Clash of the (Sort of) Ninety-Five Dollar Travel Credit Cards

Chase Sapphire Preferred vs Capital One Venture X — which travel credit card is right for your family? Melissa breaks down annual fees, earning rates, transfer partners, lounge access, and real-world redemptions to help you decide. Spoiler: you'll probably want both.

In this episode:

• Why the Venture X's $395 annual fee is effectively comparable to the Sapphire Preferred's $95 — and how the math works
• The Capital One travel portal price match trick that actually works
• Current welcome bonuses
• How the Chase Freedom Unlimited pairs with the Sapphire Preferred to maximize everyday earning
• Transfer partners: why Chase and Capital One complement each other rather than compete
• What's changing with World of Hyatt's award chart and what it means for your redemptions
• Capital One Offers: the underrated feature that scored Melissa's family 10k bonus points on an Expedia booking and 5k on StubHub — plus a jaw-dropping theme park ticket offer
• Lounge access: what the recent guest policy changes mean for families
• The Chase 5/24 rule, Capital One's inquiry sensitivity, and the right order to open these cards
• How to freeze a credit bureau before applying to improve your Capital One approval odds
• How Ronnie and Melissa divide the cards in their household — and how she uses his Venture X at Target, the grocery store and all around town

Timestamps
00:00 Welcome
02:18 Why Compare the Capital One Venture X vs Chase Sapphire Preferred?
03:37 Annual Fee Math Explained
07:01 Bonuses and Real Examples
08:22 Earning Rates and Strategy
11:45 Portals vs Transfer Partners
16:41 CapitalOne Offers Hack
18:34 Premium Perks
21:44 Application Tips
24:11 Final Recommendations

Credit Cards
Chase Sapphire Preferred 
Chase Freedom Unlimited
Chase Ink Business Preferred
Capital One Venture X (Personal) 
Capital One Venture X Business

Award Search Tools
PointsYeah
AwardTool

Articles
Free travel resources
Best Credit Cards for Family Travel
Get your free ebook

Don't miss this inspiring, practical travel with kids podcast hosted by family travel expert Melissa Conn, founder of The Family Voyage, certified Child Passenger Safety Technician, and mom of two who proves family travel is achievable for everyone.

Blog The Family Voyage

Get your free ebook The Busy Mom's Guide to Free Travel

Check out my favorite travel gear and my Etsy shop!

