Did you use the Cap 1 or PP lounges when you were an AU on your son’s Venture X card?
If so, you may just want to open your own card as that card pays for its own annual fee.
If you decide to open the card, have your son generate a referral link so that he can earn 10K or 20K points for your referral.
Also, if you want to earn more points, open the regular Venture card first and then the Venture X six months later, but you will be w/o lounge access in the interim.
If you open Venture X before Venture, you will not be eligible to earn the sign-up bonus on Venture. The Venture has an elevated offer right now of an extra $250 in their travel portal.
I have the Venture and this past summer I signed up for the Venture X (too bad it was before the bonus increased). I haven’t been using the Venture card lately and the yearly fee is going to be charged in about a month. Is there any reason to keep the Venture card if I’m now just using the Venture X?
No reason to keep the Venture card. You could see if Cap1 will allow you to product change to a free card. The only reason to do this would be to remain in Cap1’s good graces, in case they ever come out with a another card in the future that you will want to open.
I also wonder if Cap1 will try to enter the luxury card market that AmEx, Chase & Citi are competing in. Their elimination of guests for lounge access was a step in the wrong direction.
Cap 1 mostly. I didn’t renew my PP lounge pass or whatever after 1 year. When we fly international we sometimes have to go to Dulles, where the Cap 1 lounge is pretty nice.
As I wrote the other day, that card is an easy one to hold onto because its benefits pay for its annual fee, without having to jump through hoops the way you do with some of the other travel credit cards. You do have to book through the travel portal in order to use your $300 benefit, but I have found it very easy to use.
PP lounges are hit or miss. I visited one in Copenhagen last summer that was decent, but often cannot find a lounge in the correct terminal when flying out of NY.
Random question - hopefully this will make sense. If you book through the Cap 1 portal, are airline tickets treated as being purchased from the airline, or from a travel agent or other place? Same question for hotels, etc.? It’s been my experience that if you book directly the airline or hotel is more eager to help you than if you dont.
I am FAR from an expert on this, so will just relay my recent experiences.
I used the travel portal to book tickets on JetBlue, and ended up having to cancel the flights the day before travel. I dealt directly with JetBlue, money was deposited to a Jet Blue travel bank, and I was able to use the travel bank funds to immediately purchase another ticket.
Editing to add that the flight cancellation was handled by Jet Blue and subject to Jet Blue policies. I had no contact with Cap1.
I have read about people having problems working through third-party booking, so I have only use the travel bank for direct domestic flights. I have only used booked via Travel Bank three times, all to use Cap 1 credits.
Some people book through Chase or AmEx in order to earn the higher multiplier, but I’m a bit too risk adverse.
When staying in a hotel this summer that I had booked using credit card points, the front desk clerk seemed to know that my stay was an award stay. (I transferred points from Citi to the hotel program and then booked the stay.)
I don’t know if cash customers would have received a better room assignment?
A friend who booked a hotel through the Chase portal (paying cash) encountered some sort of difficulty when trying to revise the reservation.
Small sample size, and no horror stories. Hopefully someone else will have some insight.
We found that this is definitely the deal with Marriott. Even folks paying with cash get assigned different rooms in the same category depending on the discount offered.
One thing I noticed is that being a member of the hotel’s points program, even with no status or points, increases the chance of getting things like early check in compared to not being in the hotel’s points program.
The very first time I tried to use my Chase points for an air reservation was a horrible experience. 48 hours after purchasing, the flight price dropped 40%! I had never seen such a large drop. My tickets were changeable (not refundable).
Called Chase travel. No, they would not / could not credit the point difference. Called the airlines. They were very understanding, assured me that my tickets were changeable, and had I reserved them through the airline, they would simply credit the difference. However, because they were purchased through Chase points (and Chase travel), all changes must be through Chase. Airlines shared what wording I needed to share with Chase.
BUT, Chase would not budge. Phone communication took hours (literally), while on multiple holds. Information at each level was inconsistent, and frankly in some cases incorrect. I tried unsuccessfully to move up the supervisor chain.
I finally gave up. That was my first - and will be only - time to try to use points via Chase for air travel. Sometimes points can be transferred to the airline first, but this airline did not have that relationship with Chase points.
First rule of travel mile club: never book airline travel in the cc portal. Always transfer to the airline - sometimes need to do a transfer to a partner airline first to achieve it.
Second rule of travel mile club: diversify the currency you work with, to increase transfer flexibility (I collect both Chase UR and CapOne miles for just this reason).
Enough horror stories out there (especially around all the cancellations in Europe recently) to know that you never book flights through a 3rd party site. Anything goes wrong, like this, and you tend to get batted about like a ping pong ball. It was explained to me that this is because the airline’s actual customer is the booking site not you, but the booking site (unlike an actual human travel agent) generally doesn’t want to get involved with sorting out issues.
As an aside, not sure what Delta is planning to do to change its tiers for the coming year, but there is a funny Facebook thread of people asking if they’re going to lose their Diamond status this coming year. A lot of people are raising their hands on that thread.
I would think that Delta is having less Diamond/Platinum status flyers every year, since the number of people getting it from the transition from MQM’s to MQD’s is dropping every year, and now people have to earn the status the hard way. Unless they’re trying to rapidly diminish the number.
We’ve been using the Southwest Airlines credit card, which we might not keep. I did the math, and we’re actually better off taking the 2% cash back from my other credit card and throwing that money in a savings account. We end up with more money than the airlines give us in points.
We have been looking at both credit cards, and frequent flyer programs. So far, the frequent flyer programs are just not what they used to be. But then neither are credit card rewards. Last year, we earned enough cash back on our credit card to pay for one airline trip. I think we will just stick to that.
We don’t fly frequently enough to accumulate FF miles.
We don’t really buy all that much so our CC amounts aren’t very high either.
Not sure this would benefit us more than what we currently get.
I’m curious if any of you have both airline and hotel cards? I know there are benefits you don’t get if you don’t have the airline cc, but I put my flights on my hotel card and the spending usually gets me at least a few free nights a year (as well as the points that I use to exchange for free nights). I’ve never sat down and worked out what the dollar for dollar comparative value is. We are not super frequent flyers but normal for us is to fly domestic a few times a year and international once.
When my husband was a business traveler, he was a frequent hotel user of the same chain, and we got many many free nights. Not with a credit card…just from their hotel program.
But then, he flew enough to get gold status and we also got great flying perks too.
But even the FF program with that hotel chain…and that airline have changed substantially.
I think the best benefit to a credit card is the upfront bonus.
If I had a Southwest card, for example, between the point bonus and flying, if I could get to 135K and a companion pass, it could pay. But paying $69 (now $99), without the $800 worth of points sign up bonus and/or companion pass, 2% would be better.
It’s likely the same with most cards.
It’s really in the sign up bonus to make it worth it - and like you said, not everyone will take advantage.
Otherwise, a cash back - whether 2% or a 1% + more in categories - likely would be better.
At one point Wells Fargo gave $200 (not a lot) and then 2% - which is better than any hotel/airline card I know about (outside the sign up bonus).
I do keep the $49 IHG card - only because each year I get a night included up to 40K points - last year I used on an Hol Inn Express that was $169.
But it’s definitely not worth chasing for a lot of people.