Come Dine with Me: Why I (Still) Have a Diners Club Card

By Robert McGarvey

I have no memory of why I got a Diners Club card but I can tell you mine was issued in 1985, deep into the Citi ownership of what had been the pioneering independent travel and restaurant card.  Invented in 1950, Diners Club was a breakthrough dazzler of an idea: paying for restaurant meals with plastic (actually a cardboard card in its original format).

Unless you are 60+ you have no idea how difficult paying for a restaurant meal was back in the day – especially a spur of the moment meal at a white table cloth establishment. You needed a walletful of cash.

Remember, banks kept banker’s hours – most closed tight at 3pm. There were no ATMs (they weren’t widespread and easy to use until the 1980s).  If you were a regular at a saloon you probably could borrow $10 for a cab ride home – but enough for a fancy meal? Not likely.

Diners Club made dining out easy. Sort of. I still remember studying restaurant doors to discern exactly what credit cards were accepted where.

I never got a Diners Club in its heyday but did have Carte Blanche and soon American Express (“a member since 1975″).

But Diners got into my wallet in the mid 1980s as Citi managed it seemingly with nearly complete indifference.  Diners was acquired by Discover Financial in 2008 – didn’t know that, did you?

But the North American operation – US and Canada – was operated by Citi until 2009 until it sold it to the Bank of Montreal.

Different operators own and manage different international outposts.

In North America Diners Club runs on Mastercard rails. For all practical purposes it is a Mastercard with a few frills.

The annual fee on the professional card I carry is $95.

I’ll tell you too I had thought hard about canceling it but then BMO was the first – and for a long time only – major US card issuer that offered a chip and PIN credit card. Few still do despite the abundant evidence that fraudulent use of lost and stolen credit cards plummets when a PIN is required (as one is on probably all debit cards and all across Europe PIN is mandatory on cards of all types). In the US credit card issuers have resisted requiring PINs, presumably because they think we are too lazy or lame  to use it. Even though we do use it on debit card transactions.  Go figure.

There even were several years of fretting by many that European merchants and restaurants would decline American pinless chip card and in fact it did happen with some frequency. But by 2019 the Europeans accepted we were impossible and now there are few obstacles to using a pinless card abroad. 

I nonetheless still like that PIN feature on the Diners card and it’s a reason I have kept it.  

What else do I get for my $95?

There’s a rewards program that awards one point per eligible dollar spent and The Points Guy values these rewards at 2.1 cents apiece, the highest value I see on the recent list. 

Diners miles can be transferred into many airline programs – Delta, Southwest, Alaska, El Al, and more.

And because this is a Mastercard it can be used almost everywhere which means accumulating points can be easy.

There is access to over 1000 airport lounges worldwide.  

There’s extended warranty coverage on most purchases, roadside assistance (Amex discontinued similar in 2020), and there’s also primary collision insurance on rental cars.

Oh, one either thing. About 10 years ago I got a call from Diners fraud. “Did you just buy a tank of gasoline in Chennai, India?”

I responded that I had never been to India, never bought gasoline there, and wouldn’t drive there if I went (you’ve seen the videos about driving in India) 

I don’t remember ever getting such a realtime call from another credit issuer.

The charge was obliterated from my statement – I never saw it – and my card was canceled and reissued with me doing nothing except reporting that I had never been to India.

So my reasons for retaining a Diners card are, well, idiosyncratic – I am crazy for PIN and I liked the fraud protocol.  

And I kind of like the rewards program and lounge access (although I’m unsure the latter gives me anything I don’t get with Amex Plat).

Are those reasons good enough to persuade you to put a Diners card in your wallet?  That’s for you to say.

For me the takeaway is that, with peripheral cards, my reasons for keeping (or ditching) are going to be idiosyncratic. Probably yours will be too.

More proof of my thesis that there just won’t be one card to rule them all. No more.