Chase Sapphire credit cards

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Melissa 0:01

Hey there, and welcome back to Family Travel Unpacked. I'm your host, Melissa, and in case you're new here, you can find tons of detailed destination guides, travel tips, hacks, and more on my website, thefamilyvoyage.com. And if you've been enjoying the show, be sure to hit follow wherever you're listening so you never miss an episode, and drop a five-star review while you're at it because it really helps other families find the show. I know I talk a lot about traveling on points, and that's because there's no way our family could travel as much as we do without that strategy in our back pocket. But I also know that it can be really overwhelming to learn about if you're new to the game. I've got a free e-book down in the show notes that covers all of the basic ideas you need to know, or you can head back to episode seven of this podcast to hear about some of the important fundamentals. But today we're gonna narrow the conversation and get into something I've been wanting to do for a while, a deep comparison of two cards that I think belong in most family travel wallets: the Chase Sapphire Preferred and the Capital One Venture X. I'm calling this episode The Clash of the Sort of Ninety-Five Dollar Cards, and I'll explain what I mean by sort of in just a minute. Both of these cards are in our household right now. My husband Ronnie has the Sapphire Preferred and the personal Venture X while I have the Venture X business and the no-fee Chase Freedom Unlimited. I also have the Chase Ink Business Preferred, which is kinda like the Sapphire Preferred, but I'm not gonna get into that today because I wanna focus on these personal cards. We use these particular cards every week, and those points help us travel. Now to be totally transparent, we do also have about 20 other cards, but you really don't have to go down that rabbit hole, or at least not yet. I wanna walk you through why we landed here and help you think through what makes sense for your family. A quick disclaimer before we jump in. I'm not a financial advisor and credit card offers, points, values, and benefits can and do change. Everything that I'm telling you here is accurate as of May 2026. So if you're listening to this episode later, You'll wanna go back and verify that nothing major has changed. Always pay your bills in full and on time because this whole strategy falls apart the second you're carrying a balance and paying interest. And please don't rush into opening a bunch of cards at once. There's a right order and pace to this, and I'll touch on that later in the episode. Also, there are referral links for all of these cards down in the show notes. I really appreciate your using them if you decide to apply because the points I earn from those referrals roll right back into helping me create more content for you guys. Before we get to the head-to-head comparison, I want to discuss why I picked these two specific cards. If you're newer to the Points and Miles world, you've probably heard a lot of advice about where to start, and pretty much everyone is going to tell you that the answer is Chase. Chase has what's referred to as the five-twenty-four rule. They won't approve you for most of their cards if you've opened five or more personal credit cards in the past twenty-four months across any bank. That rule is really important because Chase has an outstanding lineup of cards, and you want to work through at least most of that lineup before you get locked out. So most people do start with Chase. Within the Chase ecosystem, the Sapphire Preferred is their workhorse entry card. It's the cheapest card that gives you access to their transfer partners, which is the thing that unlocks really good value. Once you've got that foundation and potentially a few other Chase cards, you can start layering in cards from other banks, and that might be where Capital One comes in for you. The Venture X is actually Capital One's premium card, but I think it's priced really reasonably compared to the premium cards offered by other banks. And the great thing is that it gives you access to transfer partners that Chase doesn't have, which means more options, more flexibility, and more chances to find the right award at the right time. I talked about that back in my Portugal on Points case study, which is episode thirty. The short version of today's episode is you'll probably want both of these cards eventually, but let's compare them so you understand why and when. First, I want to talk about the sort of ninety-five dollar thing because this is one of the more interesting parts of this comparison. The Chase Sapphire Preferred has a true ninety-five dollar annual fee. You pay ninety-five dollars, you've got the card. It does come with a fifty dollar hotel credit through Chase Travel, so in theory, you could argue that the effective cost is forty-five dollars. But honestly, in all the years we've had this card, we've never used it. The Chase Travel Portal is sort of fine, but the hotel prices are usually at least a little bit inflated, so it wouldn't save the full fifty dollars. Maybe thirty dollars if you're lucky? And hotel rates have gone up so much in the last few years that we're almost always spending way more than a hundred dollars even for the cheapest night near an airport. So I usually try to book with Hyatt Points directly, or I find some other way to get an amazing deal Your mileage may vary on that credit, but it's one that I basically don't value at all. There is one other random benefit on the Chase Sapphire Preferred that's way more valuable to me than the hotel credit, and that's DoorDash. Now, I almost never use it for food delivery, but what I do use it for is my Lyft account. I know that's super random, but let me explain. The Chase Sapphire Preferred gives you a free DashPass through twenty twenty-seven. That's basically a DoorDash premium membership. If you link that to your Lyft account, you'll get free priority pickups and five to ten percent discounts a few times every single month. We basically just use Lyft when we're going to or from an airport, but it still saves me around fifty dollars a year. I know that's doesn't apply to everyone, so when I'm comparing the annual cost