Apple unveils new travel-friendly features coming to Apple Pay, iPhone, AirPods

12.06.2024 - 15:45 / thepointsguy.com

Apple is on a mission to replace your physical wallet with a digital one.

The tech giant first launched Apple Pay 10 years ago. It was originally designed as a service to streamline payments, but it's since then morphed into an entire wallet experience that includes your credit cards, driver's license, event tickets, boarding passes and much more. In fact, the platform now covers a whopping 11,000 banks and networks.

And now, the company is back with additional improvements that it believes will further enhance the payment experience on your Apple devices.

At Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a slew of new features debuting this fall across every product platform. This included some noteworthy Apple Pay-related announcements, as well as a long list of travel-friendly improvements coming to your iPhone this year.

Here's the latest.

Perhaps the biggest news for TPG readers is that Apple Pay will officially accept points.

Historically, Apple Pay has only allowed cash purchases using linked credit cards. However, that's changing this fall with the release of iOS 18.

When it launches this fall, you'll be able to pay with points through the Apple Pay interface no matter what merchant you shop at. The ability to redeem rewards will debut with Discover and Synchrony and be available across Apple Pay issuers with Fiserv.

I'd expect that the points giants like American Express, Chase and Capital One will adopt this feature in the coming months, too.

You'll also be able to redeem cash-back rewards from any of your eligible cards when this launches. You'll see your points or cash-back balance directly on the Apple Pay screen, and tapping the "rewards" button will open a new screen that allows you to select how many points (or how much cash back) you want to redeem.

The redemption rates are going to be handled by your credit card issuer, so you'll want to pay attention to the offers directly in the app before proceeding with these redemptions. In many cases, savvy travelers can do better by converting points into frequent flyer miles with partners.

But for many cards, including the popular cash-back Citi Double Cash® Card (see rates and fees), this new feature will make it easier than ever to redeem cash back during the checkout process.

Note that the issuer will be responsible for adjusting your statement balance on the back end when you apply rewards. Just be sure to periodically check your balances to ensure that everything went through correctly.

Adding your credit cards to Apple Pay has historically required manually inputting the credit card number, expiration date, security code and cardholder name into the Wallet application.

This was a tedious process, especially for someone like me