PenFed PathFinder Rewards American Express Card Review
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When looking for a rewards credit card, there has always been a choice you had to make. You can earn bonus rewards on some qualifying purchases, and one point or mile per dollar spent elsewhere. Or, you can receive a higher rate of return than 1x on all of your purchases, but without any bonus categories. To get around this choice, many savvy credit card users simply carry one card for use where they get a bonus and another card for purchases that don’t qualify. The new PathFinder Rewards American Express Card from PenFed tries to be a card that you can use both where you can earn a bonus and where you can’t. Let’s take a look at this card and see if it’s right for you.
How this Card Works
To apply for this card, you must first be a member of PenFed, the Pentagon Federal Credit Union. Millions of Americans can qualify for free membership based on their--or a member of their household’s--association with a long list of military, government, and defense organizations. Everyone else can easily join by becoming a member of a qualifying military support organization, for a one-time $17 fee.
New cardholders can earn 25,000 bonus points after spending $2,500 within 90 days of account opening. New accounts also receive 12 months of 0% APR financing on balance transfers, with a 3% balance transfer fee.
When you use this card to purchase travel and local commuter transportation, you can earn as many as 4x points per dollar. Members of the military and holders of PenFed’s free Access America Checking accounts always earn 4x on qualifying purchases, while others earn 3x. Eligible purchases include not just air, hotel, car rentals, and cruises, but also public transportation, tolls and shared ride services such as Uber and Lyft. All other purchases earn 1.5x points, with no limits.
Points are worth different amounts depending on how they are redeemed. Gift cards generally return 0.85 cents per point, while merchandise rewards offer a bit more value. Travel rewards must be redeemed through PenFed’s designated travel agent, and can offer values of up to about 1.25 cents per point, but sometimes a bit less.
This card also comes with a $100 annual air travel credit that is automatically applied to your account when you pay fees to one of 11 eligible carriers. You will also get reimbursed up to $100 when you pay the application fee for Global Entry or TSA PreCheck, once every four years. This card also includes numerous travel insurance and purchase protection policies.
Yet despite these numerous benefits, there’s no annual fee for this card, and no foreign transaction fees.
Advantages
There are lots of cards that offer bonus rewards on travel purchases, and even some that also include local commuter transportation as an eligible purchase. Although few of them offer you as much as 4x rewards for travel purchases, nearly all of them will only give you 1x for non-bonus purchases, which make this one of the rare cards that you could consider using all of the time.
This card also stands out by offering many of the benefits found on a premium rewards card but without the annual fees. Most cardholders should be able to use the $100 annual air travel fee credit, which isn’t found in any other no-fee card.
The 25,000-point sign-up bonus is strong, and the 12 months of 0% APR financing on balance transfers can be valuable to some. I also like that there’s no foreign transaction fees imposed on charges processed outside of the United States.
Disadvantages
To apply for this card, you must first join PenFed, which is the second largest federal credit union in the United States. Joining is not that hard, but it’s an extra step that many will have to take. And if you aren’t a member of the military, then you’ll also need to open a checking account with them in order to earn the full 4x rewards on your travel and local commuter transportation expenses.
Finally, it’s hard to put a value on their rewards points, which are worth different amounts depending on how you redeem them. This is true of many rewards programs, and cardholders need to understand this in order to get the most possible value from their points.
Bottom Line
It’s clear that PenFed has worked hard to create a card that their members can feel good about using everywhere, not just where they can earn a bonus. They’ve also done a good job of including most of the features and benefits that you would expect to find on a premium travel rewards card but without imposing an annual fee. By offering all of these rewards, features, and benefits in a single card, the PenFed Pathfinder Rewards card will certainly be the choice of many credit card users who want to earn as many rewards as possible but would rather not have to use different cards for different purposes to earn them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Know Stewart is one of the leading journalists covering the credit card industry and travel rewards. His work appears at many of the top personal finance websites and is regularly syndicated by mainstream sites such as MSN Money and Yahoo! Finance.
Editorial Note: Any opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author's alone, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any card issuer.
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