Is the Capital One Venture X Card Worth Its Annual Fee?

Capital One has been gussying up its travel rewards program in recent months, and now it arrives to the premium travel credit card party with a shiny new card on its arm.

The Capital One Venture X is the issuer’s first foray into the premium travel card space. It comes with a $395 annual fee, but also plenty of the bells and whistles you’ve probably come to expect from top-tier travel cards. Think: lounge access, statement credits for travel, and TSA PreCheck or Global Entry reimbursement.

We’ll cover the card’s benefits, and how it stacks up against cards in a similar price range.

New cardholders who sign up now can earn 100,000 bonus miles after spending $10,000 on purchases in the first 6 months.

This isn’t the highest sign-up bonus we’ve ever seen on a travel card, but it’s respectable. The 100,000 miles are worth about $1,000 when redeemed through Capital One Travel. The bonus alone makes the card easy to justify in year one of being a cardholder, but you’ll want to factor in the ongoing benefits as well.

The Capital One Venture X has a similar miles-earning scheme to the other cards in the Venture family. It earns 2 points per $1 spent on every purchase.

If you book travel through Capital One Travel with cash, you could earn even more miles:

10x miles on hotels and rental cars.
5x miles on flights.

Here’s where we start getting into some premium benefits. The Capital One Venture X gives you unlimited access to Capital One lounges and the more than 1,300 lounges in the Priority Pass network.

If the cards that grant AmEx’s Centurion Lounge access are out of your budget, the Capital One lounges should be an exciting alternative if you frequently fly out of the select locations. The first lounge is set to open in the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in early November. Two additional lounges at the Denver and Washington Dulles airports are expected to open in 2022.

From the looks of it, these new lounges are smartly designed to separate and cater to travelers’ varying needs. TheDallas/Fort Worth location has a grab-and-go section for people who are just stopping to get a snack or coffee before their next flight; it has a separate section for people who plan to plug in and spend a few hours there during a layover. Some unique amenities include a cycling and yoga room, complete with Peloton bikes, and two meditation rooms with napping pods.

It’s hard to put a price on the value of an airport lounge visit because Capital One hasn’t announced the day pass rate. Priority Pass charges $32 per visit, in addition to a membership fee, but many credit cards will cover the membership fee for unlimited visits (worth $429). You’ll have to consider how often you’ll use lounge access to assess how much this benefit is worth to you.

Every year you renew the card, you’ll get a bonus of 10,000 miles deposited into your account. This perk might help you justify the annual fee because it effectively wipes out $100 of the $395 each year.

Along with the anniversary bonus, the statement credit for Capital One Travel bookings could offset the rest of the annual fee. Each year, you can get statement credits for up to $300 worth of travel booked with Capital One.

This benefit is on par with the $300 annual travel credit on the Chase Sapphire Reserve®. The only difference is that statement credits on the Capital One Venture X card only apply to bookings made through the Capital One Travel portal, while the Chase Sapphire Reserve®’s credit applies to virtually any travel charged to the card.

For a limited time, the Capital One Venture X card is also offering a statement credit for vacation rental purchases, like Airbnb or VRBO. This perk offers a solution for travelers who prefer the space and amenities of vacation rentals, but find it hard to use travel rewards to offset the cost. However, because this offer won’t be around forever, you might not want to take it into consideration when calculating whether the annual fee will be worth it year after year.

Capital One miles are actually more flexible than you might think. The issuer has recently added transfer partners and improved the transfer ratios, so now there are 15 partners with a 1:1 transfer ratio.

If you transfer your Capital One miles to some of these international airlines to take advantage of sweet spots, you might be able to get more than the 1 cent value per mile that you would get through Capital One Travel.

Let’s say you score a $500 one-way flight to Hawaii with only 10,000 Turkish Airlines miles (one of the best Turkish Miles&Smiles redemptions). That’s a whopping 5-cent-per-mile value, and the value of your award flight is already more than the annual fee you paid that year.

Notably, the Venture X Card has most everything you would expect from a premium travel credit card and the lowest annual fee among the bunch. Most other premium travel cards have annual fees upwards of $450, so $395 is a good value. It also has enough annual benefits ($300 for Capital One Travel bookings and $100 worth of anniversary bonus points) to completely offset the annual fee fairly easily.

The only catch is that you’ll have to do some travel booking through the Capital One Travel portal to maximize the statement credits and number of miles you’ll earn. The portal might limit your choices a bit. The transfer partners are also a good option for redemptions, but the lack of hotel partners and domestic airlines may make this card less appealing to novice and/or domestic travelers.

For people willing to take a chance on a growing travel rewards program, the Capital One Venture X card might be a good way to get into the premium travel credit card space at a lower price point.

You want a travel credit card that prioritizes what’s important to you. Here are our picks for the best travel credit cards of 2021, including those best for: