New Wyndham Rewards Earner Premier card: An unexpected new card that’s hard to make sense of

I don’t think anyone expected a premium Wyndham card to come on the market before a premium Hyatt card, but here we are.

Wyndham and Barclays launched a new premium card today called the Wyndham Rewards Earner Premier card. It’s a slightly strange card because it doesn’t seem like there’d be a big market for a $395 annual fee card for people who regularly stay at a Days Inn. That said, there’s enough there to make it worthwhile for the right person—so much so that I’m somewhat tempted to apply for the card myself, at least for the welcome offer and first year benefits.

As a quick aside, the existing lineup of Wyndham cards was refreshed today for new applicants, so we’ll have another post out about those changes shortly.

The Offer & Key Card Details

Card Offer and Details

Wyndham Rewards Earner Premier Card ⓘ $192 1st Yr Value EstimateClick to learn about first year value estimates Up to 120K Points Non-AffiliateThis is NOT an affiliate offer. We always present the best offer even when it means less revenue for Frequent Miler 90K points after $6K spend and paying the annual fee in full in first 120 days + 30K points after spending $750 at Wyndham properties in the first 180 days $395 Annual Fee Learn more Information about this card has been collected independently by Frequent Miler. The issuer did not provide the details, nor is it responsible for their accuracy. Earning rate: 8X Wyndham (including Wyndham Travel Bundles) ✦ 4X Vacation Club, travel (airfare, car rental, rideshare, gas, EV charging, tolls and trains), dining, & grocery (excludes Walmart & Target) ✦ 1X everywhere else Base: 1X (0.67%) Travel: 4X (2.68%) Flights: 4X (2.68%) Hotels: 4X (2.68%) Grocery: 4X (2.68%) Dine: 4X (2.68%) Gas: 4X (2.68%) Brand: 8X (5.36%) Card Info: Visa Signature issued by Barclays. This card has no foreign currency conversion fees. Noteworthy perks: 30K points every anniversary year ✦ Diamond status ✦ 25% discount on free night awards ✦ 30K bonus points when paying for 5+ Wyndham nights with the card in a calendar year ✦ Cardmember discount on paid stays ✦ $100 statement credit when spending $100+ at select Wyndham brands ✦ Up to $10 statement credits per month for meal delivery ✦ Up to $100 per year for eligible streaming services ✦ $65 statement credit for wholesale membership club purchases ✦ Complimentary Wyndham Insider membership ✦ Up to $120 every 4 years for Global Entry or TSA Precheck ✦ 15% discount—or the best available offer—when you purchase points with your Wyndham Rewards Earner® Card ✦ Complimentary Emerald Club Executive® status with National®

Quick Thoughts

The first thing to address here is the annual fee. $395 per year isn’t cheap, so the card needs enough benefits to justify that fee on an ongoing basis. Does it have those? The answer is—it depends.

For the first year at least, it certainly could be worthwhile considering the value you can get from the welcome offer. You can earn up to 120K bonus points, but there are two spending requirements to max that out. You’ll earn 90K bonus points when spending $6K and paying the annual fee in full in the first 120 days. You’ll also earn 30K points if you spend $750 at Wyndham properties in the first 180 days; that $750 of spend will count towards the $6K of required spend for the main part of the welcome offer, provided it takes place in the first 120 days.

In terms of earning rates for spending on your card, the 8X you’ll earn for Wyndham stays matches the rate on the Wyndham Rewards Earner Business card. 4X for travel, dining, and grocery stores could be of interest, but the relatively cheap rate at which Wyndham frequently sells its points might not make it worth racking up large sums of points through spend, especially considering the card doesn’t have any kind of big spend bonus that would make that spend more rewarding. Note that travel purchases are defined as airfare, car rental, rideshare, gas, EV charging, tolls, and trains.

At renewal each year, you’ll earn 30K bonus points after paying your annual fee.

