The Chase Sapphire Preferred (CSP) has got to be one of the most common travel credit cards out there. It was the first travel card I ever had, and remains one of the most straightforward and simply valuable cards out there. What is it and who is it for? Let's dive in.
The CSP has been around for quite a long time, undergoing a few updates to keep it relevant and competitive. It currently carries a $95 annual fee, with a credit to offset some of the fee, and robust protections and points earning to make it truly worthwhile.
The credit offered by the card is a $50 hotel credit when booked through the Chase travel portal. This is somewhat, but not extremely, useful. Personally, I've struggled to use this credit because I now have a hotel-branded credit card with each of the four main US credit card cobranding chains: Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Hyatt. If I'm booking a hotel, it's very lucrative from a points perspective to book it through the hotel directly and earn the bonus points offered by those credit cards! But not everyone overdoes it on credit cards like I do, so a $50 credit is nice to have once a year. The Chase travel portal is just like any other travel aggregator site, so it list almost all hotels as options when you search a location.
Beyond the points earning, the card has pretty solid travel and purchase protections. There are no foreign transaction fees, and it comes with primary CDW for rental cars, meaning you can decline the rental company's insurance, and if you have an accident you likely don't have to involve your insurance. You'll also have 6 hour baggage delay and 12 hour trip delay coverage, plus trip cancellation insurance for piece of mind.
These benefits make the CSP a well-rounded card, balancing perks with ease-of-use. Beyond that, the earning rates are pretty strong. Specifically, it earns Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) points: 5x on travel booked through the Chase portal, 3x on dining including delivery, online groceries, and select streaming, 2x on travel (broad definition including transit), and 1x on everything else. The main benefit of UR points is that they are redeemable in multiple ways as a flexible points currency. They can be cashed out at 1 cent each, but that's not the best use of them. Booking travel through the Chase portal with them results in a value of 1.25 cents each, which is OK, especially considering how easy it is to use. The best use for value, though, is transferring to partners. Chase has 14 transfer partners, where you can exchange your UR points for a particular type of airlines mile, for example. We used this to transfer points to Emirates Skywards and Singapore Krisflyer on our 2022 trip to the Maldives, to book business class flights at a value of well over 4 cents per point! There are higher-valued redemptions, but I like to conservatively use 2 cents as the floor value when assessing if it makes sense to transfer points for a particular itinerary.
To compare this spending, with the annual fee, to a standard 2% cash back card, how does it stack up? Valuing the UR points at 2 cents each (the floor value for transfer partners), you would need to spend $4,750 per year in the 2x categories, $2,375 per year in the 3x categories, or some combination of the two to offset the full $95. The calculation for this is (X*[0.04 or 0.06]-X*0.02)=$95, solving for X as spending, or X=$95/0.02 for the 2x categories or $95/0.04 for the 3x categories. These are some extremely reasonable numbers.
So who is the CSP a good match for? I recommend the CSP frequently, especially to beginners to points and miles! It can fit in a credit card strategy in a ton of different ways, making it valuable to veterans as well. there are genuinely very few people for whom this card doesn't make sense, since it doesn't require much in the way of spending or annual travel to make it worth it. Maybe if you really only want to focus on an Amex, Citi, or Capital One setup, it could be redundant, and it's arguably outdone by the Citi Premier card as a general-earning flexible points card. But if you rent cars often enough, it might be worth the $95 annual fee just for the CDW insurance...
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