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We set this website up to help people choose after extensive research ourselves in helping a client choose the right fuel card for their tourism business.
Promo periods – Ask if the offer you’re signing up to is a promo period and what the regular prices may be. What’s being advertised can often be a promo for new customers that only lasts a few months which returns to ‘regular’ pricing.
Discount Types – There are two types of discounts. Pump price and national price.
The pump price is what you see at advertised at the station. So if it’s advertised at $2.28 and you have 8c off, it becomes $2.20/l. Simple.
The national price is the average of all the fuel prices. Different cards have different ways to calculate this so it could be from the national average of their group of suppliers or one brand. This means means the price you see at the pump is not what you’re actually paying for and can be higher or lower depending on the location. We’ve only seen this used by BP.
Discount partners – Just because a particular fuel card can be used at all the fuel stations doesn’t mean you get the same discount across them all. Sometimes there are specific brands the discounts apply too. So if you lean towards fueling at a particular brand, make sure you clarify that the discount (if any) applies to the brands you use.
GST Cost – Most companies advertise without GST so it’s just an important note for comparative purposes.
Transaction fees – If you have a discount of 8c/l but each time you use the card to pay you’re hit with a transaction cost of $2 it offsets some of that discount – 25liters in this particular example, which means for an average car with a 55 litre tank, you save $2.40 instead of $4.40 each time you fill up.
Payment fees and methods – What are their terms around payment and late fees? If you’re like us and enjoy earning points on your credit card it’s worthwhile finding out what the transaction fees are and whether they’re accepted at all. For us our preference has always been the ability to pay the entire bill with our AMEX card for points which also extends our cashflow. In a scenario where we fill up twice a week (assume 55l tank and pay $2.20/l), it costs us a little over $12,500 in fuel costs per year per car. Multiply that by a fleet size of 10 and we have 125,000 points a year which is enough for a RETURN business class flight to Singapore for a cost of $3,146 in transaction fees (assumes 2.5% processing fee) which is a great discount over the normal business class tickets and paid entirely by business transactions.
Size of fleet – The larger your fleet the more attractive you are to fuel providers so they’re more likely to give you a special deal to lock in your business. This is usually based on your total fuel spend and the number of cards.
Offerings between each can get confusing quickly with a variety of different options.
For simplicity we categorised them into two types:
The difference between the two came mainly down to this:
With so many fuel card providers and each offering two or more cards we opted to show their offerings based on fuel stations. By doing it this way you can see how each card from different fuel card providers compare against each other for use at the main fuel brands.
