Chalk this one up to another stupid IT design by CNB. See, before they nerfed the airline credits, it made sense to have multiple primary CNB cards (maybe 2 was the max?) since you were making money off each primary card. That’s why I had 2 primaries in my name. Well after the new website design, they merged my 2 rewards accounts and pooled them into 1 household reward pool. This isn’t terrible if you plan on keeping both cards, but that makes no sense if you plan on cancelling at least one of them (which I planned to do.)
On one CNB card, I have about 180K points now and on the second card, I have 20K points. I called them about 2 months ago to un-pool the rewards. I then had to create a 2nd Rewards login for one of the cards. Everything was great! However, I didn’t redeem the 20K points immediately. Fast forward a month or two and those idiots at CNB re-pooled the points once again.
As a test, I had 200K points pooled. I went to redeem 18K worth of Amazon gift cards, and it seemed to take it out evenly between the 2 cards – meaning it took about 1/10th out of the 20K card and the other 9/10th out of the 200K point. This means I’d never be able to use up all 20K fast enough on card 1 to make it 0 and then close the card.
Lesson learned – if you have 2 CNBs and want to cancel one of them, make sure you call to un-pool and then liquidate those points ASAP before they get re-pooled.