I was asked about the possibility of redeeming Sword Points for air miles and I have decided to go ahead and do that. I wasn't too sure how it all works so I'm going to my mentor, Capital One. I will model my Reward Miles after their No Hassle plan because, really, who wants any hassle when they are getting a free plane ride?
So here's the deal. I am going to offer a new way to earn Sword Points. It's going to be easy and when you have enough points, you get a free airline ticket.*
The newest way to earn Sword Points is to purchase them. Simple enough, eh? For every dollar you send me (plus 14% interest**), you will earn 1.25 Sword Points. You can then redeem the Sword Points for tickets. I can give you the whole breakdown later but for now you can use this guideline. If you redeem 60,000 Sword Points, I'll give you a free ticket worth $400.*
This means that you will only need to send me about $48,000 (plus 14% interest**) and you're off on vacation.***
Pretty sweet deal for you! I'm nice that way, just like my buddies at Capital One who are always bending over backwards for you, the valued customer. It's amazing that they are still in business the way they just give away money.
5 Sword Points awarded to EditorMum the old fashioned way, for pointing me toward Mouse Print where I found the information for this post. They have information on all kinds of fine print, not just money. Check it out and tell them Success Warrior sent you.
* Nothing in this life is free, or haven't you learned that yet? As with all credit card reward systems, it costs about 120X as much to use the card and redeem the points. If you were to just buy the plane tickets instead, you could take your significant other on 60 trips. In fact, to prove that I'm nicer than Capital One, I will give you the second ticket for half the number of points as the first one. Send me $72,000 and I will reward you with enough Sword Points to buy two plane tickets. Let's see them try to compete with that!
** To be perfectly honest (and that's kind of the point behind the asterix even though "perfect" is too strong of a word for the honesty in most ads), you don't have to pay interest. It is possible to make your purchases on the card and pay it off without paying any interest but you and I both know that most people don't do that. In fact, if most people did that, the number of sky mile points needed to buy a ticket would go up. Those tickets are bought with the interest that Capital One charges you. Also note that sky mile points are not redeem on a 1/1 basis. That would make it too simple to equate the spending of $48,000 for 48,000 points for a $400 ticket. That just won't do. If you spend $1, you get 1.25 points. You see, you are getting a bargain. You are getting more than you paid for. They are awarding you 1.25 fictitious points for every dollar that you spend. They could give you .5 points for every dollar and only require 24,000 points for the ticket but that just *sounds* like a bad deal. It's even possible to earn 2 fictitious points per dollar on some purchases. Now, that's what I call a bargain. Once again, not to be outdone by Capital One, anyone who purchases Sword Points on Sword Point Saturday will receive 2.1758 Sword Points per dollar. That's every Saturday! Somebody stop me before I give away the whole store!
*** Not that you'll be able to afford to do anything once you get there but hey, it's a free ticket*. While I'm being honest with you, let me confess something to you. It would take me so long to charge $48,000 worth of crap onto my card that by the time I had earned my 60,000 sky points, gas prices would be so high that it would take 1,000,000 points to get my plane ticket. That's going to require a balancing act by Capital One. Sure, it's one thing to give 1.25 points per dollar so that people feel like they are getting a good deal but when the points required become outrageously high, they will have to come up with a better plan. A million points sounds unachievable and would be discouraging. It has to be enticing and yet seem like an achievement. "Dude, I've got 57,000 sky points! 3,000 more and I'm off to Des Moines! By myself. With no money."
Did you like how I put all the disclosures on a separate page? Now if I was as professional as Capital One, I would have made it a little harder to find this page and you would have gone through several pages of cool pictures showing you just how neat Sword Points are and what you can get with them. Someday, I hope to be as good as Capital One with my deception marketing campaign.
What's in my wallet, you ask?
Why, it's my cash. Cool.