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Many readers who have been collecting airline points and miles for more than a few years are likely to have an MBNA credit card (or 6). This is because, ‘back in the day’, MBNA used to issue a range of different travel-related cards in the UK for airlines like American Airlines and United Airlines. They provided a useful way of diversifying your points/miles stash, and frequently had decent sign up bonuses too.

In 2018, MBNA stopped offering the airline cards, and instead switched existing customers over to a free card offering 0.5% cashback and no foreign exchange fees. That’s a very solid deal for a Visa with no annual fee, so I kept my account open. I’m sure others did likewise.

MBNA Smart Rewards

Recently, MBNA introduced a new feature – Smart Rewards. The aim seems to be to emulate the success American Express has had with its Amex Offers. (i.e offering a range of discounts at various retailers/travel businesses/etc to cardholders).

When you log into your MBNA account, you should see a little ‘Smart Rewards’ tab on the left that you can click on to see your offers.

You can then take a look at the offers and register for the ones that interest you. Note that you do need to check each offer and click on “activate” in order to benefit:

I don’t use my MBNA cards much (I usually prefer to earn Amex Membership Rewards Points), which might explain why I only have one Smart Rewards offer so far:

Hopefully something more useful will be added on there soon…

Bottom line

If MBNA manages to create something similar to what Amex has done with its offers, that would be a fantastic new benefit – particularly on a free card. For context, I currently have ~40 offers on my Amex Gold and save £100s every year on purchases I would have made regardless.

Have you got more interesting offers on your MBNA Smart Rewards account yet?