By Liz Morris

Travel site Expedia has begun a rewards program that allows its customers to earn points on purchases they make at the site.  While reward points programs are fairly standard stuff, the twist here is that Expedia has not started a proprietary program, but is instead offering ThankYou points, the same points that Citibank offers on certain credit card and bank accounts. Expedia customers do not have have to be Citibank customers to participate, but if they do earn Citi ThankYou points from cards or bank accounts, the Expedia program gives them a new way to increase their point totals. In other words, ThankYou points from Citi can be pooled with ThankYou points from Expedia into a single account that offers merchandise and travel rewards to accountholders.

Confused?  So were we, but we’ll try to make it clear:

Make a purchase from Expedia and you earn ThankYou points, regardless of how you pay. If you were not enrolled in the ThankYou program from Citi, you can enroll in it through Expedia.  It is not required that you hold a Citi card in order to have a ThankYou account; you can earn points and get rewards strictly from your Expedia purchases.

However, if you are a Citi credit card customer, you can earn points from your card purchases AND earn points for purchases at Expedia.  Further, if you pay with your Citi card at Expedia, you’ll earn double points—points from Expedia for the purchase, and points from Citi for using their card.  And all of those points go into a single account, which allows you to earn points faster.

According to Citi, there are over ten million people currently enrolled in the ThankYou rewards proram. See Citi Credit Cards for information on credit cards offering ThankYou points.

By Justin McHenry

Unless you’re a really big spender, you can probably get all of your holiday shopping done with less than $100,000. So, if you’re one of the ten winners in the “100K Holiday from Visa Sweepstakes”, you can count on having quite a bit left over to treat yourself. The new sweepstakes from Visa is an automatic-entry sweeps, meaning that every time consumers use their Visa cards from now until the end of December, they will be entered. Ten winners get $100,000 each.

In addition, Visa is offering an online instant win game at http://www.visa.com/100K that will award one winner a $1000 Visa gift card and $50 gift cards for an additional 500 winners.

To support the sweepstakes Visa is running a TV ad featuring Ebeneezer Scrooge, in which Scrooge “performs ’selfish’ acts of charity to show that even someone as stingy as Scrooge can be motivated to use his Visa card for a chance to win,” according to Kellie Krug of Visa USA.

By Liz Morris

Jack in the Box restaurants is ready to make fast food even faster, with today’s announcement that the quick-serve restaurant chain is installing contactless credit card readers at all of its company restaurants. Because Jack in the Box owns its own restaurants and also franchises, the contactless readers may or may not be coming to the restaurant near you.

“Contactless” credit cards allow cardholders to pay by holding their cards in front of a special reader instead of having to swipe the cards. In order to take advantage of this faster technology, cardholderes must have credit cards equipped with a special radio frequenct identification (RFID) chip. American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa all offer some form of this technology, but not every cardholder has it today.

RFID credit cards have been the source of some controversy, as security experts question whether enough is being done to ensure that consumers’ information is being protected.

By Justin McHenry

If you are a small business owner, you’re going to like the sound of the new American Express SimplyCash Business Card. If you don’t own a small business, you might want to  start one.  At a time when many cards are scaling back their cash rebates, the just-announced SimplyCash Business Card may be offering the most generous cash back program on the market today, with a full 5% rebate on gas, office supplies and wireless charges and a full 1% on all other charges.  There are no caps on rebates, and the rebates are automatically given each month as a credit on your card statement.  There is no annual fee.

In addition, the American Express SimplyCash Card is offering a 0% interest rate on purchases for 12 months, and those with good credit can get an ongoing variable rate that is currently as low as 8.25%.

It will be interesting to see if American Express is able to keep this card on the market at these terms over the long haul.  A number of consumer cards that used the 5%/1% cash back formula have either been pulled from the market recently or have instituted caps on earnings that diminish the initial attractiveness of their offers. American Express may be betting that the higher spending of business customers will make the generous rewards worth the cost; it would be surprising if American Express introduced a similar consumer card offer.