Credit Cards Canada

I had this card now for about 4 years and use it a lot for business orders. The best thing about this credit card is the rewards are pretty much hassle free with no bull. I started off with just a normal royal bank student visa card when I was in college, I was using that for mostly business transactions for car part orders in California when I started my small business. I think it was the Royal Bank Visa Classic II student card I had.

Why was I using a student card at first you might ask and not getting any sweet avion reward miles?  The problem was at the time to get the avion you needed a $5,000 dollar credit limit to get the card. My problem was the max credit they would give me starting a new business was $3,000 for not really having a steady income and being open for 3 months. I’m not sure if it’s still like that or not but it was a few years ago. Anyway a few months passed and I packed on the orders and put some major cash through that card and kept paying it off in full and RBC had no problem giving me the new avion visa card. This time with a 10,000 dollar limit I guess they figure if you’re spending lots of money on the card and paying it off fast with no problems you would be a good future customer.
 
Now on to the card review…  This card came in the mail with in no time and I didn’t waste any time calling it in to activate. From what I remember for the first few months they were giving double points for a promotion. They have lots of promotions for double points this was around august or so and before I knew it I had around 40,000 racked up. By the end of October me and my business partners wanted to fly down to USA to visit the Sema Car show in Las Vegas. I called the 1-800-Royal-12 number on the back of the card and in no time was forwarded to the right department and had my flight reserved. There was no lock out dates and I think you could use any airline. I ended up using continental airlines and it turned out to be a very good choice. I was happy with their service and didn’t run into any delays. I can’t say the same for when I flew with delta. Continental at least seemed like they had everything together and got us in Vegas on time.
The card itself the interest is kind of high but I guess 19.5 is normal now days. The annual fee is $120 dollars a year with a 17 day grace period for late payments.  If you want to add a co-applicant it’s another $50. The cool thing with the avion card is you can use your points to buy items and not just airline tickets. After I built up some more points since the SEMA trip and they sent me a book with mostly overpriced crap to grab your points away. But there was one thing in the book that caught my attention. You could buy future shop gift cards and get as many of them as you had points. So I cashed them all out and waiting for Xbox 360 launch day ended up with 2 core systems out the door and sold them on eBay. That i think was the best use of my points. It was just as if royal bank giving me cash and trust me that will ever happen looking at my bank account statements and all the service fee’s. I do however from time to time see nice sums of money enter my account and then leave a few seconds later. You wonder sometimes….. why that happens is it really a mistake? Is something else going on behind the scenes. Anyway the card is pretty good and if your thinking thats the card for you then get it.