In addition to Capital One’s Spring program, Mastercard and Visa each offer extra savings for small business cardholders. With these programs, you can get automatic statement credits just by spending money at select gas stations, hotels, car rental agencies, merchants. (This allows for stacking rewards via business card spend.) For reference, here are links to each program:
With Mastercard and Visa, you have to enroll your business cards.
This way it’s possible to double-dip just by using the right card for the job. Here are a few examples:
Stacking rewards via business card spend: Chase Ink Business Preferred Visa
The Chase Ink Business Preferred Card earns 3 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar for travel, shipping, internet, cable, phone, and advertising with social media sites (up to $150K spend per year).
Visa SavingsEdge, meanwhile, offers a number of rebates which overlap with the Ink Business Preferred’s 3X categories. Here are a few:
- Hotels: Wyndham Hotels (all brands): 4%; MGM Properties: 4%; La Quinta Inn & Suites: 5%
- Shipping: Stamps.com: 3% (Chase Ink Business Preferred earns 3X for Stamps.com subscription fees, but not for postage reloads)
Example: By using your Chase Ink Business Preferred Card after enrolling it in Visa SavingsEdge to pay for MGM hotel stays, you’ll earn 3X Ultimate Rewards points plus 4% cash back. Similarly, if you use the card to pay at La Quinta Hotels (for example), you’ll earn 3X Ultimate Rewards points plus 5% cash back. In both cases, you can increase rewards further by booking through a portal, and by making sure you are enrolled in theotel company’s rewards programs and by making sure to enroll in any active rewards promotions that those companies run.
Stacking rewards via business card spend: Chase Ink Cash Visa
The Chase Ink Cash Card earns 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar for office supply purchases, phone, TV, and internet (up to $25K spend per year); and 2X for gas and restaurants.
Visa SavingsEdge, meanwhile, offers a number of rebates which overlap with the Ink Cash Card’s 5X and 2X categories. Here are a few:
- Gas (2X Ultimate Rewards): Chevron: 2%
- Restaurants (2X Ultimate Rewards): Corner Bakery: 2%; Godiva: 8%; Papa John’s: 2%; Panera: 2%; Red Robin: 1%
- Phone, TV, Internet (Note: I’m not 100% sure that these earn 5X): Boost Mobile: 3%; HostGator: 5%; Mailchimp: 5%; Register.com: 4%
Example: By using your Chase Ink Cash Card after enrolling it in Visa SavingsEdge to pay for gas at the pump at Chevron, you’ll earn 2X Ultimate Rewards points plus 2% cash back. Boost Mobile customers can do even better with 5X Ultimate Rewards and 3% cash back from Visa SavingsEdge.
Stacking rewards via business card spend: Mastercard Business Cards
While I couldn’t find currently available business MasterCards with great category bonuses, I figured it would be helpful to list the savings available. Note that Bank of America and Barclaycard business cards don’t seem to work with Mastercard Easy Savings.
Mastercard Easy Savings offers rebates in the following categories:
- Gas and maintenance: 5% at TiresPlus. 1% cash back at participating Fuelman Network gas stations. Click here to find participating gas stations in your area (in Ann Arbor we have two participating Mobile stations, a Shell station, and a Circle K).
- Restaurants: 4% cash back at all restaurants in the Dinova restaurant network. Click here to find participating restaurants in your area (in Ann Arbor, the list includes only major chain restaurants such as Outback, Bob Evans, Potbelly, California Pizza Kitchen, etc.)
- Hotels: 4% cash back at all hotels Hotel network. Click here to find participating hotels in your area (in Ann Arbor, the list includes primarily mid-scale hotels: Wyndham Garden Inn, Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Comfort Suites, Quality Inn). It’s also possible to get an additional 1% cash back with something called checkINN Direct (details here). My guess is that you’d do better booking directly with a hotel chain after clicking through a portal, but it’s possible that checkINN Direct has better negotiated rates (I don’t know).
- Travel: 3% cash back on travel booked with Upside.
- Car Rentals: 5% cash back at Avis and Budget.
- Airport Parking: 10% cash back with Park Ride Fly USA
- Business Services: Mimeo 10%; LivePlan 10%; BIDaWiz 10%; Monster 15%; Microsoft Search 5%; Biz eGift Cards 20%. Before you get too excited about this last one, it appears to be a service for providing your company’s gift cards to customers. I don’t think you can get 20% back for buying gift cards.
Wrap Up
Visa, and Mastercard offer extra savings for business card holders with select merchants. It’s often possible to stack these discounts with credit card category bonuses (as described above). And, in many cases, you can earn more rewards by stacking with portals, other linked credit card rewards programs, merchant rewards, etc. For more on stacking rewards, please see our Extreme Stacking page.
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CIP does earn 3% off Stamps.com, but only from their subscription fees. Postage reloads are marked as USPS STAMPS ENDICIA, so not earning 3%, unfortunately.
Awesome, thanks for sharing that info!
[…] written before about the Visa SavingsEdge program (see: Stacking Rewards via business card spend). The basic idea is that you enroll your Visa business cards in this program and automatically […]
With the old Ink Mastercards changing to Visa cards, does anyone know of any good Mastercards that work with Mastercard Easy Savings? Barclycard and Bank of America business cards don’t seem to work with it.
Resurrecting an old thread because I just found Mastercard Easy Savings as a benefit of my Barclays AAdvantage Aviator business card (getting ready to cancel after a year). I would not call this a particularly good Mastercard to use, but I would have considered using it if I had known about/remembered this feature and needed to buy tires.
[…] reference post on how to stack rewards via business cards spend, I always forget about these! I am thinking to give Frequent Miler a new nickname: The Stacker. You […]
Jetblue business card didn’t work. So I assume Barclay isn’t one of the participating banks. Citi AAdvantage business does… fwiw.
Thanks. I didn’t realize that some business cards didn’t work. Good to know!
Citi AA Business Plat Select Mastercard not working for me
What are the best currently available MasterCard business cards? I miss my Avis discount
The Capital One Mastercards (Spark Cash and Spark Miles) are the best I can think of for rewards for spend. Too bad the Ink Mastercards are no longer available.
How do you get a business Mastercard from Capital One? On their site looks like they are all Visa cards.
Haha, you’re right! I can’t believe I got that so wrong. Working on fixing it now…
@Bluecat, granted but the fun part is when you lay down in that First class seat that you earned by renting cars. Please google “Man Who’s Earned 1.2 Million United Miles by Renting Cars” and see – 1.2 million UA miles is what 3 RT seats from US to Asia in First class? 🙂
I’m not really questioning the idea of exploiting a particularly rewarding points angle (like your Car Rental guy)—I think every reader of this blog is keen to do that kind of deal!
No, what I’m questioning is the idea behind this post, in that to really work it like the author suggests, you have to have a phreaking script (or app…do I recall someone wrote one of those for just this purpose?) in order to keep track of which card to use for which purpose.
I must put a label on each card with where I should use it. No biggie. It quickly becomes habit if you spend a lot time on the road or channel a lot of spend in any of these categories.
All too complicated for me. I’m curious if any of your readers actually go through a long checklist/flowchart to figure out which card to use for each purchase….that seems like no fun to me.
😮
For Hertz, it’s best to use the Chase UA credit card and book through United to get additional 500 UA miles (~$8 value) for using the card plus up to 40% discount on the daily rate.Check your UA account and emails for the best offer. But if the rental period is a week long and the rented vehicle is fancy, the AMEX OPEN 5% rebate can add up. So it’s best to crunch the number to see which offer is the most rewarding.