Why I Wouldn’t Get the HSBC EveryMile Card Blindly

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As a travel writer who lives out of a suitcase for months at a time, I am exactly the kind of person glossy airline ads are targeting when they dangle shiny new miles cards. The HSBC EveryMile Credit Card is one of those products that looks irresistible at first glance: turbocharged miles on travel and everyday spend, flexible conversion to a long list of airline and hotel partners, and limited-time welcome bonuses that promise a head start toward your next long haul in business class. Yet the more I dug into the details, the more I realised this is not a card I would ever sign up for blindly. It can be useful, but only for a narrow slice of travellers who understand the fine print and build their entire spending pattern around it.

The seductive promise of “miles on everything”

On paper, HSBC positions the EveryMile Credit Card as a one-stop travel engine. In Hong Kong, where the card is currently marketed, you can earn RewardCash that converts at a preferential rate into airline miles and hotel points across a wide panel of partners. HSBC highlights that RewardCash can be turned into miles at a rate equivalent to about 1 mile per 2 Hong Kong dollars on designated everyday and travel spending, such as local transport, cross-border trains and coaches, cafés and travel services. Outside those categories, most local and overseas transactions earn miles at a lower rate, for example 1 mile per 5 Hong Kong dollars, which is more in line with typical bank miles cards.

This can sound thrilling to someone dreaming of upgrading an economy seat to a flat bed on a long flight. If you are planning a big trip and expect to charge flights on Cathay Pacific or Singapore Airlines, hotel stays, airport transfers and dining to the card, the headline earn rate looks like a fast track to a chunky balance of Asia Miles, KrisFlyer miles or hotel points once you convert your RewardCash. HSBC sweetens the pitch with rotating campaigns, such as welcome offers in 2026 that advertise up to roughly 29,000 miles worth of RewardCash after a few thousand Hong Kong dollars of spend in the first months.

In real life though, very few travellers concentrate all their spend neatly into the card’s preferred categories. A week-long Hong Kong to Tokyo trip might include an airline ticket bought during a flash sale on one platform, a hotel booked through a global online agency, meals at mixed vendors from konbini to izakaya, and contactless payments on local metro systems. Only a subset of that would fall into EveryMile’s boosted categories. The rest would earn at a slower pace than many competing cards, which is the first reason I would stop and compare instead of applying on reflex.

When the earn rate is not actually best in class

The phrase “up to” in any miles advertisement is doing heavy lifting. HSBC’s own portfolio, and those of its competitors, include cards that can out-earn EveryMile on many common transactions. In Singapore, for instance, the HSBC Revolution card earns 10 times Reward points on eligible online and contactless spend, which many independent reviewers equate to around 4 airline miles per local dollar in categories like dining, ride-hailing, hotels and selected retail. Crucially, that card charges no annual fee and its points do not expire while the account remains in good standing, which is an entirely different value proposition from a specialised miles product that usually charges an annual fee.

Likewise, HSBC’s TravelOne card in Singapore focuses squarely on travel, with an earn rate of around 2 miles or slightly more per dollar on overseas transactions and 1 mile per dollar locally, paired with instant redemptions to a wide range of airline and hotel partners. Competing regional cards from other banks, such as premium Visa Infinite or World Elite Mastercard products, often start at about 1.2 to 1.4 miles per local equivalent currency and 2 to 3 miles on overseas spend, with bundled airport lounge visits and travel insurance.

By contrast, EveryMile’s boosted 1 mile per 2 Hong Kong dollars rate is limited to a curated list of “designated everyday and travel spend” merchants. Outside that list, the standard 1 mile per 5 Hong Kong dollars earn rate works out to roughly 0.2 miles per local currency unit. For a traveller who spends the equivalent of 10,000 Hong Kong dollars on a mixed basket of daily expenses in a month, a general miles card earning around 1.2 miles per local unit could generate roughly 12,000 miles. An EveryMile card limited by category caps and lower base rates might yield only a few thousand miles unless you deliberately funnel spending into its preferred pockets. Without that discipline, the card quietly underperforms alternatives that do not require such micromanagement.

