The Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card is an excellent premium travel credit card that strikes an excellent balance between benefits and its annual fee. Launched in 2021, this card has impressively positioned itself as a competitor.
In this article, we'll explore this card's annual fee, its credits, travel benefits, and other perks.
The Welcome Offer: A Healthy Dose Of Miles
The Venture X has a decent introductory offer: earn 75,000 miles after spending $4,000 on purchases in the first 3 months. These miles can be used immediately once they are earned, meaning you can take advantage of searches you see on Roame super quickly.
Earning On The Capital One Venture X
The Capital One Venture X has a very simplistic earn structure:
- Earn 2x miles on all purchases
This is an incredibly simple way to earn miles, meaning you don't really need to think too much about using your cards—rather, you can literally just pull out this card for all your purchases.
When purchasing through the Capital One Travel Portal, you can also get more miles:
- 10x miles on hotels & rental cars booked through Capital One Travel
- 5x miles on flights booked through Capital One Travel
Key note: you do not earn 10x miles for direct hotel bookings. You only earn the 10x miles for bookings made through the Capital One Travel Portal. This can have an opportunity cost associated with it, which can be costly, especially if you lose out on your hotel status or your direct hotel earnings.
The $300 Annual Travel Credit
One of the best and worst things about the Venture X is the $300 Annual Travel Credit. Every calendar anniversary, you will receive a $300 travel credit to use towards purchases made through the portal. This credit will expire if it goes unused.
The primary con with this benefit is that it forces you to make purchases via the Capital One Travel Portal. Generally speaking, I recommend against booking via travel portals because of the opportunity cost. However, for many folks, the Venture X has such good benefits that it may be worth using the portal to justify its benefits here.
10,000 Miles Anniversary Bonus
One of the best features of this card is the 10,000 Miles anniversary bonus awarded every anniversary year. If you redeem these miles via the travel portal, you'll get $100 worth of travel back (1 cent per point). However, if you leverage transfer partners, you can start scoring at least 50% more value out of your points.
Strong Insurance Benefits
Given the Venture X is a Visa Infinite® card, it also comes with a variety of awesome insurance protections and perks, including:
- Cellphone Protection
- Trip Cancellation & Interruption Coverage
- Return Protection
- Extended Warranty Protection
- Travel Accident Insurance
- Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver
Exact terms & benefits may vary by situation, so make sure you read carefully into the technicalities into each insurance benefit to make sure it is applicable to you. Just owning the Capital One Venture X doesn't simply make you eligible for these insurances.
Airport Lounge Access
Like many other premium travel cards, you can get access to lounges. Broadly speaking, there are two types of lounges you can access with this card.
Capital One Lounges
Capital One Lounges are some very nicely designed lounges located at three major airports right now:
- Dallas Forth Worth (DFW)
- Denver (DEN)
- Washington Dulles (IAD)
These lounges have been receiving rave reviews for their food, amenities, and design.
Partner Lounges: Priority Pass Lounges
Priority Pass lounges are a network of 1,300+ lounges located around the world. Credit card issuers like Chase, AMEX, Capital One, etc. all have partnerships with Priority Pass to allow lounge access to their cardholders. With the Venture X, you can access Priority Pass lounges.
Generally speaking, Priority Pass lounges aren't anything incredibly special. However, there are definitely some gems out there (e.g. funnily enough, the Chase Sapphire lounges by The Club).
Global Entry/TSA PreCheck Credit
Cardholders can receive up to a $120 statement credit on their application fee for TSA PreCheck® or Global Entry when using their card. However, it is very important to make sure you are using the official government website; using a third party to pay for this will not work.
No Foreign Transaction Fees
Capital One cards in general don't charge any foreign transaction fees when making purchases outside the United States.
Transferring Miles To Partners
Miles earned via the Capital One Venture X can be used to book award travel. These miles are really valuable because they can be transferred to a wide variety of partners to get good value out of them. If you only use miles in the travel portal, you're only going to get 1 cent per point. However, using them to book economy or business class flights can get you way more value than that.
For instance, you can use 87,500 Capital One miles to book this incredible nonstop flight from New York to Singapore flying on Singapore Airlines business class found on Roame!
Redeeming Your Miles Via The Capital One Travel Portal
If you're just looking for an easy way to use your miles without much thought, you can redeem them for flights in the Capital One Travel Portal for 1 cent per mile. While this is generally not a recommended use of miles since you'd be missing out on a lot of potential value, being able to liquidate your miles for even 1 cent each is not the worst escape route in the world.
With Roame, you can typically do a lot better than 1 cent per mile, so please keep that in mind whenever you're thinking about redeeming your miles for just 1 cent each!
Free Authorized Users
One of the reasons why I think the Venture X is such a strong card for families/couples is that you can add up to 4 authorized users for free. Furthermore, each authorized user also gets access to Venture X/Priority Pass lounges. The value proposition for this is insane, as it helps justify the value add of the card even more (vs a Chase Sapphire Reserve®, which costs $75/authorized user).
Analyzing The Annual Fee: Is The Venture X Worth It?
On a high level, I think the benefits justify the Venture X's annual fee pretty well. If we do a quick cost-benefit analysis at face value, the $300 travel credit and 10,000 anniversary miles should be enough to offset the $395 annual fee pretty easily.
Even if you don't value the $300 travel portal credit at its face value, you also get a slew of other benefits:
- Lounge access (Capital One lounges + Priority Pass lounges)
- Insurance benefits
- Global Entry/TSA PreCheck credits
- Free authorized users (who also get lounge access)
Mathematically, it's pretty easy to recoup the investment on the Capital One Venture X.
Conclusion
The Venture X is one of the best luxury travel cards out there, with its relatively easy to recuperate annual fee and strong ancillary travel & insurance benefits. With up to four free authorized users who can also access lounges, it's hard to put this card anywhere else besides the top.
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