Do I Keep the SPG or the C1 Venture?
 

I don't normally pay annual fees. So with a plethora of new cards, I'm wondering what's worth keeping. I know I will keep the new Priority Club Visa, because for $45, I get an annual free night certificate, and that's well worth it.

Is the new Venture card one I should consider as a replacement to the SPG? I will only keep one or the other, since it doesn't make sense to pay annual fees for two primary spend cards, which is what I consider both of these.

Capital One points are worth $0.01 each. You earn two points per dollar spent. The value of Starpoints depends on how you redeem them. If you receive more than $0.02 per Starpoint, keep the SPG card. If you're not sure how to value them, mention how you redeem: transfer to airline miles, for free stays, or Cash & Points stays, etc.

It all depends on how you use the points you earn with SPG.

If you end up using them for domestic coach flights that wouldn't cost more than $500 in money, or for international coach flights that wouldn't cost more than $1000 money, and you use them on airlines where you don't combine them with miles earned any other way, then the Venture card might be competitve.

However, the Venture card (as with all "fake miles" cards) is horrible for getting business (or first) class flights, especially internationally. Those flights only cost 2x the coach miles with "real miles", but since they cost 5x to 10x the "money" that coach does, they require 5x to 10x the "fake miles" that coach does (since "fake miles", including Venture, are always proportional to the money cost).

Furthermore, Venture's "fake miles" stand alone. You cannot earn them any way other than through use of the Venture card. You can't combine them with miles you earn from hotel stays (sometimes way more than 2 miles per dollar spent, though it depends on the hotel family and the length and cost of the stay), car rentals (again, sometimes way more than 2 miles per dollar spent), dining (several airlines have dining programs where you can earn at least 5 miles per dollar spent at certain restaurants), etc. But you can combine miles you transfer from SPG with miles you earned with that airline other ways.

On the other hand, if you do use it mostly for cheap coach flights, then keep in mind that when you use Venture to buy a flight that you pay for with their "fake miles", you still earn "real miles" with the airline that flies the flight. When you book a flight with "real miles", you obviously don't also earn miles (real or fake) on the same flight.

Finally, there is a no-annual-fee version of the Venture card that you could downgrade to (after close to a year; no point in downgrading before your first annual fee is coming up), but it only earns 1.25 "miles" (instead of 2 "miles") per dollar spent. But that's not much better than a straight 1% cashback card (which would allow you to use the cashback to help with purchases you made with the SPG card, while the Venture card's "miles" can only be used on travel purchases that you bought with said Venture card.

IMO, the SPG card is the only <$100 annual fee card that's worth paying an annual fee for. I believe most will agree an average SPG point value is somewhere in the 2.5-3 cents range.

But I find the real value in the SPG card is Amex's Return Protection and Purchase Protection. Return protection is pretty much like having a 90 day buyers remorse period; they'll either take back most items up to $300 OR pay up to $300 in restocking fee.

Well, I disagree slightly, but it's because of a difference between "annual fee" and "net annual fee".

The Chase Priority Club Select card has an annual fee of $49 after the first year, but it's offset by a free hotel night voucher every renewal year, and you'd be hard pressed to find any Priority Club program hotel that's less than $49! So if you need a hotel stay once in a while, it more than pays for the annual fee. Annual fee $49, net annual fee negative.

My Citi AA MC came up on an annual fee, but Citi retention department didn't need much prompting to offer me a statement credit equal to the annual fee if I did something simple like 5 transactions in the next month or two. Annual fee $85, net annual fee $0.

A little more complicated to analyze is Diners Club. First of all, you can't apply for one (for a couple years now), so the only people who could consider whether the annual fee is worth it or not are those who have had it for a while. (It's in a very slow process of being transferred from Citi to Bank of Montreal / Harris Bank.) So far, they also have retention bonuses, and the ones most people choose if offered (10k points) can be worth close to or even more than the annual fee, depending on how you use them. I've used 10k points to turn into more than one night at a hotel which would have cost $149+tax in money. But the annual fee is only $95. So if I get the 10k points and use them "well", the net annual fee can be negative. Even more cmplicated is the revered "always primary" collision coverage built into the card (despite many other card claiming something similar, it's not). Some people, in fact, keep the card year after year, with the annual fee paid each year, despite only using it for rental cars! It depends how much you rent and how much in CDW fees you can thus turn down as to how much this offset the annual fee. (But that analysis is further complicated by whether you'd be covered in at least some of those cases another way, if you weren't using this card.)

And I'm sure these aren't the only cards where some perk (independent of the miles/points you earn) effectively pays for the annual fee.

i agree there are a handful of cards that may be "net 0" annual fee (including the SPG). but are each additional "net 0" or "net negative" annual fee card worth it. unless you are loyal to the brand, i find that it's not really worth it.

like the priority club card you mentioned.. for me, i generally never need just one night nor am i loyal to priority club brand (so i would end up moving hotels after the 1st night). this is probably also the same for airline cards with free bags and they throw in a few club passes.

however, IMHO, i believe any purchases that fall outside of whatever no fee reward card (freedom, discover, etc) are all on the SPG card, your annual net benefit will be greater than spreading them over a few cards.

With any credit card you've had for a year or two you can usually call them and ask them to waive their annual fee. I did it with my AAA Mastercard and my United Visa. Both cards waived my fee

Well, my point is, what works for you doesn't work for everyone.