There’s then a separate benefit: you can earn an additional 30K bonus points, available from the moment you get your card. To earn those additional 30K points, you have to pay for at least five nights at Wyndham properties within a calendar year; those nights can be consecutive, or they can be spread across two or more stays. Earnings from this benefit are capped at 30K points per calendar year. However, since it’s a calendar-year benefit, you could earn it twice in your first year of card membership.

For those who book award stays with Wyndham or who redeem points for stays booked in the UK via its partnership with Cottages.com, you’ll get a 25% discount on the number of points required. Wyndham has three pricing tiers for its own properties—7,500, 15,000, and 30,000 points—so the prices would drop to 5,625, 11,250, and 22,500 points, respectively. That’s a great benefit, but do note that all the other Wyndham cards that have a lower annual fee also offer a discount on award stays, albeit with lower percentages of 10% (Earner, Earner Plus, and Earner Business(the latter for existing cardholders)) or 20% (Earner Business for new applicants).

Premier cardholders get a discount on paid stays, but that discount is available to other Wyndham cardholders as well.

You’ll also get Diamond status every year that you hold the card. That status level is available on the Earner Plus card for the first year (after which time it’ll drop to Platinum), and on the Business card on a permanent basis.

Other hidden coupon book benefits

All that might not sound like it’s worthy of a $395 annual fee, and you’d be right. The weird thing is that Barclays is underselling the cards by hiding a whole host of other coupon book-style benefits at the bottom of the page. Not only that, but the list is hidden further behind a dropdown box titled ‘$400 in Annual Benefits’. If you click on the + sign next to that, you’ll see those benefits:

• $100 statement credit for eligible hotel stays – This is earned when spending $100+ at the following brands: Wyndham, Wyndham Grand, Dolce, Trademark Collection, and Registry Collection. This benefit can be earned on a calendar-year basis, so you can earn it twice in your first year.
• $65 statement credit for wholesale membership club purchase – A Costco Gold Star membership usually costs $65, while Sam’s Club and BJ’s Wholesale memberships usually cost $60 per year, so this benefit would cover the cost of all of those. If you’re a member of any of these wholesale clubs, this benefit could be as good as cash. I doubt you’ll get the $65 statement credit for day-to-day purchases, as I believe these clubs handle their membership processes differently from ordinary transactions, which is how the statement credit would be triggered.
• Wyndham Rewards Insider membership – This normally costs $95 per year. While its benefits are limited and the $95 fee is thus extremely questionable, Wyndham has started offering additional bonus points on stays for Insider members when running stay promotions, so having a complimentary membership could prove to be useful for picking up more points that way.
• Up to $120 statement credit for Global Entry or TSA Precheck – This benefit comes on a lot of cards nowadays, but it’s nice to have if you don’t happen to have any other eligible cards.
• Up to $10 per month for meal delivery – This is earned when paying for the service with your card. I suspect that pickup orders will also work, so placing a $10 pickup order at a local restaurant would be the best value way to max out this benefit each month. Eligible services are:
  • Caviar
  • ChowNow
  • Delivery.com
  • DoorDash
  • Goldbelly
  • Grubhub
  • OrderUp
  • Postmates
  • Seamless
  • Uber Eats
• Up to $100 per year for streaming services – This is a far more useful benefit than it might first appear because it’s a calendar-year benefit, rather than coming in the form of monthly credits (although you can use it for monthly subscriptions). That means that if you pay annually for a subscription due to that offering cheaper pricing, you’ll still be able to maximize this benefit. The calendar year nature of it means that you can get up to $200 in statement credits during your first cardholder year. There’s a long list of eligible streaming services:
  • Video streaming services
    • Amazon Prime Video
    • Apple TV
    • Crunchyroll
    • discovery+
    • Disney+
    • ESPN+
    • fuboTV
    • Hulu
    • Hulu + Live TV
    • Netflix
    • Paramount+
    • Peacock
    • Philo
    • SHOWTIME
    • Sling TV
    • STARZ
    • Vudu
    • Willow TV
    • WOW Presents Plus
    • YouTube Premium
    • YouTube TV
  • Music streaming services
    • Amazon Music Unlimited
    • Apple Music
    • iHeartRadio
    • Pandora
    • Qobuz
    • SiriusXM
    • SoundCloud
    • Spotify
    • Tidal
    • YouTube Music
  • Audiobooks/eBook streaming services
    • Audible
    • Kindle
    • Kobo

Who is this card for?

