app!) and it won’t let me pay off the card using the app either.

When I do get around to paying it off online it forgets my debit card details so I have to enter them every time! That’s just laziness on their part. Not to mention that if I want to pay over the statement balance back I’m not allowed.

Anyway so I decided to also apply for an American Express British Airways card. Which is free. I plan to use this wherever I can’t get points on the Santander one and the Amex one is accepted. That seems like a nice compromise. The difference between applications for Santander and Amex was phenomenal. I have to say the Amex application was the easiest I’ve ever used.

Amex application process

Amex application process: Basic info

As you can see, it’s slick, and clean with a large font and only asks for the bare minimum of information which is great and saves me time. They also send me regular email updates telling me of the card progress without me even having to do anything. And there it appeared just a few days later.

Amex Confirmation Email
 Amex Confirmation Email

I downloaded the Amex app, which is also clean and slick and as a bonus has offers which I can activate, which I wouldn’t have expected from a pure credit company.

We’ll see how long Santander can last without annoying me completely and causing me to cancel it. I’m going to have to try to pay it off directly from my bank account to avoid having to put my debit card details in every time! Argh.