I don't think SPG annual fee is worth it (for me)! Reason: I have a Diners Club already, and now that it's an MC (for a number of years now), I can use it "everywhere", while there are some signficant places where I can't use Amex, so I'd always have to be looking for something else from SPG.

Furthermore, I want to collect points in a variety of hotel programs, SPG not among them (because I don't do any reimbursed travel, and SPG is typically outside my personal budget). Diners will let me transfer to lots of hotel programs, but SPG being a hotel card obviously won't transfer to any other hotel program.

And some of the airilnes I want to be to transfer to include UA, which SPG supports at a poor transfer rate, so making up for Diners not supporting UA with SPG wouldn't make sense.

So 1:1 from a card I can use to partners that SPG can't is worth more to me than steady 1:1.25. And SPG doesn't solve any additional problems for me that Diners Club doesn't do about as well.

But, of course, for several years now, no one who didn't have a Diners Club (US/Canada) already has been able to apply for one. So it's not an option for anyone looking for a card right this second.

But I do agree with matching the card to your program usage. In my case, I do do mostly 1-night stays (because I'm so used to promos which give me oodles of bonus points or miles per stay, which can only be maxed out by hotel hopping). And I have been active in Priority Club for years.

It depends on how much you spend and how you redeem.
If you only spend 5k/year on plastic (low for FT, but still high for the general public) then the annual fee still doesn't pay for itself relative to C1 if SPG is either 2.5 c/$ or 3.0 c/$.

I have both cards in their first-year-free stage and I am shifting my spend to C1 as the $0.02 is more-or-less immediate (as long as you have travel to credit it against) vs SPG points that have restrictions and I don't have an immediate use for (neither US$ or SPG will be indexed for inflation but you at least have a shot at trying to get a return on your US$).

YMMV, but that's my 2 cents ;-)

I'm not sure, if you only spend $5k/year on a card, that any card with a net annual fee is necessarily going to be worth it.

With C1, you may earn $100 in travel reimbursements, but after you pay for the annual fee, it's net $40ish, which is way worse than, say, the free Priority Club card which costs $49 and gives you a free night voucher each renewal year (and you'd be hard pressed in many areas to find a Priority Club hotel less than $89 all-in for one night). Yes, the C1 does pay for itself technically in that case, but it's might small, especially considering you can't necessarily even redeem the $100 if the only travel you have on the C1 card is hotels at more than $100/stay. (As I understand it, C1 lets you break up an airline purchase into 10 for redemption, but usually not hotels.) If you're spending that little on the card, yet all your travel purchases are non-airlines in bigger chunks (likely if all your hotel stays are multi-night, for example), you may have to collect C1 "miles" for several years at the $5k/year rate before you can actually redeem, but meanwhile you have to keep paying the annual fees.

It also depends whether you also have points-earning no-annual-fee cards (say, from hotels or whatever) that C1 is displacing. Then you have to subtract from the net $40 the value you lost by not using the no-annual-fee cards instead and thus not collecting those points. Which means you're in the end probably even getting substantially less than net $40 from it.

i'm not paying a fee unless i'm putting at least $15k/yr on a card (or there's other benefits like lounge access). also, for rewards calculation in terms of card benefit, you should subtract what the reward would be for a non-fee card (generally 1% for most cards, or 2% with schwab/fia or 5% freedom/discover/etc). so in the case of the C1 at $5k/yr, you actually come out worse than just using a no-fee 1% straight cash back card.

and yes, i agree diner's club is probably better than spg if it was still offered.

If one only spends <5K/yr, one can downgrade to the no annual Venture that earns 1.25 mile/$. 5K/yr = 6250 miles = $62.50 in credit toward travel charges.

But if you can find a pure cashback card with 2% for no annual fee, it's not clear to me why the free C1 would be better, unless you have signfiicant foreign charges and the C1 is the only one without the FOREX fee.

First of all, if the only travel charges you have are for multi-night hotel stays, which you cannot break up, then it could take you years of $62.50 adding up before you'll be able to use that credit (since, except for airline tickets, you have to have enough C1 "miles" to pay for the entire expense as charged to your C1 card) With a cashback card, you don't need to wait until all you have enough cashback to cover all of a particular expense.

Second, you don't have to worry about waiting for a travel expenses specifically. You can apply cashback to anything you want.

And my understading is that there is still at least one 2% cashback card out there.

This is a huge YMMV and comes down to what you value in a card. Since you're playing the mile/point game, then you probably want some sort of award at the end of the day. So, what type of award do you want? If you want free nights at Starwood properties, or the ability to transfer your points into airline programs, then the SPG card is the one for you. If you prefer the flexibility of the Cap One awards, the ability to get 1 cent for each point for travel and many gift cards, and the hotel awards, then the Cap One card is for you.

Many here see value in numerous cards with annual fees, and others only carry cards with no annual fees. I am actually thrilled that I have been introduced to the Cap One program since it has some awesome awards such as the Hyatt/Raffles/Fairmont/Ritz certs that make each point worth much more than a penny. I do not count redeeming Cap One points for a penny as good value when there are other awards offered that are of much higher value to me (and that's the key part and what makes this an individual decision).

I'm not advocating for or against the Cap1 card, but thought I would point out that airline bag fees are also eligible as a travel expense, and can even be split up 10 times just like airfares!