This is where the danger of going in blindly appears. You might be seduced by a marketing banner quoting, for instance, “HKD2 = 1 mile” but then discover that your grocery bill at a non-partner supermarket, your streaming subscriptions and even some hotel stays are earning at a much poorer rate than if you had simply put them on a straightforward cashback product.

Fine print around annual fees, waivers and minimums

Another reason I would never grab EveryMile without a spreadsheet is the ongoing cost of keeping it. Dedicated miles cards across Asia often come with annual fees that are only waived if you hit certain spend thresholds or hold a premium banking relationship. HSBC is no exception. While promotional campaigns sometimes offer a discounted or waived first-year fee and dangle bonus RewardCash once you make a modest qualifying spend, cardholders report that subsequent years can be less forgiving if you do not keep using the card heavily.

In Hong Kong, anecdotal experiences shared by customers in recent months include cases where EveryMile annual fee waivers were refused because the cardholder had not met an internal spend target. In practice, that meant paying a few hundred Hong Kong dollars for a card that had sat mostly unused in a drawer, or cancelling it and dealing with the awkward task of rushing to redeem orphaned RewardCash before closure. For travellers juggling several cards across different markets, it is easy to miss the renewal date or an SMS reminder and suddenly find the annual fee charged on a statement during a month when you are not even in that country.

Imagine a frequent flyer based across Hong Kong and Singapore who already carries a premium Visa Infinite from another bank that includes unlimited lounge visits and good miles earn, plus a fee-free cashback card for groceries. Adding EveryMile on top may only make sense if they are channelling a clear chunk of designated everyday spending through its preferred merchant list to justify the annual fee. If they do not run the numbers before applying, they risk paying perhaps 600 to 800 Hong Kong dollars a year for marginal extra miles, which is equivalent to buying miles at a rate that may not be attractive compared with just purchasing a paid fare upgrade during airline sales.

For a casual traveller who flies once a year from Hong Kong to Bangkok and books an inexpensive guesthouse, a fee-based card like EveryMile is usually unnecessary. A simple card with no annual fee and automatic cashback or straightforward points redemption would be easier to maintain, with no pressure to call the bank every year begging for a waiver.

Foreign currency, FX rates and the hidden cost of “travel” cards

Because EveryMile is marketed as a travel card, it is natural to assume it will always be advantageous for foreign currency spending. Yet one of the lessons I have learned as a travel author is that “no foreign transaction fee” or “travel card” labels do not guarantee the best deal. Banks can route transactions through their own foreign exchange rate tables rather than the raw network rates from Mastercard or Visa, effectively baking a small margin into every conversion.

Recent discussions among HSBC customers in other markets show how this plays out. Some users of HSBC Premier credit cards in the United States, for example, have reported that while there may be no explicit foreign transaction surcharge on paper, the bank’s in-house FX rate can be 2 to 3 percent less favourable than the rate you would get from a low-cost competitor using direct network rates. The result feels like an invisible foreign transaction fee. While the EveryMile product is specific to Hong Kong, the broader lesson applies: if the bank’s FX spreads are wide, then the miles you earn on overseas hotels in Seoul or cafés in London may be partially funded by the extra you are paying on the currency conversion.

Consider a Hong Kong traveller spending the equivalent of 8,000 Hong Kong dollars on a week in Europe, booking hotels in euros and buying train tickets in local currencies. If the FX rate they receive on their EveryMile card is just 2 percent worse than a mid-market rate card from a fintech competitor, they have effectively paid an extra 160 Hong Kong dollars for that convenience. If that same spend earns only 1 mile per 5 Hong Kong dollars because it does not fall into the card’s designated categories, they will walk away with about 1,600 miles. That puts the effective “price” of each mile at a rate that might not be attractive, especially when airlines frequently sell miles during promotions at prices that can occasionally be more favourable for topping up a balance.

This is why serious travellers often split their strategy: a specialist low- or zero-FX card for overseas spend, a separate high-earning miles card for big-ticket travel bookings in their home currency, and perhaps a supermarket-optimised cashback card for domestic groceries. EveryMile can plug into that toolkit, but it is not a universal solution and should not be treated as such without factoring in FX realities.

