The problem with HSBC rewards points

For the longest time, HSBC was a fringe player in the miles game.

It had two main offerings: the HSBC Visa Infinite and HSBC Revolution. The former was a solid $120K card, but lacked any real miles earning potential. The latter had a mediocre earn rate of 2 mpd on online spend, dining and entertainment, outgunned by most other competitors.

Then in August 2020, everything changed. HSBC gave the Revolution a massive makeover, nixing the annual fee and turning it into a 4 mpd card with a wide range of bonus categories including dining, supermarkets and travel.

The launch of the HSBC TravelOne Card in May 2023 was another big leap forward, as the bank went from just KrisFlyer and Asia Miles to more than a dozen partners overnight, together with a new rewards platform offering instant, free conversions, and smaller conversion blocks. This platform has since grown to 21 airline and hotel partners, and has been rolled out to all HSBC cards with points pooling now possible too.

So does this mean that HSBC rewards points are now the most valuable points currency in Singapore?  I’d say yes, but that’s only half the picture…

HSBC rewards points are incredibly valuable

When I evaluate how valuable a given bank’s points are, I look at several factors:

• Transfer partners
• Transfer times
• Conversion fees
• Conversion blocks
• Points pooling
• Expiry

HSBC certainly excels on each of these metrics: 

• It has 17 airline and four hotel transfer partners, by far the most of any bank in Singapore
• Conversions to all but three programmes (Club Vistara, Hainan and JAL) are instant
• Conversion fees are waived till 31 January 2025
• While the minimum conversion block is 10,000 miles, the subsequent block is just two miles (so you could transfer 10,002 or 20,496 miles, for example)
• Points now pool across all HSBC cards
• While non-expiring points would be nice, HSBC still offers longer validity than most competing banks at 37 months

So full credit to HSBC here, because the new platform and transfer partners they’ve introduced have made their points very attractive. There’s little doubt in my mind that these are probably the best points currency in Singapore right now, with AMEX Membership Rewards a close second.

But HSBC rewards points are hard to earn

But before you rush out to make HSBC cards your default choice for everything, you should be aware of a major drawback: HSBC rewards points are incredibly difficult to earn at a reasonable pace.

There’s several reasons for this.

HSBC has no bonus categories on its general spending cards

Card	SGD Spend	FCY Spend
HSBC Visa Infinite	1 mpd	2 mpd
HSBC TravelOne Card	1.2 mpd	2.4 mpd

HSBC has two general spending cards now: the TravelOne and Visa Infinite.

HSBC TravelOne Cardholders earn 1.2/2.4 mpd on local/overseas spend, which is respectable enough for a general spending card. It’s surprisingly better than the more-expensive HSBC Visa Infinite, which is in the midst of sunsetting its step-up earn rate and nerfing all cardholders to just 1/2 mpd on local/overseas spend.

But either way, the earn rates of general spending cards will always be glacial compared to the 4 mpd of specialised spending cards (or even 6 mpd, with the UOB Lady’s Savings Account) . To make it worse, neither card has a bonus category, nor does HSBC have a tie-up with an OTA to earn bonus miles on hotel bookings (e.g. Citi PremierMiles x Agoda 7 mpd; while these rates are usually inflated, you can view it as an opportunity to buy extra miles provided the price is right).

Unless you’re a really big spender, you won’t be racking up a significant number of points from these cards alone. 

The HSBC Revolution has been nuked

The HSBC Revolution should have been the answer to accelerated points earning, but HSBC has devalued this card into oblivion, with three separate nerfs in January, May and July 2024. There’ll even be another one in January 2025, just for good measure!

To put things in perspective, here’s the full list of all the bonus categories that the HSBC Revolution has lost, or will lose in the months to come.

While the remaining whitelist may still look presentable, we need to remember that from 15 July 2024, bonuses will only be awarded for online spending, and from 1 January 2025, the travel category will disappear. 

This means the ground is rapidly shrinking beneath the Revolution’s feet, leaving a very narrow range of use cases, and by association, fewer opportunities to leverage its 4 mpd rate.

HBSC excludes CardUp & ipaymy

If your plan was to buy HSBC rewards points through bill payments with a platform like CardUp or ipaymy, think again. 

Back in July 2020, HSBC excluded both CardUp and ipaymy from its rewards programme, and till today remains the only bank to do so. Even the notoriously killjoy DBS (remember how quick they were to nerf Amaze and Mileslife?) still offers points on these platforms!

