Credit Card Top Spender Offers are not rewarding – An Experiment

If you’re following the blog for a while you would know that Top spender offers are not something I like because of the way they work.

So I did an experiment recently to re-confirm this and won the Yesbank Credit Card Top spender 2020 Diwali campaign (daily). But its not worth it and here’s why, in detail.

Before we jump into it, let’s have a quick look at the offer. Below are the offers and hedetails are here.

So there will be so many winners for hourly and daily campaigns, while the weekly and monthly winners would be way too low and so are the probability to win them.

Hence, banks will design it in such a way that in most cases you will win the smaller ones over the bigger prizes but well our mind would assume we would make it for the big ones.

Why I participated?ds

I was hoping to get Amex Diwali offer and was holding the festive spends but then I was not targeted. So Yesbank offers appeared to be decent if I make it to weekly winner.

But I do know its a hit or miss, as even during the 2018 sbi cards spends offer , many have reported that they did not get anything even on spending 5 Lakhs during the offer period.

So I very well knew that these top spender offers are either not fulfilled as promised (or) maybe too many are competing for it. Yet, these are assumptions. 

So I finally decided to experiment the top spender program, for the first time ever. And Yesbank is good to test it, as I assumed not many would be active.

Why its not worth it?

I won the JBL Bluetooth speaker that retails for ~Rs.2400 on Amazon. That means if I spend 1.5L, I would get a decent 3.1% return, which also includes regular rewards.

However, as I was hoping for the one plus smart phone, I stretched the spends but it went useless as my net return on spend fell much below 3%.

That’s a lot of opportunity cost.. well opportunity rewards if I had put that spends on HDFC Infinia. 

Final Thoughts

I never used to like the top spender offer and this experience proves me right, finally. So if you find such top spender offers from any issuer, its time to re-think.

Its generally better to go for it if and only if the regular rewards are good on the card compared to other cards you own so you don’t loose anything in the attempt.

Yet, of-course you can play the game if you enjoy the suspense, without forgetting that bank’s may have unpleasant suspense too for you as well