As much as I love flying Philippine Airlines, I've actually flown on Cebu Pacific the most for a couple of reasons. More often than not flights would be cheaper and more flight schedules would be available throughout the day. Despite this, I was never enticed to get any of their co-branded credit cards - until now.
UnionBank is Cebu Pacific's bank partner with two co-branded credit cards, a platinum and a gold variant. Both cards give you a spent to mile ratio of ₱30 = 1 GetGo point.
The main reason I never wanted one of Cebu Pacific's co-branded cards is that I already had the Citi PremierMiles that gave the same spend-to-mile ratio plus the flexibility of transferring my PremierMiles to other Airlines.
This is important because co-branded credit cards tie you down with a particular airline and make your points and miles prone to devaluation. Unlike transferrable cards where you can avoid devaluation by transferring to another airline instead.
Unfortunately, The devaluation of the Citi PremierMiles last year and the fact that Citibank will be exiting the Philippine market has led me to decide that it's time to look for another credit card with a better spend-to-mile ratio.
I've since then gotten the EastWest Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer World Mastercard, which in my opinion is the best travel credit card in the Philippines to date. But the strength of this card is on online and travel-related spending with a local spend to mile ratio of only ₱36 = 1 mile.
It's still better than the ₱48 =. 1 mile ratio from the devalued Citi PremierMiles card, but I wanted something better. After some research and going over my travel strategy in the future, I've decided that getting one of Cebu Pacific's co-branded cards was the best option for me.
Bottomline
The Citi PremierMiles devaluation was the main reason I got the GetGo card but I also didn't want to put all my eggs in one basket by going all in on Singapore Airlines since they don't fly any domestic flights here and they only fly from Manila for now because of the pandemic.
I have now allocated all my local spending to my UnionBank Cebu Pacific GetGo Gold credit card for the foreseeable future. Cebu Pacific and GetGo are also moving to Go Rewards by the end of July so we'll have to see how this affects the co-branded cards and the loyalty program in general.
I'll be writing about why I opted to get the gold variant instead of the platinum one so stay tuned!
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