Cancelling your HSBC TravelOne Card? Getting your points out might be tricky

The HSBC TravelOne Card launched in May 2023, so if you were amongst the first wave to sign up, you’ll have been billed your second year’s annual fee by now.

Assuming you don’t like the idea of paying S$196.20 for 10,000 miles and four more lounge visits, then your next step would be to cancel the card and get a refund. But there’s one thing you need to do first: transfer out your points. 

Unfortunately, as we’ll see in a bit, it’s not as simple as one might hope.

Can the HSBC TravelOne Card’s annual fee be waived?

HSBC TravelOne Cardholders must spend at least S$25,000 in the previous membership year to earn an automatic annual fee waiver.

In my case, I fell way short of that mark (I’ve probably spent less than S$2,000 on the card to date, since the only substantial spending was during the sign-up bonus period), and my attempt to get a fee waiver via the automated hotline failed. However, I tried to roll the dice one last time by calling up and speaking to a human, and this time it was successful.

YMMV.

What do you get for renewing?

HSBC TravelOne Cardholders who pay the second year’s S$196.20 annual fee will receive:

• 25,000 HSBC points (worth up to 10,000 miles, depending on which programme you choose)
• Four DragonPass lounge visits (via Mastercard Travel Pass)

Do note that the lounge visits are awarded based on calendar year, so you won’t receive them immediately upon renewal. The next batch will only arrive on 1 January 2025. 

Does that justify the S$196? Well, I can see arguments both ways. 

• Paying 1.96 cents per mile is well over the odds, but if you don’t have an unlimited lounge visit pass, then you’ll want to factor in the value of the four lounge passes too
• On the other hand, if one of your credit cards does give you an unlimited lounge pass, then it’s a much clearer decision: there’s no sense in paying 1.96 cents per mile when you can buy miles for much less with CardUp and Citi PayAll.

TravelOne Cardholders also enjoy an ENTERTAINER with HSBC membership, but you shouldn’t factor that in as it’s available with the no-annual-fee HSBC Revolution Card too.

What happens to my points if I cancel my card?

HSBC recently started pooling points, and while that’s a good thing overall, it actually makes cancellations a bit more complicated!

That’s because unlike other banks where points are pooled, HSBC’s official position is that cardholders will forfeit all unused points on a given card if they cancel it (for what it’s worth, DBS has a similar policy). 

As per HSBC Rewards T&Cs, when customer closes off their account card, any unutilised points will be forfeited if not used before the time of closure

-HSBC spokesperson

Therefore, they must transfer them out before cancelling their card, or else lose them.

But HSBC, like many banks, practices first in first out: the oldest points are redeemed first. I’m guessing most readers will have a HSBC Revolution or Visa Infinite, and will have held that card for much longer than their TravelOne.

This means that in order to extract your younger TravelOne points, you’ll need to redeem your older Revolution/Visa Infinite points first.

If you planned to redeem your entire points balance anyway, that’s not so big an issue. Where it gets really tricky is if you just want to cash out the TravelOne points specifically. In fact, it might not be possible at all. 

Here’s a simple illustration. Suppose you earned a total of 147,400 HSBC points as follows:

In this situation, you can’t cash out any of your HSBC TravelOne points until you’ve redeemed the 40,000 HSBC Revolution points earned prior to getting a HSBC TravelOne Card (in Nov 22, Jan 23, Apr 23 and May 23). 

Even in a best case scenario where you applied for the HSBC TravelOne Card on day 1, your welcome bonus would only have credited in July 2023. This means you’ll need to cash out any Revolution/Visa Infinite points older than July 2023, in order to extract your TravelOne Card’s welcome bonus points.

And if you have any TravelOne points earned fairly recently (like Apr 24 in the example above),  you’ll need to cash out even more Revolution/Visa Infinite points to get to them.

Keep in mind, real life will be significantly more complicated than this. For one, you won’t have a neat table showing you exactly how many points were earned in each month from what card. This means you’ll basically have to guess and check, by cashing out the minimum block of 25,000 points, then checking your TravelOne to see if any points are left (Home > Tap on any card > View more > Redeem your points > Show points history > View points per card)

For what it’s worth, HBSC points transfers are free until 31 January 2025, and instant for all programmes except Club Vistara, Hainan Fortune Wings Club and JAL Mileage Bank. So this guess and check process won’t cost you anything except your time.

Now, I want to circle back to what I said earlier about losing your points when you cancel your card. That is HSBC’s official policy- emphasis on official, because in practice it doesn’t appear to be the case. There are several data points in the MileChat from cardholders who cancelled their HSBC TravelOne Card and still see the orphan points in their combined balance.

However, there is no knowing whether these points will be later “adjusted” out of your account, or whether this is simply a transitory glitch which will eventually be rectified. Because of this, I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable cancelling my TravelOne Card without transferring the bulk of the points out first.

Conclusion

HSBC TravelOne Cardholders who wish to cancel their card to avoid the second year’s annual fee will need to transfer out their points before doing so. 

The problem is that there’s no way of neatly transferring out just the TravelOne’s points. You will almost certainly have to touch your older Revolution/Visa Infinite points before you get to the TravelOne- unless of course you already cashed out your TravelOne points before pooling came into effect.

HSBC TravelOne Cardholders: stay or go?