of these cards, I'm just not gonna account for it. Now let's flip over to the Capital One Venture X. On paper, it has a three hundred and ninety-five dollar fee, which sounds very different than ninety-five dollars, until you look at what it comes with. Every year that you have the card, you get a three hundred dollar travel credit that you can use through Capital One's travel portal. That credit automatically applies when you book through Capital One Travel, so it's not like you're filing claims or remembering to use a coupon. You just book a flight, hotel, rental car, or even an activity like a food tour through their portal, and it comes off during the transaction like a coupon. It sounds similar to what Chase Travel offers, but the flexibility makes it much more useful, especially since sometimes Capital One actually has great rental car prices. On top of that, every anniversary, you automatically get ten thousand bonus points. That's worth at least a hundred dollars, but it could end up being worth a lot more. I'll talk about that later. If you travel enough that you're bothering to listen to this episode, you should be able to take advantage of both the travel credit and the bonus points on the Venture X with no trouble at all. So three hundred and ninety-five dollars minus the three hundred dollar travel credit, minus one hundred dollars in anniversary points gives you effectively negative five dollars. Capital One basically pays you five bucks a year to hold this card as long as you actually use that three hundred dollar credit. That's why I put sort of ninety-five dollars in the title. They're both in the neighborhood, but the math just gets you there differently. Now, one thing I wanna flag about that Capital One travel credit, but it's a green flag, not a red one, is their portal has price matching, and it actually works. I've done it a bunch of times. Here's an example. Once I noticed that a hotel's own website was running a fifty percent off promotion to stay a second night So I booked through Capital One's portal to use my credit, and then I called Capital One right away, and they issued me a credit for the entire difference. And here's the part that surprised me, those price match credits don't expire. So don't be afraid to use the portal and then check and see if you can get a better deal within twenty-four hours. Let's talk about sign-up bonuses because a lot of times that's where the huge value is in travel credit cards. Right now, as of May 2026, both cards are offering seventy-five thousand points as a welcome bonus, which is great, but the spending requirements are just a little different. The Sapphire Preferred requires five thousand dollars in purchases within the first three months, while the Venture X only requires four thousand dollars within the same window. Seventy-five thousand Chase Ultimate Rewards points is a great chunk to start you off with. Depending on how you redeem them, that could be a few nights at a really nice Hyatt, or flights for multiple people on a partner airline, or a mix of both. And seventy-five thousand Capital One miles is also strong. Transferring those to the right airline partner can get you some seriously good value. For context on what those bonuses can actually do, we used Capital One points transferred to TAP Air Portugal to book our family's flights to Portugal this spring. TAP is a Capital One transfer partner and no other major US banks transfer there. I combined Ronnie's points with mine over the phone and booked tickets the same day. Each adult ticket was forty thousand points, and my daughter got a twenty-five percent discount because she's under twelve. That's a real-world example of what sign-up bonuses can unlock. Once we were in Lisbon, we used around sixty thousand Chase points transferred to Hyatt to cover our four-night stay. Now, unfortunately, that specific hotel is going way up in price, but the Sapphire Preferred welcome bonus will still get you at least three nights if you're outside of the peak dates. All right, moving on from the sign-up bonus, how much can you earn from these cards on an ongoing basis? This section is where you'll really want to consider how much you're willing to use different cards for different types of purchases and give consideration to that same thing for anyone else in your house that's using credit cards. Chase and Capital One take pretty different approaches here. The Venture X is super simple, which is part of what makes it an awesome beginner card. Two points per dollar on everything other than their travel portal. Every swipe, every category, every day. You just don't have to think about it. For a lot of families, that simplicity is super appealing. Like if you've got to pay your car insurance online, this is the card that you want to reach for. It's great for expenses that don't fall into those typical bonus categories. But I'm still getting two points back on them, which is at a minimum like getting 2% cash back. The Sapphire Preferred is more complicated, but it also gives you more opportunities to be strategic and earn more points. You get three points per dollar on restaurants, streaming services, and online grocery orders, and that includes buying in-store if you pay through the store's app, which is a nice trick, although I can never get Kroger pay to work. So if somebody's got tips, please let me know. You also get two points per dollar on travel, whether that's flights booked directly with an airline or a tour you book on Viator. And everything else, gas, soccer registration, Amazon, that's just one point per dollar. Here's the thing, though. I almost never put spending on our Sapphire Preferred card directly, and that might sound weird, so let me explain. The Sapphire Preferred is the cheapest Chase card that'll let you transfer points to travel partners. However, the no-fee Chase Freedom Unlimited card earns one and a half points on everything, and you can combine those with points from your Sapphire account and then transfer them. So if I put a purchase on my Freedom Unlimited, I earn one and a half points, and those points can be transferred to Hyatt, United, British Airways or lots of other partners. That's 50% more than I'd earn putting the very same purchase on my Sapphire Preferred. The Freedom Unlimited also