The web designers of Suncorp are so adept at concealing documentation that they should consider a career in espionage, or at least a job with Godwin Grech in Treasury. The product disclosure statement, fee guide and detailed information on the rewards program are so difficult to locate you can't help but feel a bit elated when you do - it's like finding Wally.
But it's not just the top-secret documentation that has me concerned. It's the small footnotes which reveal devastatingly important caveats to the cards 'features', buried in a tiny scrollable text box of even tinier text.
For example, consider the heavily-promoted balance transfer offer of 1.9% for fifteen months. Once you locate the footnote, you discover that following the expiration of the balance transfer offer, balances revert to the cash rate of 20.74%.
In itself, that (unfortunately) isn't unheard of. There are other cards which offer balance transfer deals which revert to very high rates. But it isn't the only minimized caveat.
The Take Flight Cashback rewards service allows you to redeem reward points for cash back on travel purchases. You make a travel purchase, then apply (within thirty days) to redeem your reward points for the purchase.
But quietly understated in the fine print is the eligibility condition that you must have made a travel purchase (where a flight or airline ticket is an element of that travel purchase) to a minimum value of 3,000 points ($3,000). So, if you pay for a holiday which costs you $2,900 - too bad, your purchase is ineligible, which pretty-much renders Take Flight useless for domestic travel.
Even the name Take Flight Cashback is misleading - you don't get 'cash' back, the amount is credited to your outstanding credit card balance.
But while these conditions are concealed, at least they're stated on Suncorp's website.
The card also offers Purchase Security, covering items purchased on the card for loss, theft or damage up to the value of $50,000. I can't tell you what the excess is. It could be $49,999. I can't tell you, because Suncorp don't give this information on their website: they simply direct readers to Citibank's website. I spent over an hour looking for the Purchase Security PDS on Citibank's website and couldn't locate it.
You might be OK with omitted or incomplete terms and conditions. You might be happy with a mystery excess on your purchase security policy. But I can't guarantee there aren't more surprises: these are just the ones I found.
On a positive note, the Plus does include 55 days interest free, which is a significant improvement over the
Standard Card. The interest rate is 20.49%, which is high for the range of features offered, but at least the annual fee is realistic ($63).
The card accumulates one reward point per dollar spent and points can be redeemed for vouchers, gift certificates, merchandise and cash back. However, as we demonstrated in our
comparison of Australian reward programs, the redemption value isn't great.
Bottom line: it's difficult to make a fair assessment of a card when the bank doesn't disclose many of the details and half-discloses the others. The information we were able to obtain on the card doesn't look promising: the balance transfer deal is actively bad: you're almost better off not using it than risking the 20.74% interest if it lapses past the twelve month period. The interest rate is disproportionately high for the features offered and the rewards program is average.
