January 12 Update: AIR MILES losing Lowe’s, Rona & Reno Depot, Alaska Airlines will not adjust oneworld partner charts and Virgin Atlantic status match to British Airways + MORE Jan 13th

 Here’s your Rewards Canada Daily update! Your daily dose (or near daily dose) of loyalty program, credit card and travel news, bonuses, deals and more.  And so it continues – as first reported by Milesopedia. AIR MILES will be losing a major partner at the end of this month. The Lowe’s group of partners (Lowe’s, Rona, Reno-Depot) will end their partnership with AIR MILES on January 31. This marks another blow to the AIR MILES program and further adds fuel to the topic of the coalition program model dying a slow death in Canada. After this there aren’t many prominent nationwide partners left in the program, you have Amex, BMO, Shell, Safeway/Sobeys, Staples and a few other major players but gone are the days of having so many nationwide partners to choose from. Image via Rona—Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan will not be adjusting their flight reward charts when they join oneworld – at least not for oneworld partner airlines! Just as predicted in our latest podcast episode where Anshul stated that there is the possibility of a devaluation but not right away…

BMO’s ad on TwitterTaking a page right out of TD’s playbook we see BMO come out with an advertising campaign for their new BMO eclipse Visa Infinite* Card. The campaign that I saw on Twitter highlights the card’s 5x points earn rate and the card’s welcome bonus but nothing else. It is ads like these that irk me as they don’t tell the whole story. Technically speaking there is absolutely nothing wrong with them nor are they advertising anything falsely. In fact many banks and credit card issuers do it. For me it brings back memories of when I heard that radio ad for Canada’s first ever 100,000 point credit card welcome bonus on the ATB Gold My Rewards Travel Card back in 2013. The radio ad made it seem like or should I say implied those 100,000 points were huge and provided amazing value when in fact they were only worth $100. Other cards at that time were only offering 15,000 to 25,000 points but those were worth way more than that $100 but ATB’s hope was that people didn’t realize that…