Capital One Venture Rewards

Jul 30, 2020

Overview

For a relatively low $95 annual fee, this card unlocks transfer partners while earning 2x everywhere. This makes it a viable option for people that only want one credit card. Capital One also tends to cater toward simplicity.

Alternatives

That said, most beginners will be much better off starting with the identically priced Chase Sapphire Preferred which has:

better benefits,
better transfer partners,
credits which help offset the annual fee
and clearer terms.

True, this won’t give you a 2x everywhere card, but you can likely achieve a similar earn rate between a Sapphire Preferred (some 3x categories) and a free Freedom Unlimited (1.5x everywhere).

Alternatively, you could skip this $95 Venture card and go straight to the $395 Venture X which comes with approximately $400 in easily usable credits every year.

$300 discount on travel through the Capital One Travel portal.
10,000 points after renewal.

While these credits don’t offset the annual fee, the card has much better benefits than the Venture, and the effective annual fee after accounting for the credits is likely to be lower in the long run.

Basic Information

Cardholder Type: Personal
Network / Type: Mastercard
Earns: Capital One Rewards

Annual Fee: $95
Card Type: Credit
Foreign Transaction Fees: No

Earnings

5x Portal Rental Cars

5x Portal Hotels

2x Everywhere Else

Status

Hertz Five Star

Memberships

Global Entry: Implemented as a statement credit. You can only get one of Global Entry or TSA Pre-check and Global Entry effectively includes TSA Precheck.
Tsa Precheck: Implemented as a statement credit.

Travel and Purchase Protections

We stopped listing protections for Capital One cards. Recently, they changed some cards from Visa to Mastercard while others changed from Mastercard to Visa. Product pages often make it unclear which type of card you will receive and tend to under-advertise the features in the underlying card. To us, this implies benefits could change.

Further muddying things, Capital One is in the process of acquiring Discover, which performs a similar function to Mastercard and Visa. Since many protections stem from the card type (ie. Visa Signature/Infinite vs World Elite Mastercard), it’s hard to know what the actual benefits are and how long they might last for any given card.

Capital One maintains guides for all benefits by underlying card type, but this only helps if you are reasonably certain of the card type.