Complexity, caps and the risk of devaluation

One of the subtler risks of a miles-focused card like EveryMile is that your rewards are exposed to multiple layers of change: bank policy, card-level terms and the airline or hotel programmes you ultimately transfer into. HSBC’s own rewards ecosystem has evolved in recent years. In Singapore, for instance, the bank moved towards a new TravelOne card with a broad selection of instant transfer partners, and at times removed or adjusted certain conversion options for other cards while its catalogue was being updated. In the United Arab Emirates, customers have seen the bank transition from co-branded AirMiles arrangements to a different rewards structure, sparking debates about whether to burn or hold points ahead of a change.

Although EveryMile in Hong Kong currently advertises access to a wide panel of airline and hotel transfer partners, that list is not set in stone. Airlines merge, devalue their award charts, or shift to dynamic pricing. Banks can introduce transfer fees, remove specific partners, or change the RewardCash to miles conversion ratio. Because EveryMile’s biggest selling point is the ability to convert at a preferential rate, any deterioration in that rate in the future would directly affect the value of your accumulated points.

Layer on top of that the caps and exclusions common to most miles cards. Promotional earn rates are usually limited to a certain amount of monthly spend, after which you drop back to a base rate. Gift cards, government payments, education and insurance premiums may be excluded from earning altogether. If you signed up after seeing a banner that shouted about high earn rates but did not study the exclusions, you might find that your largest bills are not earning at all. It is a sobering moment when a six-figure annual insurance premium posts to your statement and yields zero miles because it sits in an excluded merchant category, while a no-fee cashback card elsewhere would at least have given you a small rebate.

Relying heavily on a single miles card also increases concentration risk. If HSBC were to announce, for example, that RewardCash will now convert into your favourite frequent flyer programme at a worse ratio, or that a key airline partner is leaving the network, you could suddenly find that the business class redemption to Europe you were building toward now requires tens of thousands more miles. Savvy travellers mitigate this by diversifying across bank programmes and by not hoarding more points than they can reasonably redeem within a couple of years.

Real-world scenarios where EveryMile does and does not shine

To understand whether the card makes sense, it helps to model concrete scenarios. Take a Hong Kong-based consultant who flies regionally twice a month, mostly to Singapore, Tokyo and Bangkok. Their employer reimburses flights but allows them to pay with a personal card. They also spend heavily on airport rail links, midrange hotels and midweek dinners with clients at cafés and casual restaurants. If they map those merchants against HSBC’s list of designated everyday and travel partners where EveryMile earns at the boosted 1 mile per 2 dollars rate, they might find that a large chunk of their spending qualifies. In that case, paying an annual fee could be worthwhile, especially if they convert RewardCash regularly into a single airline programme where they are already elite.

Now contrast that with a family in Hong Kong who travel internationally only once a year, usually booking discounted package holidays through third-party agents during school breaks. Their domestic spending profile is dominated by supermarket chains and tuition fees that sit outside the card’s preferred categories. For them, the complexity of tracking RewardCash, monitoring transfer bonuses and redeeming through multiple airline schemes is more hassle than it is worth. A straightforward cashback card that returns, for instance, 1.5 percent on everything and more in selected categories would yield simpler, more predictable value. If they were to grab EveryMile purely because a friend mentioned a welcome bonus, they would likely let RewardCash sit unused, risk expiry if they ever close the card, and potentially pay an annual fee for little benefit.

A third scenario is the location-independent remote worker who spends half the year in Europe, a quarter in Southeast Asia and the rest visiting family in North America. Their largest expenses are rent paid via bank transfer, coworking fees, and day-to-day contactless payments in a mix of currencies. For them, optimising foreign exchange spreads and ATM access may matter more than chasing airline miles. A multi-currency account from a specialist provider, paired with a no-fee debit card and a simple cashback credit card in their home base, would often beat a geospecific miles product like EveryMile that assumes much of your spend happens in a particular city and merchant set.

These examples illustrate the core issue: EveryMile rewards can be excellent in a narrow lane, but that lane does not match how many modern travellers actually spend. Unless you honestly sketch your own numbers against the card’s categories and exclusions, you risk pushing spend through it “for the miles” when a different combination of tools would fit your life better.

