That’s an interesting option, that I had not heard of.
We may be looking at getting such a card in a bit, so I’m actually reading this thread with great interest.
So, I went ahead with the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, and just booked my first trip through their travel portal. It was the same price as if I bought from the airline website, but buying through the portal gives you a bigger points multiplier.
One interesting thing is that buying through the Chase portal doesn’t guarantee reserved seats - after the confirmation came through I logged into the airline website and picked my seats, no problems, but just a little odd.
In anticipation of my planned trip to Iceland/Glasgow in August it occurred to me that I wanted to avoid foreign transaction fees, so I did some research and also settled on the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. I applied online yesterday, and as soon as I get the card I’m going to buy my plane tickets on Iceland Air. Since that’s going to cost about $3500.00, I’m not going to have any problems meeting the “charge $4000 within the first for four months and get 60,000 points” offer.
Interestingly, I was told that my credit limit for the card is only $5000.00. This shouldn’t be much of an issue, since I always pay off my credit cards in full every month.
Our credit limit is over $20K, but we might be in a different financial situation. You can certainly ask them to raise your limit.
I may ask for a credit limit raise after I have the card for a few months (and have paid off the cost of the plane tickets). Since my main purpose for getting the card is to avoid having to pay foreign transaction fees while I’m travelling and I don’t expect to spend $5000 during the trip, I’m not that concerned about it.
Googling, that credit card has an annual fee of $95 but there are no-fee cards with no foreign transaction fees.
The 60,000 point startup bonus is worth roughly $750 in flights, so it pays for 8 years of the card.
As Telemark pointed out, the startup bonus offsets the annual fee. I used a similar logic when I signed up for a Citibank American Airlines card a number of years ago; it also has a $95.00 annual fee, but one of the perks is a free baggage charge for flights. At $25.00 a flight, I make up the annual fee with only two round-trip flights. Since I fly to Chicago at least three times a year, I’m ahead of the game. And that doesn’t count the mileage I get for each flight, which I’ve used to get several free flights and upgrades.
Don’t be surprised if they bump that up after a few months. I think every card I’ve ever owned has done that out of the blue.
I’ll be watching here to see if people continue to be pleased with the benefits.
Does it work with the pin-and-chip systems in Europe?
It also may help that I just cancelled a card that I never use. It was opened to pay for a sofa I’d purchased under a “no interest if paid off in X months” plan; Of course, I’d paid it off before the interest kicked in, and almost completely forgot about it afterwards.
Could be. Closing a credit card account essentially raises your utilization percentage - e.g. if you have 3 cards with a limit of 10K each, and you have a balance of 5K, that’s 5000 / 30000, or 16% utilization. Closing one card brings it to 5000 / 20,000, or 25% utilization. That can impact your score.
I use Credit Karma to keep an eye on my scores. We have higher balances than I like on a couple cards (left over from tight cash flow while supporting the parents) and while we’re making significant dents in them, we’re still not down to an ideal utilization. CK keeps sending me emails saying YOU SHOULD OPEN UP ANOTHER ACCOUNT cuz THAT’ll HELP YOUR UTILIZATION RATIO!!!
Egad. What horrible advice. Someone who in theory is in credit trouble (we are not), opening another account, is NOT gonna benefit in the long term. I think I’ll stick with the plan of paying down balances and fixing utilization percentage the old fashioned way.
Anyway - that’s mostly off-topic rambling, but is a factor in why I haven’t gone for a travel credit card yet, but am watching here so that when we do get stuff paid down, we make the right choice. The Amtrak card did really pay off, since we got it for a specific reason, but I’ll want something broader in the future.
I pay off all my credit cards in full every month and I own my house free and clear. The last time I checked my credit score it was over 800, so I’m not worried about my chances of getting my credit limit increased, unless the combined credit limits on all my credit cards is a factor.
Well, that’s the problem right there, you deadbeat!! 
wait to see if Cap1/Discover merger goes through