Changes to ANZ Travel Card's Unlimited Airport Lounge Benefit (from 01 September 2016)

If you follow The Shutterwhale on Facebook, you should have seen my rant this morning on the changes to the ANZ Travel Visa Signature Credit Card's unlimited Airport Lounge benefit that came into effect this morning. One of the last few benefits of this card used to be the unlimited access to Veloce lounges all over the world but now that has been taken away and been replaced with a conditional DragonPass access instead. 

ANZ Travel Visa Signature Credit Card Lounge Access | Photo Credit: DragonPass

Starting today, you will no longer be able to access Veloce Lounges without restrictions anymore. In fact, you will now be required to spend S$10,000 per calendar quarter in order to get two complimentary DragonPass Airport Lounge access passes. Supplementary cardholders who used to get complimentary Veloce Lounge access will not be able to benefit from this arrangement but any qualifying card spend on the supplementary account will be accumulated on the principal cardholder's account. 

In addition to all that, every lounge visit under this new scheme is up to a maximum of 3-hour duration - while this should not matter to most travellers since we get there approximately 2 hours prior to the flight's scheduled departure, this may cause frustration to travellers here on a longer layover. 

With the ANZ Travel Visa Signature Credit Card, you will receive a maximum of 2 complimentary passes per calendar quarter up to 8 passes in a calendar year - so spending S$50,000 in a quarter will still give you two passes only. Personally, I think that the ANZ Travel Visa Signature Credit Card has fallen from where it used to stand two years ago. It is disappointing but it is what it is and I guess it's time to cash out on those miles and close my ANZ account altogether (especially since I've ditched my Optimum World MasterCard a few months ago)