3 Best Ways to Optimise Your Credit Card Air Miles Spend in Singapore

In Singapore, the credit card scene (and the air miles involved with them) can be kind of overwhelming. Do I use this card for that? How many miles am I getting with this spend?

So many cards are marketed to us, it sometimes feels like we’re just a small child looking up at a “Great Wall” of sweets/candies—not knowing which one to pick!

Also, how do we know we’re not just picking the cards that are shoved in front of our face the most by the banks (versus the ones that are actually shiok)?

Fear not because I’m here to share with you how exactly you can best optimise your credit card spend to get the most air miles out of it.  

While it takes time to get used to any system or new way of doing things—remember when BTS went on “hiatus” and pursued their own solo careers?!—it’s just something we just need to come to terms with.

Once we do, we can really make the best of it. Similarly, the air miles game in Singapore is more about getting used to a system and then optimising it the best we can.

So, here are three of the best ways that you can get started on optimising that credit card spend to make your miles game properly lit! 

 

1. Understand your spending habits

Before you even think about signing up to the new “hot” credit card out there, you need to establish some foundations. Why? Because certain cards out there cater to different types of spending and actually award you more (yes, more) miles for those types of transactions.

When I say “types of spending”, I mean the actual channel that you go through. This can be either the physical/online difference or an actual specific type of merchant (say a restaurant for “dining” or a luxury brand for “shopping”).

Online vs. contactless spend

If you spend more online (shout out to all the Shopee and Lazada lovers!) on a month to month basis, there are certain credit cards out there that you should be targeting. Likewise, getting a Grab/GoJek or ordering food from FoodPanda or Deliveroo will count as “online” spending.

Think of the DBS Woman’s World Mastercard or the Citi Rewards Mastercard for online spending as these two cater specifically to those who like to spend digitally and live a more online existence, as it relates to their spending.

However, if you know that you’re more of a face-to-face type of person and like dining out, going out at night—anybody vibin’ Marqueeeeeeeeee this Friday night?!—or even prefer shopping in person at the many malls on our Little Red Dot, then there’ll be specific cards that cater to what we call “PayWave” or “contactless” spending. What exactly is contactless? It’s when you tap your card (or your phone because we are in 2024, people) on a payment terminal at a shop, restaurant, bar, hotel etc.

So PayWave and contactless includes both Apple Pay and Google Pay as a lot of us can now store multiple credit cards on our phones. 

To be honest, the term “PayWave” is as out of date as the term actually first appeared in Singapore back in 2007 when you could use a card to tap at a payment terminal to pay.

Now, we use the catch-all term “contactless” that refers to both tapping the physical card or tapping your phone to pay.

Either way, I’ve personally not seen a card be inserted into a machine in years! That makes paying with contactless relatively straightforward if you’re out and about spending money on a credit card. In this contactless alternate universe of spending, you have multiple options to choose from, including nabbing the top “contactless” cards like the UOB Preferred Platinum Visa or the UOB Visa Signature.

Specific merchants

Alright, now it’s time to flip topics (is your brain completely fried yet?!) and talk about spending at specific merchants. The other way to make sure you optimise your spend is to actually spend at specific merchants.

To distinguish what merchant—basically where you’re spending is named a “merchant”—falls under a specific category, there is actually something called a “merchant category code” or MCC for short. It’s a 4-digit number and it’s primarily used by banks to determine what type of merchant your card has spent money at.

So, say you order some food on FoodPanda. While that would count as food delivery in your eyes, for banks, the food delivery companies typically have an MCC that comes under “Dining”.

Alright, what does it all mean though? Well, find a card that rewards you big time for spending in the “Dining” category (or any other specific merchant category like “Shopping” or “Groceries”) and you could be earning extra miles for all that spend! 

In this instance, think of cards like the UOB Lady’s or UOB Lady’s Solitaire Cards—they give you extra miles for spending at specific merchants that have an MCC code that falls under seven different categories.

 

 

2. Do NOT earn less than 4 miles per dollar with your credit cards/be aware of spending caps

Now that you understand your spending habits and know where to focus, you need to repeat this mantra: “I will NOT earn less than 4 miles per dollar of spend on any transaction I make”. Say it when you wake up and say it before you go to bed (just explain beforehand to your SO in case you’re creeping them out). 

