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All the useful airline partners for Capital One are already partners of the Amex Membership Rewards program (and often the Ultimate Rewards and ThankYou Rewards programs as well). Air Canada's Aeroplan is good option for Star Alliance flights, with reasonable award prices and waived fuel surcharges. Air France / KLM's Flying Blue program is a decent option for SkyTeam. Avianca never passes through fuel surcharges and is often a well priced option for Star Alliance flights, although it can be difficult to deal with. Cathay Pacific is reasonable option for Oneworld. And Etihad can be an attractive option for many of its partners, including American Airlines. | All the useful airline partners for Capital One are already partners of the Amex Membership Rewards program (and often the Ultimate Rewards and ThankYou Rewards programs as well). Air Canada's Aeroplan is good option for Star Alliance flights, with reasonable award prices and waived fuel surcharges. Air France / KLM's Flying Blue program is a decent option for SkyTeam. Avianca never passes through fuel surcharges and is often a well priced option for Star Alliance flights, although it can be difficult to deal with. Cathay Pacific is reasonable option for Oneworld. And Etihad can be an attractive option for many of its partners, including American Airlines. | ||
Revision as of 23:50, 27 April 2021
Easily Earn Points for Free Travel, Introduction to 'Transferable' Reward Points
For years, the Capital One Venture program has been the most famous of the "fixed value" reward programs. You earned 2 "miles" with every purchase and each mile had a fixed value of 1 cent per point. Essentially the card worked the same as a 2% cashback card, just one in which your points could only reasonably be used to refund travel purchases.
In late 2018, Capital One turned Venture points into a true transferable reward program. You can still use Venture "miles" to offset any travel purchase at 1 cent each, but you can also transfer them to over a dozen different frequent flyer programs in order to redeem them for frequent flyer tickets.
Venture Rewards is a valuable credit card program, but generally not as valuable as the Chase Ultimate Rewards and Amex Membership Rewards program.
Venture points, like Ultimate Rewards points, provide the best of both worlds. If necessary, it is easy to simply cash out and get solid value from your points, but you retain the opportunity to receive outsized value from particularly good frequent flyer ticket award redemptions.
Unfortunately, the Venture program is just not as good as the Ultimate Rewards program. When used for frequent flyer tickets, you'll earn the same 1.5 miles per dollar spent, but Venture's airline partners aren't quite as good as Chase's. And when used for easier redemption options, you only get the equivalent of 2% back, rather than the 2.25% to 3% you can get through Ultimate Rewards. Furthermore, there are no opportunities to earn higher bonus category reward rates, collect multiple signup bonuses, or get great value through one of the major hotel programs (such as Hyatt).
If you are willing to focus primarily on using your points for frequent flyer tickets, Membership Rewards winds up being a much better overall program and even ThankYou rewards is probably more useful.
Nevertheless, if you can get approved for the Venture or Spark cards, they are still well worth getting and you'll get good value from the points you earn.
Jump to
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Airline transfer partners
Points transfers are either instantaneous or take a day or two. The main exception is Cathay Pacific, where transfers can take up to a week. You can transfer points in 100 point increments, as long as you transfer a minimum of a 1,000 points at a time. Points Transfer Times.
Like the Membership and ThankYou Rewards programs, Capital One occasionally offers transfer bonuses (where you get bonus miles when you transfer your points to a specific airline partner). See Take Advantage of Transfer Bonuses to Get More Value from Your Reward Points for more information or Frequent Miler’s Current Transfer Bonuses page. for a list of current bonuses.
The number of miles you get for each point depends on the airline. With some airlines, you get as much as a full mile per point (or 2 miles for every dollar spent with your card). In the worst cases, you only get ½ mile per point (or 1 mile per dollar). And with many of their better airline partners, you get $frac34 miles per point (or 1.5 mile pr dollar).
| Star Alliance (United) |
SkyTeam (Delta) |
Oneworld (American) |
Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air Canada (1:¾) (Aeroplan) |
Air France / KLM (1:¾) (Flying Blue) | Cathay Pacific (1:1) (Asia Miles) |
JetBlue (1:¾) |
| Turkish Airlines (1:¾) | Alitalia (1:¾) | British Airways (1:¾) | Etihad (1:1) |
| Avianca (1:1) | Aeromexico (1:1) | Qantas (1:1) | Emirates (1:½) |
| EVA Air (1:¾) | Finnair (1:1) | ||
| Singapore (1:½) | |||
| TAP Portugal (1:1) |
All the useful airline partners for Capital One are already partners of the Amex Membership Rewards program (and often the Ultimate Rewards and ThankYou Rewards programs as well). Air Canada's Aeroplan is good option for Star Alliance flights, with reasonable award prices and waived fuel surcharges. Air France / KLM's Flying Blue program is a decent option for SkyTeam. Avianca never passes through fuel surcharges and is often a well priced option for Star Alliance flights, although it can be difficult to deal with. Cathay Pacific is reasonable option for Oneworld. And Etihad can be an attractive option for many of its partners, including American Airlines.
Singapore is a solid program, but the weaker exchange rate makes it a less attractive partner.