HSBC has no tax payment facility

Likewise, HSBC used to offer an income tax payment programme, which allowed cardholders to earn miles on their tax payments with an admin fee of 0.5-1.5%. Depending on which card you used, this worked out to a very decent 1.2-1.75 cents per mile.

However, this facility was terminated in April 2023, with no replacement. 

HSBC doesn’t offer the same rates for all partners

Another issue that detracts from the usefulness of HSBC rewards points is that not all partners share the same transfer ratio.

With airlines, for instance, the ratio ranges from 25,000-50,000 points : 10,000 miles.

✈️ HSBC TravelOne Airline Partners
Frequent Flyer Programme	Conversion Ratio (HSBC : Partner)
	50,000 : 10,000
	40,000 : 10,000
	35,000 : 10,000
	35,000 : 10,000
	35,000 : 10,000
	35,000 : 10,000
	35,000 : 10,000
	30,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000

🏨 HSBC TravelOne Hotel Partners
Hotel Programme	Conversion Ratio (HSBC : Partner)
	30,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 5,000
	25,000 : 10,000
	25,000 : 10,000

This matters, because the advertised earn rates only apply if you choose a partner with a 25,000 points : 10,000 miles ratio. The earn rates drop as the transfer ratio worsens, as illustrated in the table below.

Therefore, some of those 21 transfer partners are not as useful as they appear on first glance.

For example, I would kill for the opportunity to earn Aeroplan miles at the same rate as KrisFlyer. Aeroplan often sees Singapore Airlines award space that even KrisFlyer members don’t, absorbs fuel surcharges, has more airline partners than any programme (including non-Star Alliance carriers like Air Mauritius, Azul, Gulf Air and Oman Air), and allows stopovers on one-way awards for just 5,000 miles. It can even offer cheaper redemptions than KrisFlyer on a mile for mile basis. 

Now, this would be phenomenal if you could earn Aeroplan and KrisFlyer miles at the same rate. But you can’t, and since Aeroplan is 3.5:1 versus KrisFlyer 2.5:1, we need to increase the Aeroplan figures by 40%.

This limits the usefulness significantly (though Australia might still be a viable option, which is more of a testimony to how good Aeroplan rates are than anything else), especially when you factor in the difficulty involved with earning HSBC points in the first place. 

I’m not going to say you should never transfer points to a programme without a 25,000 : 10,000 ratio, but I will say the use cases would be very limited and niche. In that sense, the number of “useful” transfer partners HSBC has might number just eight or fewer (I don’t count airasia rewards because it’s more like a rebates programme) – and of those I’d only consider using Flying Blue, British Airways Executive Club, Asia Miles, EVA Infinity MileageLands, KrisFlyer, and maybe Eithad. 

It’s certainly a different situation from American Express and Citi, where all partners share the same conversion ratio.

So would I bother earning HSBC rewards points?

I currently have a good-sized chunk of HSBC rewards points from the Revolution’s heyday and the TravelOne’s welcome offer (recently upsized). Going forward, however, my accumulation rate is going to slow significantly, in a big part due to the Revolution’s nerfing. 

And even if I could navigate around the dramatically-reduced whitelist, in a best-case scenario I’d be earning up to 120,000 HSBC points a year from the Revolution (S$1,000 spend per month), which works out to 24,000-48,000 miles depending on which frequent flyer programme I pick. That, unfortunately, is not the kind of critical mass I’ll need to get invested in HSBC-exclusive partners like JAL MileageBank and Aeroplan, which makes their presence kind of irrelevant. 

I could use HSBC as another means of earning points with programmes like British Airways Executive Club or FlyingBlue, but those partner with Citi too, and it’s much easier to earn Citi points thanks to PayAll and the Citi Reward’s online spending bonuses. 

I guess the HSBC Revolution could come into play if I’ve maxed out the bonus caps on the Citi Rewards Visa and Mastercard, and still want to earn more “exotic” points, but their combined S$2,000 cap is difficult for me to breach anyway. 

So long story short, in the absence of HSBC…

• adding bonus categories to its general spending cards
• allowing miles to be earned on bill payment platforms
• reversing the Revolution’s nerf

…it’s just really hard to get invested here.

Conclusion

HSBC rewards points are arguably the most useful on the market right now, but they’re hamstrung by how difficult they are to earn at a decent pace, and the fact that some partners have poor conversion ratios.

It’s a shame, because HSBC has obviously invested a lot of time and money into their new rewards ecosystem. But what good are points that nobody can earn?

Are you going to stick with HSBC points?