This is the rule that miles chasers live by. And it’s for good reason. That’s because everything I laid out in section 1—understanding your spending—comes into play as you direct all your spending towards specific cards that can gain you those 4 miles per dollar.

While banks may have different so-called “bank point currencies” (think UNI$ for UOB or DBS points for DBS) it’s just important to realise that 4 miles per dollar is the most you will earn on these “specialised” spending cards.

As I outlined in the previous section, all these specialised cards meet various types of spending needs. You know all those cards out there that shout about how it can earn you 1.1 miles or even 1.2 miles per dollar (I’m looking at your AMEX KrisFlyer) of spend? Well, that’s less than 30% of the miles you could and should be earning every time you whack some of your spend on a credit card.

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ALSO READ: How to Earn Miles and Redeem Free Flights with Singapore Airlines’ KrisFlyer

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Specialised spending cards gives you access to the inner circle

These specialised spending cards are like the crème de la crème of credit cards—the “quiet luxury” of Singapore’s credit card scene if you will. They go unnoticed but they’re special for all the right reasons. They don’t need to be marketed because people in the know realise how great they are. 

In my opinion, banks probably also don’t make as much money off those cards from us consumers (versus other cards) because they’re giving away so many air miles for that spend. If you consider these specialised cards as the “best of the best”, then the “general” spending cards should be seen as the exact opposite.

Cards like the DBS Altitude, UOB PRVI, or (yes) Amex KrisFlyer are general spending cards where you should only spend when you can not spend on the “best of the best” range. Just imagine you’re Superman/Superwoman, and these general spending cards are your kryptonite—they need to be avoided at all costs.

However, there is one caveat to the specialised spending card scene. There are spending caps to those plentiful, wonderful 4 miles per dollar.

When you do direct your spending onto those cards, just be mindful of that. Because any money spent beyond their stated caps means you’re going to get one-tenth of what you’d normally get (so yes, 0.4 miles per dollar).

Crazy I know but these spending caps are relatively decent, with the low end ranging from S$1,000 and going all the way up to S$2,000 per month. 

 

3. Note the exclusions on credit card spend for miles

Let’s try to approach this particular issue from the perspective of a bank; a boring exercise I know but a necessary one. If you’re a bank and issue a credit card, you want people using your credit card to earn rewards for spend they might have otherwise used cash for.

Basically, that spend should be “discretionary” in nature and not sizeable transactions they must pay every month or every quarter.

In that sense, banks (and their respective credit cards) actually don’t give you any air miles for particular types of spending. There’s an exhaustive list under each bank’s Terms & Conditions (T&Cs) page but the main exclusions you need to watch out for are:

• Insurance premium payments
• Utilities bill (think SP Power, Senoko Energy etc.) payments
• Payments to any educational institutions or tuition centres
• Payments to hospitals
• Any top-up payments to e-wallets (like GrabPay, EZ-Link etc.)

That’s because you can game the system and earn many miles by whacking these expenses on your card. Imagine any hospital bill or an education payment for your kids—both of which are necessary but also pretty dang expensive!

As a bank, you don’t want to be dishing out air miles for that sort of spend. So, across the board in Singapore, it’s nearly impossible to earn miles on any of these types of transactions with any air miles card issued by the banks.  

So, prepare yourself mentally when you do start the miles games and don’t think you’re going to be swimming in miles based on how much you have to pay for your insurance premiums!

There are certain platforms that allow you to earn miles on these transactions (as well as earning miles for paying rent or your taxes) but you effectively have to pay a fee to use the platform, such as CardUp.

The end result is that you are actually “buying” miles by using them. Furthermore, they don’t allow you to use the specialised spending cards to accrue those miles—you have to resort to the “kryptonite” general spending cards. While it can work out/make sense for people who spend enough, you also need to redeem flights frequently.

 

Optimising starts with realising how you spend

It’s super crucial to realise what your spending habits are before you even think about applying for certain cards. That’s because how you spend is going to dictate exactly which cards you apply for first.

So before going out there and employing a “spray and pray” method on credit card applications, nail down what you spend on and then have a very clear idea of which 4-miles-per-dollar cards are going to get you the most bang for your buck.

By doing that, we can start our miles hacking journey off on the right foot and get working faster towards those credit card points and eventual free flights!