By Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card Review (2020.12 Update: 60k Offer)
2020.12 Update: The new offer is 60k, and the spending requirement is only $3,000.
2020.9 Update: The new offer is 50k+50k. The latter part has a very high spending requirement.
2020.5 Update: The first year annual fee is no longer waived.
Application Link
Benefits
- 60k offer: earn 60,000 miles after spending $3,000 in first 3 months.
- Earn 2x miles on all purchases.
- Earn 10x miles on thousands of hotels, through January 2020; learn more at hotels.com/venture .
- The overall point value is 1.0 cent/point. How to redeem the miles:
- [New] You can transfer them to partner airline miles, the ratio for most of them is 2:1.5, including: AV, AC, CX, etc.
- You can redeem the miles for statement credit to cover travel expenses at a fixed ratio 1 cent/mile.
- You can also redeem the miles for some gift cards at a fixed ratio 1 cent/mile.
- You can also redeem for cash, but the ratio is very low, only 0.5 cents/mile.
- [New] Up to $100 credit for Global Entry or TSA Precheck application fee.
- No foreign transaction fee.
Disadvantages
- $95 annual fee, NOT waived for the first year. (Before 2017.10, the annual fee was $59)
- Capital One will pull all three major credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion, Equifax) for one credit card application!
Recommended Application Time
- We recommend you apply for this card after you have a credit history of at least two years and you are very comfortable with the credit card game.
- [1/6 rule] You can only apply for 1 Capital One credit card for every 6 months, including both personal and business credit cards. You will get automatic denial if you violate this rule, but there will be no hard pull.
Summary
This card is similar to Barclaycard Arrival Plus: very generous sign-up bonus, 2x miles on all purchases, no FTF, but there is an annual fee. Compared to Citi Double Cash (DC) which earns 2% cash back for everything and no annual fee, this card has higher sign-up bonus but comes with $95 annual fee, so it’s not a good idea to keep this card for a long time. The sign-up bonus is less than most of the miles and points cards, in my opinion this card is good only for people who don’t want to spend time studying airline miles. You should be careful since Capital One will pull all three major credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion, Equifax) for one credit card application (see Characteristics of Major Banks for more details). If you can’t apply for cards in major banks because of various rules already, then this card with several hundred dollars is quite a good choice.
Recommended Downgrade Options
Historical Offers Chart
Note: Sometimes there are offers such as 50k+50k on this card, but the spending requirements after the latter part are huge. Therefore, we don’t treat them as sign-up bonus.