earns three points per dollar on restaurants and drugstores, so that's the one you'd want to carry and swipe around town if you decide to commit to the Chase ecosystem. Just as a quick aside, in terms of the travel category: because travel blogging is my business, I typically put our travel expenses on business credit cards that are tied to my LLC. The Chase Ink business Preferred earns three points per dollar on travel expenses, so if you also are traveling for work, that's a great one to look at. And it comes with excellent travel protections. Plus, you can still combine those points with points that you might earn on a Sapphire Preferred or a Freedom Unlimited. One thing I want to mention is that both the Sapphire and the Capital One Venture X allow you to combine points with other people in your household. It just takes a quick phone call. So you could each open a Venture X, or one of you can open the Sapphire Preferred, and the other can open the Freedom Unlimited. If you start with that Chase option, instead of making each other authorized users, just add the Freedom Unlimited to everybody's Apple Wallet or Google Pay. That's easy way to minimize annual fees and avoid having too many cards in one person's name while you still maximize the points you earn. Now, if you're totally unwilling to open the no-fee Freedom Unlimited in addition to the Sapphire Preferred, I think it's hard to make the case for the Sapphire Preferred on its own compared with the Venture X. But hopefully by this point in our discussion, I've managed to convince you that it's worth having both cards. For a lot of families, if you sat down and looked at your monthly spending by category, you'd probably earn more points by going all in with the Venture X, maybe even 30% more. But you might still prefer to have fewer Chase points rather than more Venture miles, and here's why. At the most basic level, Capital One makes using your points incredibly simple. For anything that you pay that comes through as a travel expense, you can click a few buttons and wipe away any amount of it with points- 100 points gives you $1 of value, and you can choose to cover only part of the expense works for you. It's amazing for things like Airbnb, cruises, or Disney vacation packages that you can't book directly with points. They used to call it the purchase eraser, and I thought that was such a good name because it was really clear what you were doing. Also, a lot of hotel programs these days offer pretty terrible value when you redeem their points. Generally, Marriott, IHG, and Hilton are all worth less than 1 cent per point, so if you want to book those, it can be better to just book directly with the hotel using your Capital One card and then cover the cost with points. That'll require fewer points than transferring into one of those programs. And in terms of flights, it's so nice to be able to just book the flight you want without worrying about award availability, transfer charts, and which airlines are partners with each other and things like that. You just book the flight, either directly or through Capital One Travel, where you'll earn 10 points per dollar, and then cover the charge. You can book flights and hotels through Chase's travel portal also, and you get decent value doing it, but now it's usually the same as Capital One. Sometimes you'll find what's called a points boost that gives you more value, but it's super random and unpredictable. You can't count on it. However, I find that the prices through Chase Travel can be higher than direct prices, especially for hotels, and they don't offer price matching like Capital One does. So you're spending more, and then you only earn five points per dollar on that transaction instead of the 10 that Capital One gives you. Overall, if you think you're gonna wanna do a lot of portal booking so that you have flexibility, Capital One's the clear winner. But, but, but, but both of these cards earn flexible points that you can transfer to airline and hotel partners when the value is there, and that's where the magic really happens. When you transfer points to the right partner and find good award availability, you can get much more value than a cent per point, sometimes two cents or even more if you're talking about an international business class flight. And juicing your points for that extra value, that's a big piece of the game. So here's where I think Chase pulls ahead. The Ultimate Rewards program has a fantastic lineup of transfer partners: United, Southwest, British Airways, Air France KLM, Hyatt, and more. For families, Hyatt has been the most powerful transfer partner for a long time. We've used Hyatt points for everything from the Andaz Papagayo Resort in Costa Rica to the Thompson Central Park in New York to random nights near Cleveland when we were picking the kids up from camp. Eight thousand points for that last one, by the way. The range is huge. But I gotta be honest, Hyatt's award chart is getting hit hard on May 20th. They're keeping the eight-category structure that they've had for a long time, but they're moving from three price buckets, off-peak, standard, and peak, to five buckets, and most of those new tiers are more expensive than what we're used to. Plus, some really great properties, like that Hyatt Regency in Lisbon, they're moving to higher categories at the same time that the categories are getting more expensive. It's not a reason to abandon Hyatt entirely, and it still might be the best hotel transfer partner out there, but it's worth knowing that the best-case scenarios are gonna get harder to find. Capital One's transfer partners are different, and that's the point. They have a couple of the standard ones like British Airways and Air France KLM, but they also have TAP Air Portugal, like I already mentioned. They have Turkish Airlines, which I used to book a one-way United flight from Ohio to Anchorage for 10,000 points, although now that's 15,000 points. There's Japan Airlines now too. You can use it for Accor hotels, which is helpful in Europe because there are lots of family rooms available, but the value is fixed at one euro cent per point, so you kinda have to pay attention to the exchange rate But there's no Southwest, no United, no Hyatt, which is why Capital One usually works best as a