Wells Fargo Courts Frequent Travelers With New Autograph Card

Wells Fargo has added a card to its Autograph suite to woo frequent travelers.

The banking giant’s Autograph Journey card, announced Wednesday (March 6), offers accelerated earnings on travel categories like hotels, airlines, dining and other purchases.

“Autograph Journey is Wells Fargo’s best travel rewards card to date, designed to help cardholders build journeys as unique as they are by earning points wherever they book travel,” Krista Phillips, Wells Fargo executive vice president and head of consumer credit cards and enterprise marketing, said in a news release.

The card will launch at select Wells Fargo locations March 9 before rolling out across the country March 20.

Wells Fargo is also launching a program called points transfer, which lets cardholders transfer rewards points “as miles, points, or credits to participating partner loyalty programs,” the news release said.

The bank is introducing these features at a time when America’s higher-earning consumers continue to use travel to treat themselves, according to research from the PYMNTS Intelligence/Lending Club report “New Reality Check: The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Report: The Nonessential Spending Deep Dive Edition.”

“The results reveal that, for consumers with financial security — those who do not live paycheck to paycheck — 40% say their spending on airfare has been indulgent, a greater share than said the same of any other type of purchase,” PYMNTS wrote last week.

Airlines are seeing continued spending on travel, according to commentary from recent earnings calls by the likes of American Airlines and Delta.

“We produced record full year revenues of approximately $53 billion, driven by strong demand for our product and record revenue from our travel rewards program,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom told analysts. “Demand remains strong, and we’ve seen robust bookings to start the year as travel trends have begun to normalize across entities.”

Additional PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that 64% of consumers say they are very or extremely likely to use card-linked offers to make local travel purchases, while 60% said they’d do the same for purchases tied to long-distance travel.

These figures highlight the opportunity travel industry merchants have to increase engagement and draw in customers via more personalized and relevant card-linked offers, according to “Leveraging Item-Level Receipt Data: How Card-Linked Offers Drive Customer Loyalty,” a collaboration between PYMNTS and Banyan.