Mastercard Airport Experience

Anyone knows if Monzo Users can join the Mastercard Airport Experience Program or not ?

It seems like the answer is no.
I just tried to register with both my Monzo card and my MBNA card and neither were accepted.
I can’t find anything about eligibility criteria either :man_shrugging:t5:

Probably only available on World Premier tier cards. MBNA and Monzo are bog standard tier cards.

This is not entirely true, they used to be standard but we silently upgraded them to Platinum and then to World cards. :slightly_smiling_face:

I unfortunately cannot speculate on the particular requirements for the Mastercard Airport Experience Program.

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Interesting… does this give cardholders any particular benefits?

I believe cheaper exchange rates

I thought it gave Monzo more of a cut outside the EU?

And - wild speculation alert - maybe it might be something that would have come into play for lounges etc for pre-Covid Plus?

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Any chance on a blog post or a little more info on this. I’ve heard the terms before but have never known what they actually are or why Monzo would upgrade silently

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The BIN shows as world debit mastercard on binlist.net, has done for a while.

New cards have been showing world debit on them.

Mastercard tier most of their products into - in Europe at least - typically four categories, from lowest to highest

  • Standard
  • Premium
  • World
  • World Elite

Our UK personal cards started as standard Debit Mastercards, and we’ve since upgraded them to the World Debit tier. Our business cards are “World Business Premium Debit Mastercard” and, yes, I’m as confused as you are about where that fits on that list.

There is a trade-off on each of these tiers: Mastercard require the issuer to include more features, and in exchange the issuer gets higher interchange (on business cards in general, and also consumer cards outside the EEA). The higher the tier, the more features required; this especially goes for World Elite, and also more so for credit cards than debit cards. The feature set required for a given tier isn’t fixed - issuers get to pick and choose which they want to implement in order to meet the bar.

But what does this mean for you as a customer of ours? Not an awful lot! It only indirectly impacts the product that you experience, in that internally we have notes next to certain product features saying “This is a part of why our cards are now World Debit”. Several of these features are ones we offered anyway. For example, earlier someone said:

I believe cheaper exchange rates

This isn’t really true - Mastercard gives everyone the same exchange rate (though a bank can choose to perform their own FX, or add their own markup on top of it). At the same time, you will often see a better exchange rate on higher tiered cards because its one feature you can use to count towards that tier.

There is a correlation between higher tiers and travel features - such as airport lounge access. I mean, the clue’s in the names - “World” and “World Elite”

Note that things are somewhat different outside Europe, and especially in the US the tiers are a bit more differentiated. A credit card transaction in the US can sometimes attract 3% interchange - as opposed to 0.3% here - so there’s more room for differentiation.

Pragmatically though, unless you’re a card nerd, just ignore the back-of-card label and just compare accounts/cards based upon their advertised features.

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