[Update 5/1/12] Both offers are dead now.

[Original Post 1/11/12] In July and October we blogged about four Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards (RR) Visa offers and it has expired.

Now Southwest RR Plus - the one with $69 annual fee - is live again with up to 100K bonus points at signup.  50K for personal card and 50K for business card.

Landing page - Plus Personal Visa
Application page - Plus Personal Visa
Landing page - Plus Business Visa
Application page - Plus Business Visa

Curiously, on the page you can click the Southwest RR Premier (the one with $99 annual fee) and see the 50K offer landing page, but once you click "APPLY" it gives you an error.

[Update 10/12/12] Looks like the 55K (65K as advertised) offer is still around for targeted customers.  Make sure you have some miles in your United account.  Then go to this link and log into your United account.  See if you get the "65K" offer - 50K miles after spending $1,000 within 3 months, 5K miles after adding an authorized user within 3 months, and 10K miles after spending $25K within a year.  The last 10K is a standard feature of the card so I still call this a "55K" offer.

[Update 5/14/12] Now this offer has been slightly enhanced to 55K after the 1st purchase.  You still need to go into your United account to see the offer.  It is branded as "65K miles" since you will earn another 10K miles after spending $25K in a year.  However this feature is built into the card - meaning you will have it every year you keep the card open, not just the 1st year.

[Original Post] Since Chase introduced the new United Mileage Plus (MP) Explorer Visa last summer, the best signup offer open to public has been the "40K offer" which gives you 25K miles after 1st purchase, 5K after adding an authorized user, and 10K after $25K spent annually.  Since the last one is a standard feature of the card, I think the ad is kind of misleading and consider it as a 30K signup offer.

Now Chase have a new "60K offer" which gives you 50K miles after 1st purchase, and again 10K miles after $25K spent annually.  This offer is not strictly open to public, however, as long as you are a MP member you are eligible (the registration is free and takes like one minute).  You don't really need a link - just go to united.com, login to your MP account, then go back to the home page and you will find the 60K offer somewhere on the page.  Note if you are not logged in, you only see the standard 40K offer.  If you really want a link here it is but you still need to login otherwise it will only show 40K.

So if you have never had United credit cards, it is a good time to have one.  The first annual fee is waived, saving you $95.

I normally don't go into details of value of miles/points since it is very subjective and even personal.  Everyone will value his/her miles/points differently.  Miles/points travel blogs such as View from the Wing, One Mile at a Time, The Points Guy, just to name a few, talk quite a bit about this topic and these things are changing constantly.  So If you are interested, subscribe to them (I actually read them everyday).  However, I feel that I can't omit several major devaluations throughout 2011 that impacted one of our favorite programs - American Express Membership Rewards (MR) in this blog.  If you are not familiar with MR, check out our featured review on three most popular programs that allow points transfer to frequent traveler miles/points - SPG vs. MR vs. UR.  At the beginning of 2011, MR point was one of the most valuable frequent travel currencies out there.  I personally value them at more than 2 cents a piece.  However, several frequent flyer partners devaluated during 2011, which even though was out of control of Amex, substantially weakened the value of MR points.

• Continental Airlines ended its partnership with MR in October 2011.  You can't transfer MR points to CO miles, and if you have Amex Platinum, one of our Top Listers, or Amex Centurion, you won't be able to enter CO Presidents Club any more.  Amex made great effort to compensate this loss, by giving out advance notice, adding Virgin America as a new partner (the exchange rate is 2:1 though), and adding new features to Amex Platinum such as US Airways Club access, $200 airlines incidental reimbursement, Priority Pass Select membership, and so on.  In my opinion, Amex Platinum is still the best card for airport lounge access.  However, other MR cards like our beloved Amex PR Gold, undoubtedly took a huge hit.
• British Airways revamped their program completely in November 2011, even changing the name of the currency to Avios.  For short flights within US or most UK flyers, the change represented a better value.  For US based flyers who like long haul international redemption, the change was disastrous.  For example, a round trip on Cathay Pacific from SFO to HKG costed 40% more miles; a round trip SFO-HKG-DPS used to cost the same as SFO-HKG but now you need to pay additional miles on HKG-DPS segments, costing a whooping 90% more miles than it was before.
• Aeroplan, the frequent flyer program of Air Canada, made several very bad moves in 2011.  They first introduced a new award chart in July, causing almost across the board devaluation - we are talking about 25-50% increase of miles on some most popular routes.  Then they stopped allowing domestic first class segments to be included in international business class award tickets, which really does not make sense.  Finally in November they started charging fuel surcharges on (some) partners like Lufthansa and they said more partners may be included any time in the future.
• All Nippon Airways (ANA) started to charge fuel surcharges on one of the most popular redemption partners - Virgin Atlantic in July.  Here we are talking about $600-800 increase in charges, which essentially close the door to most flyers.
  

Devaluation of frequent travel miles/points is similar to inflation of the real currencies.  However, unlike inflation, most of time the changes happened so suddenly and sharply, making it hard to swallow.  All these changes are not controlled by Amex, but they did hit MR program pretty hard.  By comparison, Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) is certainly gaining popularity.  British Airways is also their partner; however, Chase did add Korean Air, a SkyTeam member, United Airlines which is merging with Continental so this one does not really matter, and Southwest Airlines which used to be a SPG and MR partner.  SPG, on the other hand, also got hit since it partners with British Airways, Air Canada, and ANA; however, SPG became relatively more valuable due to the fact its other popular partners such as American Airlines and US Airways did not have changes.  We certainly wish that Amex will bring more new partners to MR to make it more competitive since now its major partners in the three alliances - British Airways (oneworld), Air Canada (Star Alliance), and Delta (SkyTeam) represent bad value compared to competition. 

Finally the question is "do you give up your Amex MR card(s) now?"  The answer is not so early.  For one thing, if you have tons of MR points you need to use them before you close the account otherwise you will lose them.  A way to get around is to downgrade your MR card to an MR Express card such as Blue so you keep all the points; note that you can't transfer them to miles/points any more; however, once you do need to transfer just upgrade the card back.  The other thing is that the world of miles change really fast and no one knows if other major players such as American Airlines, US Airways, or the newly merged United Airlines are changing their programs in the near future.