Best Travel Credit Cards of 2024: Top Picks & Rewards

So, what’s the deal with these travel credit cards of November? Well, they’re packed with perks that can save you loads when you’re planning your next getaway. The best travel card will help you get $750 in travel credits every four years, which is pretty sweet! Just make sure to keep an eye on the list of the best options out there. Each card comes with its own flair and benefits, so you’ll want to choose the best travel credit that aligns with your travel habits. Whether it’s travel purchased through Chase travel℠ or simply scoring credits on Chase travel purchases within your account, these cards are designed to help you jet-set without breaking the bank. Ready to take off? Grab that new card in your first few months and watch your travels unfold!

In the past few years, we’ve scored flights and places to stay in the Bahamas, Australia, England, Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Hawaii, Lake Tahoe, and Costa Rica— and we did it all for either nothing or just a tiny bit of the full price.

If you’re new to travel credit cards, here’s the lowdown:

If you’re new to travel credit cards, here’s the lowdown. First off, you gotta know there are so many options out there, but the best travel rewards credit card for you really depends on your travel style. If you’re a frequent flyer, check out the one venture x rewards credit—it’s a premium card that offers killer perks. Plus, it comes with a hefty 300 annual travel credit to help you save on your trips. But maybe you’re more into hotel stays? A hotel credit card could be your jam; these cards often come with sweet deals when you book travel directly through their travel portal.

Now, if you’re thinking of going big, consider a co-branded card that ties into your favorite airline or hotel chain. That way, you can earn points that can be redeemed through chase travel or even used for 750 in travel perks! And don’t forget about dining credits—some cards offer dining credit to make your meals more affordable too. Whether you’re after a cash back card or the best card for travel rewards, just make sure it fits your lifestyle!

When you apply for a new credit card, you can earn a big sign-up bonus by spending a certain amount of money on that card. That large chunk of points you’ve earned can later be redeemed for travel. And once you have the card, every purchase you make with it continues to earn you more points, which you can use for more travel!

You can go down the rabbit hole with this pretty much as far as you want. We started out with just one basic travel credit card, and as we realized how effective using them can be, we’ve continued to get more and more. When I think back to the many years’ worth of purchases I paid for with cash or debit cards, when I could have been earning points towards free travel, it drives me crazy!

That said, this tactic requires some organization and strategy in order to be done well. If you aren’t smart about how you use your travel credit cards, you’ll end up wasting money in the long run.

A few warnings about best credit card for traveling:

• Alright, let’s get straight to it: If you’re someone who never checks their credit score, this isn’t for you. You’ll need solid credit to snag those fancy travel cards, plus you gotta keep tabs on your score going forward. Applying for these cards shouldn’t mess with your credit (we’ll cover that later), but you gotta stay on the ball to make it all work.

We love the Mint app for keeping track of our finances, and it also gives us our credit scores for free. There are plenty of websites, like Credit Karma and Credit Sesame, where you can get your score free of charge as well.

• Pay your card in full every month! If you aren’t able to pay your card off with each billing cycle, paying interest on your balance will negate the points you earned towards travel. We charge literally everything we can to our travel cards, but we keep track of those purchases (again, with Mint) and we ALWAYS make sure we have enough money in the bank to pay our cards off entirely when they come due.
• Hit that minimum spend! Each travel credit card has its own requirement for how much you need to spend to snag that signup bonus. Take the Chase Sapphire Preferred, for example. They’ll give you 50,000 points if you spend $4,000 in the first three months after getting the card. Yeah, that sounds like a chunk of change, but if you use the card for all your regular stuff—like groceries, gas, utilities, and dining out—you’ll probably reach that amount without breaking a sweat. Check out this handy chart that lays out the minimum spend and signup bonuses for some popular travel cards.
• Keep an eye out for fees! The only stuff we don’t hit you with extra charges for are the purchases that come with a credit card fee. Like, we’d totally want to pay our mortgage with our travel credit cards, but the services that let you do that usually have a fee that’s way more than the points you’d score. Sometimes, retailers will also add a credit card fee, so just watch for those alerts when you’re checking out.
• Stay organized. This is simple enough to do with one card, but if you start to play the game with a few simultaneously, things can fall through the cracks! Set a reminder or mark in your calendar when your minimum spend needs to be met and when your payments are due. If you’re not using your card often for some reason, be aware of when your points might expire so you can be sure not to lose them.

Just a quick note about yearly fees for the Credit Cards for Traveling:

Hey there! Just a quick note about those yearly fees of travel credit cards. If you’re on the hunt for the best travel credit card, you might want to keep an eye on the card offers. Some cards like the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card and the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit have awesome perks like statement credits and bonus points after you spend a certain amount in your first few months of card membership. These can really kickstart your travel plans!

Also, make sure to check out the best credit cards of November 2024 if you’re thinking about getting a new card. With the right rewards card, you can earn 5x on travel purchased through Chase or get a credit toward hotel stays. And if you’re looking for something with no hassle, there’s always a card with no annual fee. Just remember, the right travel rewards card can totally change how you experience your trips. So, go ahead and find the best credit card to suit your travel needs!

For a long time, we avoided the fancier travel credit cards with large annual fees. But once we got serious about traveling with cards and sat down to do the math, we realized they can actually be an awesome deal!

