New card which earns points with easyJet, M&S and Amazon

We compare a new card that rewards you at major retailers with other reward cards

Today I'm taking a look at reward credit cards. Reward cards is an area where there are rarely any gems. Still, it's worth taking a look at the best every now and then to see if any sparkle when compared to other reward schemes or cashback cards.

Earn rewards with easyJet, M&S, Boots and Amazon

The newest reward card is what got my attention this week. It's the NatWest/RBS YourPoints World Credit Card. Let's see if the card lives up to its potential with those big name retailers.

The YourPoints rewards system

• Get about £10 worth of bonus points on sign-up, and the same again once a year.
• Earn one point per £1 spent wherever you spend. One point is typically worth half a penny.

Points can be spent in a number of retailers, including:

Amazon.co.uk

Boots

Vue Cinemas

Harvey Nichols

British Airways

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Half a penny's worth of points per pound spent is pretty good, and the variety and type of retailers where you can redeem your rewards is also promising. However, the scheme lets itself down by not allowing you to redeem points when you want on any product you want.

This scheme offers you specific rewards when you have collected enough points. So you can collect 2,000 points and get an M&S voucher or for 10,800 you can get an easyJet flight to Madrid. Hence, you may have to wait a long time to use your points, and you might have to accept a reward that wasn't precisely what you wanted.

A choice of rewards

To offset this, the website claims there are many, many rewards to choose from, such as thousands of flights. You should take a look at the website and contact YourPoints to ask about the retailers that interest you and to get more details of the rewards available through them.

The credit card does boast some other features worth a look:

• 0% for 13 months on balance transfers with a 2.9% fee.
• 0% for 13 months on purchases (no fee).

Anyone who needs to transfer balances shouldn't be choosing a credit card based on rewards (see these instead), so we can ignore that highlight.

But the 13 month interest-free period on purchases deal is great news. Play this card right and it can add to your rewards benefit.

Here's how. Use the NatWest card as often as possible (but only on goods you would have bought anyway) and pay just the minimum monthly repayment. Then save the difference in a savings account, so that you effectively earn interest on money you've already spent. Just remember to pay off the whole bill before the 0% deal expires.

Some more reward cards

The Capital One Click Card is a discount card for online shopping. For the first six months you can get 20% to 50% off at Zavvi (but not laptops, phones, iThings and games consoles), Travelpack, viagogo and Ted Baker. Every three months you get access to new discounts, which last three months. Overall, I rate this a typically poor reward card, because it is very limited, and all it's likely to do is encourage you to spend more on more expensive products, rather than help you save money. But, of course, that's what all reward cards are meant to make you do.

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We recently wrote about the lastminute.com reward card. (See lastminute.com launches reward credit card.) My own take on this is that it's in the “typical” reward card category, like the Click Card.

I wrote about the Tesco Clubcard credit card, Sainsbury's reward credit card and other credit cards in Credit cards that make shopping cheaper. The gist of most of them is that every little helps, which is good, because they reward with very little, and I usually value the rewards at a quarter of a penny or less per pound spent. However, the AA credit card, also mentioned in that piece, remains one of the most rewarding cards for loyal users of AA products, and the Tesco card now comes with a market leading 15 months at 0% interest on purchases.

As you can see, reward cards are not normally very generous. The above are about as good as it gets. As much as you like to be rewarded, none of those cards work out better over the long-term than the current top cashback cards, which are not only more flexible, but the rewards can be double as much as you'd expect from reward cards. Cash remains king!

More: Compare credit cards through lovemoney.com | Virgin unveils amazing new balance transfer card | The credit card that beats 0% cards