Luxury Card credit cards: Which one is best for you?

What type of person is Luxury Card designed for? Does that align with the typical cardholder? How high of a salary and credit score do you actually need to qualify for the Gold Card?

Overall, Luxury Card targets high-net-worth individuals who expect high-touch services and competitive benefits. Our customers seek the support and assistance of a 24/7 concierge service to help them manage life’s tasks and save time. They are also looking to benefit and gain additional access to high-end experiences that fits their lifestyle.

How does Luxury Card help consumers make the most of their luxury travel needs?

Every step of a customer’s journey can be managed by Luxury Card Concierge experts—from sourcing destination ideas or a unique bucket-list experience to customizing an itinerary based on a customer’s wants and needs to handling luggage or ski/golf equipment shipments to the destination and booking air travel and hotel accommodations. From there, agents can assist with on-the-ground tours, restaurant recommendations and local experiences to enhance the overall trip and vacation. We have an extremely beneficial Luxury Card Travel program—offering cardmembers an average value of $500 in benefits and services per stay.

Resort credits and daily breakfast for two are just the beginning of perks offered by Luxury Card’s Hotel & Travel program at over 3,000 fine hotels and properties in 500 countries. Lastly, our 2% redemption value for airfare leads the industry and is available with no blackout dates, airlines or seat restrictions. Our app also features hundreds of bookable travel ideas and benefits.

Why do the Gold and Black Cards have high annual fees compared to other cards on the market? What value do these cards offer that compensates for the high annual fee?

To clarify, our Mastercard Black Card has a lower annual fee than Amex Platinum and Chase Sapphire Reserve ($495 v $500). Our Mastercard Gold Card carries a higher annual fee because this tier of Luxury Card products offers more value — We offer a 33% greater redemption value for cash back (vs Black and Titanium). The increased value of cashback redemptions along with the extensive travel benefits, 24/7 concierge services and access to the airport network lounge, to name a few, all add up. In addition, the metal card is plated with 24K gold, making this a valuable status symbol to carry in one’s wallet.

Why does Luxury Card not offer a sign-up bonus? Is that a benefit that you would ever consider adding?

We don’t want to attract “gamers” or customers who are thinking short-term and looking for a quick hit of points. We had a sign-up bonus program with the original product, but we removed the sign-up bonus with no adverse impact on customer acquisition. We seek a long-term, quality relationship with our customers and vice versa. Our customer wants that reliable, consistent long-term service from Luxury Card.

Has Luxury Card considered adding transfer partners to the rewards program?

Yes, we have. This is a topic and member benefit we continue to vet and assess.

What’s your strategy in differentiating the Luxury Card brand from your competition?

Our customers drive our strategy—high-touch service and focus on the customer experience drive every strategy decision. We keep informed of what the competition is offering, which is always a good business practice. Overall, we take the lead from our customers by assessing their requests and purchase habits. Then we listen to their feedback — all these elements inform our strategy.

In our tests of concierge services, Luxury Card was the most efficient and reliable. Tell us how you designed your concierge service. What are the most common concierge service requests you get?

That’s great to hear, our goal is to be just that for our customers—efficient and reliable. Our Concierge service is designed for relationship-based services, focusing on responding to and delivering on personalized, custom requests. It is not a cookie-cutter service, and we really do stand behind our motto that no request is too big or too small. Travel and transport are always in the top categories of requests with food, wine and entertainment being a close second and third.

What new credit card features or updates do you have in the pipeline, if any?

This year we rolled out a series of new member benefits as part of our Preferred Partnership Program — all timely and quarantine-friendly. Select partners were chosen to offer a preferred rate or exclusive service for Luxury Card members. For example, we worked with an online yoga- streaming subscription service — YogaToday — which offered our members 50% off their annual membership rate. We also partnered with Frette, which offered 25% online and in-store purchases for customers, as well as an outdoor-inspired and wellness-focused hotel group, LOGE Camps, which offered Luxury Card members 15% off their room rates alongside special amenities and services such as complimentary gear rental. Our goal with these partnerships is to delight the customer in unexpected ways. All of these have been incredibly well received by our cardholders and the participating partners. This program will continue to grow.

How is Luxury Card faring during the pandemic? Are there any consumer trends you’re seeing?

Obviously, the Concierge service has seen a decline in customer requests, which makes sense as customers have not been traveling and have remained largely at home. However, we have already started to see a recovery and lift in requests in July and August. Total open accounts are in fact up year over year.

We’ve seen a lot of card issuers make changes to their cards to react to the pandemic, but we haven’t seen changes to the Luxury Cards. Why is that? Do you foresee your card features will change as COVID continues or will they remain the same?

We believe there is value in maintaining continuity of the core member benefits so it clear for our customers, especially during this time when everything all around us is uncertain.

We have augmented the strong foundation of our cardmember benefits with relevant “pandemic-centric” offers, such as payment relief programs for customers who may benefit from the extra financial reprieve in monthly payments, and concierge agents assisting customers with sourcing hard-to find pandemic items or proactively offering virtual experiences and other at-home amenities or services.Adding incremental value and benefits we believe is a better customer experience than changing any existing benefit mid-year or “for a limited time” with small-print terms and conditions that add confusion to the overall customer experience.