By : Mr Credit Card

Review of the National City Bank Elite Visa

Summary - The National City Bank Elite Visa is a reward credit card with a reward program that has both travel and shopping rewards. Let's explore this card in greater detail.



Reward Formula - The National City Bank allows you to earn 2 points for every dollar you spend as long as your annual spending is below $5,000. Once your annual spending exceeds $5,000, you will earn 5 points for every dollar you spend on the card. New cardholders get 5,000 bonus points after their purchases.

Fees and Rates - There is no annual fee for this card. The apr is either prime rate plus 3.99%, 6.99% or 12.99%. The two-cycle average daily balance method (including new purchases) is used to calculate monthly balance. New cardholders get an introductory 0% apr offer on purchases for 3 months and balance transfers for 6 months.

Is earning 5 points for every dollar you spend too good to be true?
When I first read that the elite visa lets you earn 5 points for every dollar you spend after your annual spending exceeded $5,000, I thought they had given the Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards Card a run for their money. Recall that the Citi Diamond Card allowed you to earn 5 points for every dollar you spend at supermarkets, gasoline stations and drugstores. To get to the bottom of this, I checked the reward catalog.

After scanning through the rewards, I found out that the 5 points per dollar headline was indeed too good to be true. The reason is because the points required to redeem rewards is skewed upwards to reflect that. For example, one would require 100,000 points to redeem a round trip flight within the continental USA. Most reward program only requires 25,000 points. Hence, when you factor in that you earn 5 points for every dollar after $5,000 in annual spending and scale it to compare with other credit card reward program, then a round trip air ticket within the US for the Elite Rewards requires an equivalent spending of between $20,000 and $25,000. (which is comparable to other reward programs).

Since this is a reward card, I thought I'd compare it with some of its peers from the main stream banks.

National City Bank Elite Visa Versus Chase Freedom - Given that this card allows you to spend 5 points for every dollar once your annual spend goes above $5,000, I'd thought that a comparison with the Chase Freedom is in order because the Chase Freedom allows you to earn 5% rebates or 5 Points (depnding on how you want to redeem your points) for categories that changes every three months (quarterly rotating categories). You also extra points when you shop with Merchants at Chase Ultimate Rewards shopping Mall. You can also redeem points for travel with their online travel site. 100 points gets you $1 in value (which is much better than the 100,000 points needed for a domestic flight with the Nat City Bank Elite Visa. So I think the Chase Freedom clearly beats out this card.

Versus the Citi® ThankYou Preferred Card - The Citi ThankYou Preferred Card is Citi's reward card. You can earn 5 point on things like gasoline, supermarket and drugstore spending for the first 12 months. Citi's ThankYou Reward program is superior to the Nat City program. You can redeem points for airline tickets on their online travel portal, which is powered by expedia.com (though that means that you can get American Airline seats and Southwest). At first glance, the ThankYou reward program is also better than the ELite Visa in terms of variety of choices.

Versus Blue From American Express - Compared to cards from Citi or Chase, the Blue card only allows you to earn one point for every dollar that you spend. But it's reward program is the Membership Rewards program and it is one of the (if not the) best reward program in the market today. There are more rewards than other programs and the online travel site is great as well. It leaves the ELite Visa program in a dust!

Verdict - I do not particularly like it that they advertise that you can earn 5 points for every dollar you spend when the number of points required for rewards is scaled up such that earning 5 points per dollar spent is almost equivalent to earning 1 point (as measured to other credit cards). The reward program is not as comprehensive when compare to others like the Chase choosemyrewards, Citi ThankYou Redemptions Network or the Membership Rewards. As a result, we cannot recommend this card.

Update - National City Bank has been taken over by PNC (during the financial crisis) and this card is no longer available.