complement to Chase rather than a true replacement. Holding points in two different currencies means you have more options when you're searching for awards. Sometimes Chase partners have great availability and Capital One doesn't. Sometimes it's the reverse, but having both gives you flexibility. I want to point out an important exception here. If your family is focused on ultra-budget travel, let's say road trips where you're good staying in hotels or vacation rentals that are under a hundred, a hundred and fifty dollars a night or flying ultra-low-cost carriers like Frontier and Allegiant when you can get their best deals, then I think the Capital One Venture X is a no-brainer for you. You can avoid all the complications of transfer partners completely. Just book the affordable flights that work for you and then cover them with points. Like if I wanted to fly to the Florida Keys, I'm gonna do it nonstop on Allegiant, and I can cover that one hundred and five dollar round-trip ticket with ten thousand five hundred points if I don't want to eat the out-of-pocket cost. Or you can find a rustic cabin you love on Expedia, which has all of the VRBO listings, and then you can go through a shopping portal to get up to ten percent back, let's say, book it on Expedia, and then cover the whole expense with your Capital One points. If that travel pattern sounds like your family's, just hop down to the show notes and grab the link for the Capital One Venture X and don't worry about any of the other complications. I want to spend a minute also on something I think is really underrated about the Venture X, and that's Capital One offers. Chase and Amex have similar offers when you log into your account. Basically, these are targeted bonuses that pop up for different retailers. So let's say you might have five percent back from Kroger or ten percent back on Rover. The difference is that Capital One's offers are sometimes outrageously good. If you time some of your larger purchases or travel bookings, it can be the equivalent of getting another sign-up bonus. I'll give you a few examples. Earlier this year, I got a ten-thousand-point bonus on a single Expedia booking, so that's a hundred dollars in value on top of the points I was already earning on that purchase. The minimum purchase to earn that bonus was three hundred dollars, so totally reasonable for a hotel or rental car booking. And if I didn't want to pay the full cost of that hotel booking, as soon as that 10,000 point bonus hit my account, I could use it to cover a third of the cost that I had charged to Expedia. We also got a 5,000 point bonus on a StubHub purchase this year. That's $50 back on tickets we were buying anyway. And then there are ones that make you do a complete double take. I didn't take advantage of this one, but an offer I saw around Thanksgiving was spend $1,000 at Undercover Tourist, get 50,000 points back. Now, Undercover Tourist is a major ticket reseller for Disney and other theme parks, but it codes as travel. A lot of families like ours use them already. If you're spending $1,000 on theme park tickets, which is unfortunately really easy to do as a family of four, getting 50,000 points back means you're saving basically half the cost. It's huge. And like I said, once those bonus points hit your account, you could go back and use them to cover a big portion of the expense that you've already paid even before your statement closes. These offers show up all the time. You just have to scroll down in your account when you log in. And clicking through them before you make a purchase takes about five seconds. It's one of the easiest ways to rack up points fast without changing your spending patterns at all. Let's shift gears and talk about the fun benefits that can make your travel better or more relaxing. And remember, when you take the $300 travel credit and anniversary points into account, you're looking at effectively no annual fee on Venture X. It comes with some premium perks that you'd normally expect to get only on a much more expensive card. These aren't going to be meaningful for you if you tend to do road trips using your own car, but if you ever fly or rent a car, then at least one of these is going to be worth looking into. Lounge access is a big one. Your Venture X gets you into Capital One lounges and Priority Pass lounges. Now I'll be upfront about this. The guest access situation changed earlier this year. The personal Venture X no longer includes complimentary guest access at all, and that definitely stings for families like ours. The business version still gets two guests into Priority Pass lounges, which is one reason why that's our household setup. I have the business card, Ronnie has the personal and I've added his card to my Apple Wallet so that I can use it when I'm at the grocery store. If you're frequent flyers and there are Capital One or Priority Pass lounges near you, you might want each adult in the household to get their own Venture X so that they can have lounge access, and then you'll pay a small amount for the kids to come in as well. Even with the guest access limitations though, I wanna be clear, those Capital One lounges are awesome. I've been to a lot of airport lounges, including Amex Centurion lounges, which have a great reputation, and the Capital One lounges are my favorites. There's great food, they're super comfortable, they're really well-designed and modern with lots of charging ports everywhere. Some of them even have showers. Kids can get in for twenty-five dollars, which can be worth it on a long layover. Other than the guest limitations I mentioned, the big downside is that there aren't many Capital One lounges yet, but they're working on it. The Priority Pass network is much larger, but much more, uh, variable. We've been in some great ones, especially outside the US, but we've also been in some awful ones like St. Louis that are standing room only and they basically just put out some chips and cookies from Costco. So your mileage may vary. The Venture X also comes with TSA PreCheck or Global Entry fee reimbursement once every few years. That can be a huge time-saver if you ever go through airports that have long security lines. Another one of my favorite perks of the Venture X is top-tier Hertz President Circle status. You