The higher-end travel credit cards may not be worth it if you only take one trip a year, but for us they pay themselves off almost immediately. Or, if you know you have a big trip coming up and you want the points and perks just for that, you can always get a card for a year and then cancel it before its annual fee comes due. Just one more reason to stay organized and, as annual fees approach, periodically re-evaluate whether your cards are worth keeping!

Isn’t this gonna hurt your credit score?

Not if you do it right! I am a control freak with our budget and super concerned about my credit – especially when we decided to buy a house a couple of years ago. In fact, worrying about messing up our credit was one of the things that (wrongly) stopped us from getting into travel credit cards earlier.

Today, we have several cards between the two of us and often apply for and cancel cards in order to take advantage of bonuses or avoid annual fees. And I can tell you from personal experience that this has actually IMPROVED both our credit scores. That’s because we finally understood the components that actually make up those scores!

To keep your credit safe right from the start:

>> Maximize the length of your credit history. Never cancel your oldest credit card since the length of your credit history makes a difference to your score that can only be earned with time. If you have an old card with an annual fee that you no longer use, you can always call the bank and ask to downgrade to a no-fee card – that way, you’ll keep your years of credit history without throwing money down the drain.

>> Minimize the number of inquiries to your report. Don’t go applying for 10 new cards in a day. Each time you apply for a card, the company does a hard pull of your credit report. Doing this a lot can cause a small ding in your score, or get you declined by the bank for having a suspicious number of recent inquiries. If you have a compelling reason for going on a credit card bonanza (chasing a bunch of signup bonuses for a specific trip, for example), it may be worth the temporary drop in your score – but that’s advanced credit card gaming, and this is a 101 class!

To improve your credit score with new cards:

Pay your cards off in full, on time, every month! (We’ve covered that, right?) The biggest component of your credit score is your payment history. Paying your fancy new travel card off on time, consistently, will be a bonus to your credit score.

Understand utilization ratios. After payment history, the next most significant component of your credit score is the amount you owe. This is how opening multiple new credit cards over the past couple of years has improved both mine and my husband’s credit. Your utilization ratio is the amount of debt you have compared to your amount of available credit.

When we started out with just one credit card with a $5,000 credit limit and spent $2,500 on it, our utilization ratio was 50%. That’s not great. But as we started applying for more credit cards, the amount of available credit we had increased while our spending stayed the same.

For example, if we then opened the Sapphire Reserve and got an extra $20,000 credit limit, but we were still only charging a total of $2,500 a month on our cards, that would make our new utilization ratio only 10%! As we have continued to apply for new cards and pay our balances in full each month, our credit score has only gone up.

Conventional wisdom says to keep your utilization ratio under 30%, but we aim for less than 10% because I’m a perfectionist. The good news is that as long as you control your spending and forget about those big credit lines you have sitting unused, each card you add only improves your ratio!

Which travel credit cards should you start with? 

There are tons of cards out there offering a wide variety of benefits, and there’s no simple answer to which one is best to start with. It all depends on how YOU travel!

Some cards can only be used to fly with specific airlines (the Alaska Airlines Visa or United Mileage Plus cards, for example). General travel credit cards, however, can be used to redeem points for a much broader category of travel expenses. For example, our very first travel card, Capital One Venture, allowed us to use our points to simply “erase” travel purchases from our statement balance – so the cost of flights with any airline or nights at any hotel would disappear once we had the points to cover them.

Unless you are loyal to just one airline, I think a general card gets you the most bang for your buck. This became abundantly clear to me when I tried to fly to Hawaii a few years ago with my Alaska Airlines credit card.

Alaska loves to advertise their Companion Fare that comes along with owning this card – a $99 ticket once a year for you to bring a friend along with you, anywhere Alaska flies. Unfortunately, when put into practice, this perk often isn’t as great as it sounds. Once I had chosen my flights and was ready to book my Companion Fare to Honolulu, the total price didn’t seem like a discount to me. Just to be sure, I plugged my same dates into Hawaiian Airlines’ website and found that it was cheaper to just purchase regular tickets with them. Thanks to all the taxes and fees Alaska had tacked on to their Companion Fare, it never ended up being worth it for me to use it at all!

Once we learned that lesson, we switched mostly to general travel cards and never looked back. For absolute ease of use for those nervous about getting started, I’d recommend the Capital One Venture card – it doesn’t give you the highest value for points, but it’s got a low annual fee and the points are super easy to redeem for literally any travel purchases.

Another excellent card to start with is the Chase Sapphire Preferred. You’ll earn 50,000 bonus points after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months, 2 points per dollar spent on travel and restaurants, and 1 point per dollar for all other purchases. The $95 annual fee is waived for the first year and it’s absolutely worth it if you use this card often. It also comes with a host of other perks, like no foreign transaction fees, a $100 airline fee credit (for expenses like checking your bags), car rental coverage, and trip insurance. We’d still have this one if we hadn’t upgraded to the Reserve!

I’ve only just scratched the surface of how to maximize your travel with credit cards! Now that we’ve gotten the hang of it, we apply for and cancel cards frequently.

You don’t have to play the game that much! Starting with just one travel card that you plan to hold on to for the long term will still earn you benefits that will get you traveling for free.

For more specifics on how we do this, check out which travel credit cards are in our wallet right now. If you have questions about how to make this work for you, leave us a comment – we’re always happy to help out our fellow travelers!