The Takeaway

After years of testing cards around the world, my rule of thumb is simple: do not let the word “travel” in a product name override basic arithmetic. The HSBC EveryMile Credit Card is not a bad product. In the right hands it can be a sharp instrument, especially for Hong Kong-based travellers who spend heavily with the merchants where its elevated earn rate applies and who are disciplined about converting RewardCash into airline miles or hotel points on a regular schedule.

Yet it is not a card to apply for on autopilot just because you like the idea of a future business class redemption. Between the complexity of category-based earn rates, the possibility of annual fees without guaranteed waivers, the hidden impact of foreign exchange spreads and the ever-present risk of devaluation in both bank and airline programmes, there are many traps for the unwary. For many people, a combination of simpler tools such as a fee-free miles card for selected online and contactless spend, a no-FX card for overseas transactions and a generous cashback card for everything else will quietly outperform a single specialised miles product over the course of a year.

If you are still tempted by EveryMile, treat it like planning a long trip: map your routes, price your options, and be honest about how you really travel and spend. Only if the numbers work after that analysis should you consider adding it to your wallet. Blind faith belongs in travel daydreams, not in credit card applications.

FAQ

Q1. Is the HSBC EveryMile Credit Card a good first travel card for beginners?
For most beginners the EveryMile card is not ideal as a first travel card because it has complex category-based earn rates and typically charges an annual fee. A simpler no-fee miles or cashback card is usually easier to manage while you learn how rewards and redemptions work.

Q2. Who is the HSBC EveryMile Card best suited for?
The card is best for Hong Kong-based travellers who spend heavily with merchants that fall under the bank’s designated everyday and travel categories, convert RewardCash into miles regularly, and are comfortable tracking multiple airline or hotel programmes.

Q3. How does EveryMile compare with HSBC’s own Revolution or TravelOne cards?
EveryMile focuses on preferential conversion of RewardCash to miles across many partners, with boosted earn on select categories. Revolution and TravelOne, in contrast, can offer higher miles-equivalent earn rates on common local and online spend, and in some cases charge no annual fee or allow instant redemptions, so they may outperform EveryMile for general use.

Q4. Are there hidden costs when using EveryMile for overseas spending?
While fees and FX policies vary by market, travellers should be aware that banks can apply their own foreign exchange rates that are slightly worse than mid-market or card network rates. This widens the effective cost of overseas purchases, which can offset some of the value of miles earned.

Q5. What happens to my RewardCash or miles if I cancel the EveryMile card?
If you cancel the card, unredeemed RewardCash linked to it may be forfeited, depending on local terms and conditions. It is important to convert or redeem points before closure or to have a clear plan to use them within the bank’s specified timeframe.

Q6. Can I rely on EveryMile as my only credit card when I travel?
Relying on a single miles card is rarely wise. Many travellers pair a specialist miles card like EveryMile with a separate low-FX card and a no-fee cashback card to cover different types of spending and to provide backup in case one card is declined abroad.

Q7. Is paying the annual fee for EveryMile always worth it?
Paying the annual fee only makes sense if your projected miles value clearly exceeds the fee. That typically requires significant annual spend in the card’s boosted categories and regular, high-value redemptions, such as long-haul premium cabin flights.

Q8. How risky is it to hoard RewardCash for a big redemption later?
Hoarding any bank points is risky because both bank programmes and airline or hotel partners can devalue their charts or adjust transfer ratios. A safer approach is to earn with a specific redemption in mind and to transfer points only when you are close to booking.

Q9. Are there better options than EveryMile for casual holidaymakers?
For travellers who take one or two short holidays a year, a straightforward cashback card or a simple miles card with no annual fee often offers better, more predictable value than a complex, fee-based product like EveryMile.

Q10. What should I check before applying for the HSBC EveryMile Card?
Before applying, review your past year of spending by category, estimate how much would earn at the boosted rate, compare that with alternative cards, factor in any annual fee and foreign exchange costs, and make sure you are comfortable managing multiple loyalty schemes.