Mastercard Debuts Experience-Focused World Legend Card

Mastercard has introduced a new suite of benefits aimed at experience-seeking consumers.

The Mastercard Collection, announced Wednesday (July 16), is available across the company’s World, World Elite and newly created World Legend Mastercard cards, offering rewards on things like dining, entertainment and travel.

“Time well-spent with people who matter most is truly priceless,” Bunita Sawhney, Mastercard’s chief consumer product officer, said in a news release.

“That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce The Mastercard Collection. Together with issuers around the world, we look forward to granting cardholders and their families access to memory-making experiences wherever they go.”

The World Legend card is available to banks worldwide now, and will debut to cardholders in the third quarter of this year in the U.S., followed by a larger international launch, the release added.

Driving this launch, the company said, is its in-house research showing a growing demand among consumers for a “more intentional way of living, where spending on meaningful experiences is prioritized over material things.”

The vast majority of the company’s cardholders, the release said, “feel their best when spending their time on their passions, including culinary exploration, artistic endeavors, and cultural immersion,” while two-thirds “are becoming more intentional with how they spend their time, focusing on the relationships that matter most.”

Recent research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that 40% of consumers use their credit cards to pay for travel costs.

“This indicates a strategic choice for larger expenditures, where credit cards often offer benefits such as rewards or better expense management,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, citing data from the “How People Pay” eBook.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last month about the opportunities credit card benefits offer to financial institutions.

Although consumers who have entry-level cards may switch based on practical factors such as credit limits or balances, people with higher-fee, premium cards are markedly loyal and highly engaged with their card’s benefits.

These consumers are more than twice as likely to take advantage of card-linked offers than those with free cards, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “How Consumers Decide Which Credit Card to Pay With.”

“Strikingly, 74% of premium cardholders took advantage of at least one offer in the past year, compared to just 32% of free cardholders,” PYMNTS wrote. “This strong correlation between premium ownership, usage, and offer uptake suggests that card-linked offers are a highly effective tool for reinforcing the value proposition of high-fee products and driving their use as the primary payment method.”