Finnair, Capital One's truly unique partner, isn't particularly useful. Neither are Qantas and EVA, which are also part of the Citibank ThankYou points program, but not part of the generally more useful Membership or Ultimate Rewards programs. The possible exception are good rates for flights on El Al with the Qantas program.
Remember that you can use miles from any of these programs to book awards with any of that program’s partner airlines. So, you can transfer your Venture points to Air Canada and then use the Air Canada miles to fly United, any of the two dozen or so other airlines that are part of the Star Alliance, or any other of Air Canada's other airline partners. With all the various partnerships, you can redeem your Venture points for flights on almost 100 airlines.
Hotel transfer partners
You can transfer your Venture points to two hotel partners.
- Accor Live Limitless (ALL). Accor is the loyalty program for a very large number of primarily European and Luxury brands, including Novotel, Sofitel, and Fairmont. They offer a fixed-value reward program, where each point is worth exactly .02 Euros (around 2.2 cents). Venture points transfer at a 2:1 ratio, so you are getting around 1.1 cents per Venture point. This is slightly more than you would get by using your Venture points for regular travel purchases. Guide to Accor Live Limitless.
- Wyndham Rewards. Venture points transfer at a 4:3 ratio. Since we value Wyndham points at 0.8 cents each, this is typically a poor-value redemption. However, if you have the opportunity to use 3,000 Wyndham points (4,000 Venture points) to take advantage of Wyndham's GoFast 35% room discount, and you don't already have a stash of Wyndham points, a transfer can be worthwhile. Guide to Wyndham Rewards.
Neither of these hotel programs participate with the other transferable credit card reward programs.
Cashing out your points
If you don’t want to mess around with frequent flyer tickets, your can always use your Venture points to pay for most other travel purchases.
Unlike programs like Ultimate Rewards, you don't need to make your purchase through a travel portal that is run by the credit card company. You can just use your Capital One Card to make almost any travel purchase and then use your points to "erase" the charges on your statement. For example, you can make a direct purchase at Hilton, a secret hotel purchase on Hotwire, or a payment directly to a taxi cab driver, and then use your points to offset the charge on your statement.
You have up to 90 days to make a redemption, so you can eventually use points you haven't earned yet to offset purchases you make with your card.
Unlike many other fixed-value points, there is no minimum redemption. If you have a $2 train ticket, you can use 200 points to "erase" it. However, if you only want to use points for part of the charged amount, you'll need to use at least 2,500 points.
You also have the option of making a point-based purchase directly through Capital One's travel portal. But you'll probably receive better pricing, and often receive additional benefits and reward points, by booking elsewhere and then using your Capital One points to offset the credit card charge.
Capital One "transferable points" credit cards
Only some of Capital One's credit cards earn points that can be transferred to airline partners. For example, points earned from the Savor card are not transferable. Promotional signup offers are sometimes available that are higher than the typical signup bonuses shown below.
| Card | Typical Signup Bonus | Bonus Categories | Effective Annual Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capital One Venture | 50,000 | 2x all purchases | $95 |
| Capital One VentureOne | 20,000 | 1.25x all purchases | $0 |
| Spark Miles (Business) | 50,000 | 2x all purchases | $95, waived first year |
| Spark Miles Select (business) | 20,000 | 1.5x all purchases | $0 |
Only the Venture and Spark cards are reasonable options for ongoing spend, but the other cards' signup bonuses can help build up your point balance.
Collecting multiple signup bonuses
- In general, you are better off spending on other cards. We'd rather earn 1.5x Ultimate Rewards points with the Freedom Unlimited card than 2x Venture points—both transfer to 1.5x Airline miles, but Ultimate Rewards has better partners. Even if you are just cashing out your points, you'll get at least 2.25 cents per dollar from the Chase Unlimited cards versus 2 cents per dollar from Capital One.
- However, it is worthwhile to collect miles from the Venture and/or Spark signup bonuses. A typical signup bonus of 50,000 points can still be redeemed for $500 in travel purchases and can be worth considerably more when transferred to frequent flyer programs.
- You can only receive a new Capital One personal credit card every six months. And you can only have a total of two cards at one time.
- It can be hard to be approved for Capital One cards. They seem to prefer people who don't pay off your balance every month. If you fall into this category, you should focus on reducing your interest rates (and paying off your debt), not on collecting signup bonuses.
Some people can get even more value from other cards, such as earning 2x Membership Rewards points per dollar with the the Amex Blue for Business cards.
Point transfers and expiration
- You can transfer points to any other Capital One cardholder, not just a spouse or family member. You'll need to call in, as there is no way to do this online.
- Each Capital One credit card accrues miles into a separate account, but you can freely move miles between cards. When it is time to transfer miles to a partner, offset travel purchases, or cancel a card, you can easily combine the miles into the account associated with any one of your cards.
- You'll need to keep one of these cards open if you want to maintain your points balance. However, you should be able to downgrade your card into a one of the options that doesn't charge an annual fee. Other options are to use your points for a travel purchase or transfer them to the partner you are mostly likely to want to leverage in the future.