As is usually the case with premium cards, you’ll need to work fairly hard to ensure you’ll extract enough value from its benefits to justify the annual fee beyond the first year.

This new Wyndham Rewards Earner Premier card is therefore a little confusing because it doesn’t feel like the market for people who frequently stay at Wyndham properties will widely overlap with the market for people who are happy to pay $395 in annual fees for a credit card.

That said, I am tempted. I’m currently a Wyndham Rewards Earner Business cardholder, and benefits for existing cardholders aren’t changing—only new cardholders (more about that in a separate post later). I have a decent stash of Wyndham points, but 90K bonus points from the welcome offer certainly wouldn’t go amiss.

In terms of benefits, I’d likely be able to take advantage of the following:

• 30K bonus points at renewal
• 30K bonus points for five paid nights in a calendar year – My wife and I sometimes stay at roadside Days Inns in the UK when on a road trip; $65 per night Days Inns here are better than the equivalent in the US
• 25% award discount – The award discount on my Wyndham Business card is—theoretically—10% as I’m an existing cardholder. However, when logging into my account today, I’m seeing a 20% discount listed on the Barclays website, although only a 10% discount is being applied on the Wyndham site. That would mean the Premier card would save me an additional 15% when booking award stays.
• $200 statement credits for streaming services in the first cardholder year, $100 per year thereafter – We have both a Kindle Unlimited and an Audible subscription, so $100 per calendar year towards those is pretty much as good as cash for us
• Referrals – Barclays/Wyndham recently introduced the ability for cardholders to earn bonus points when referring others to a Wyndham card. That referral ability is only on personal cards; I can’t refer from my Business card, so having a personal card for referral capacity would be nice.
• $65 wholesale club membership fee – Although we live in the UK now, I still have a Costco Executive membership. I’d been weighing up whether to cancel that as worthwhile gift card deals on Costco.com are few and far between nowadays and, for obvious reasons, I can’t take advantage of in-store deals for discounted (US-denominated) gift cards other than when we’re back in the US for a limited time. Getting a $65 statement credit might make it more worthwhile keeping a Costco membership, but I’d effectively be paying for it by way of the Wyndham Premier card’s annual fee
• Wyndham Rewards Insider membership – While I wouldn’t ever pay $95 for this, I would anticipate being able to earn additional bonus points during stay promotions by virtue of this membership

The welcome offer and those benefits are certainly worth it in the first year (other than the 30K bonus points at renewal which wouldn’t be applicable that first year). For the second year onwards though, I can’t quite ascertain how valuable it’ll be as it’ll largely depend on variable factors such as how many award nights we book, how many paid stays we have (and thus our ability to earn the 30K bonus points for five or more paid nights, plus bonus points during promos from the Insider membership), and whether it’s worth me still having a Costco membership.

The other wrinkle in this is 5/24.

I think I’m currently below 5/24, although it depends on if my authorized user card on my wife’s formerly Barclays American Airlines Aviator Red card/now Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select card will count towards 5/24 for a second time. With the Wyndham Premier card being a personal card, that would add to my 5/24 count. I might be willing to take that hit for a personal card that’s a keeper, but I don’t know if I want that impact if I’m only going to cancel the card in a year.

That itself displays one of the problems with this new premium Wyndham card. I’m someone who has at least a few (albeit cheap) paid stays at Wyndham properties each year, is willing to pay high annual credit card fees, and is willing to maximize card benefits. If even I’m struggling to make the card make sense for me beyond the first year, I imagine many others will have the same dilemma. I’m sure there are people out there who’d be able to get value well in excess of $395 each year, but will there be enough applicants to make it worth Barclays and Wyndham sustaining it?

Question

How about you? Is this new Wyndham card tempting you, or is the $395 annual fee far too steep? Let us know in the comments below.

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