have to enroll, but once you do, you're getting upgrades, you're skipping the counter, and I've even found that stacking my status with the three hundred dollar travel credit on Hertz rentals works really well. I think they have some negotiated rates for the Capital One travel portal. But even if you don't like renting with Hertz or you have negotiated corporate rates like I do with another provider, you can usually have that status matched by other rental car agencies to get their top-tier status. That's how I got my Avis President's Club, which I tend to use a lot because my corporate rates there are better than my Hertz corporate rates. If you wanted any of those benefits on the Chase side, you'd have to step up to the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which has a seven hundred and ninety-five dollar annual fee, and there are tons of credits and complexity to navigate with that card. We're talking hundred-line spreadsheets just to keep track of things and make sure that you're recouping most of that fee. As I mentioned earlier, the biggest perk you're gonna get on the Sapphire Preferred is a DoorDash DashPass, which can save you a little on food delivery fees and Lyft rides. Okay, so I think there are things to value about both of these cards, and a lot of families are going to want to have both of them, but for different reasons. Here's the practical question. When do you open them and in what order? The general advice that you'll hear in the Points and Miles community is work through the whole Chase roster first. And the reason is that 524 rule I mentioned at the top. Chase won't approve you for most of their cards if you've had five or more new personal cards in the last 24 months. Capital One doesn't have that restriction, so in theory, you can open a Venture X later without losing your Chase eligibility. If you open the Venture X first and then try to get a bunch of Chase cards quickly, at some point you might find yourself locked out. So unless you're that ultra-budget traveler I talked about a few minutes ago, the Chase Sapphire Preferred probably comes first. Now, like I talked about earlier, you don't have to get that card for every adult in your household. One of you can get that and the other one cann get the no-fee Chase Freedom Unlimited, which is the actual daily swipe card. Once you've built out your Chase lineup, the Venture X is a great next step for diversification. But let's flip it around for a second. Capital One has its own quirk on approvals, too. They are a little more sensitive about the number of recent inquiries you've had on your credit report. If you've been attempting to open credit cards or taking loans recently and you have a lot of inquiries, Capital One might not approve you. One way to navigate that is to freeze one of your three credit bureau reports before you apply. You can check the number of inquiries through Credit Karma for both Equifax and TransUnion, and then check Experian directly. Whichever bureau shows The highest number of inquiries, freeze that one Before you apply for a Capital One card. It can definitely make a difference. Now I'm going to buck the conventional wisdom for a second here. While I don't think you should go hog wild applying for a ton of cards outside of chase in your first year of building up points, I do think it's okay to deviate a little bit in a household with two adults, as long as you take turns with who opens the cards. That's what we've done. Think about it this way. As a couple, we're able to open ten personal cards every two years and still be eligible for new Chase credit cards. That's a new personal credit card in your house every two and a half months. Is that really a constraint for you, considering that a lot of these require spending a few thousand dollars or more to get the welcome offer? If you're the only adult in your household, you obviously need to pay closer attention to how you use those five spots. Chase does have some really valuable cards outside of the Sapphire Preferred and the Freedom Unlimited, and as you get more into traveling on points, you'll start to get a better handle on which ones might be a good fit for you. But now that I've talked you through the pros and cons of your different options, it's okay to make an informed decision to give up one of those spots for the Venture X. So how does this all shake out? If you're just starting out and you can only have one card right now, I'd probably still start with the Chase Sapphire Preferred because it gets you into the best hotel transfer partner available in Hyatt. Now the value has gone down, but it's still there, especially for low and mid-tier hotels, and it also opens up an incredible lineup of airline partners. It pairs really well with the no-fee Chase Freedom Unlimited to maximize your earning potential. In total, you're still just spending ninety-five dollars a year on annual fees, and there are no complicated credits to work through. Plus, it gives you a solid foundation to start using transfer partners to book awesome trips. Once you've worked through the first few Chase cards you want, add in the Capital One Venture X. It diversifies your points into transfer partners that Chase doesn't have. Plus, it gives you premium perks like lounge access and TSA PreCheck at a price point that actually makes sense. And those Capital One offers can rack up points super fast. Plus, you can really minimize your out-of-pocket expenses by covering things like tours and activities, if that's a priority for you. But if you tell me that you only ever want to get one card and you want the flexibility to book what you want when you want, Capital One might honestly be the better solution. Personally, I think these two cards work better together than either one does alone. I've got links for all the cards I discussed today down in the show notes whenever you're ready to apply. That's a wrap on today's episode. I know I covered a lot of ground, and you can always find more details and resources at thefamilyvoyage.com/freetravel. Thanks so much for listening to Family Travel Unpacked. If you found this episode helpful, drop a comment or leave a five-star review, and be sure to hit follow wherever you're listening so that you don't miss an episode. Until next time, safe travels.