Travel Cards

Travel credit cards are a must! With them, you can earn points on purchases, which are redeemable for great rewards and discounts – especially when used towards travel! Many also include access to airport lounges, travel related insurance coverage, and more! We avoid using too many cards and complex card “churning”. Instead, we rely on just a couple of cards. These are widely recognized as some of the best available! More on what we use below! 🙂

Chase Sapphire Reserve

Best overall travel credit card

Widely regarded as one of the best travel credit cards available! It offers great rewards, airport lounge access, and tons of other travel-related perks. 

*If you apply using our referral link we may receive a bonus - at no extra cost to you! 🙂

As full-time travelers, the Chase Sapphire Reserve was the best option for us! While its $550 annual fee may seem high, the annual $300 travel credit immediately offsets that cost. If you’re a frequent traveler, you will definitely come out ahead between the travel credit, faster points earnings rate, increased point redemption value, and better perks!

With this card, you get a higher point earnings for travel-related purchases, including 10x points on hotels and car rentals as well as 5x points on flights (when purchased through their travel portal). That’s in addition to 3x points on all other travel purchases and 1x on everything else! You also get a higher redemption value for these points compared with many other cards, especially when used towards travel.

Another big perk: airport lounge access! With this card, you get a Priority Pass Select membership – giving you (and up to two guests per person on your account!) access to over 1,000 airport lounges around the world. This is a nice touch when you’re stuck at the airport or during long layovers. As an added bonus, they offer food, and if you’re into it, usually booze! 😀 This card really pays for itself! hahaha.

One of our favorite perks that comes with the CSR is that it offers great travel and even emergency health insurance benefits when you use it to pay for your trips. It includes primary car rental insurance, trip delay and cancellation insurance, luggage insurance, travel accident insurance, and even some emergency medical insurance – which is a rarity among travel cards! Travel is already pretty stressful, so it really puts your mind at ease knowing you’re covered.

We also greatly appreciate the service that we have received from Chase. They have helped us in a couple of less-than-ideal situations; they’ve been able to send us new cards abroad when ours were stolen, they have helped us reimburse fraudulent charges without any pushback, and we love how easy it is to control the card through their app. (Seriously, when you’re visiting somewhere sketchy, the ease of turning your card on and off with the flip of a switch is amazing!)

There are so many more benefits the card offers that you can read about. Just click the “Read More & Apply” button below! (You don’t have to apply or put in any information to be able to read more about it!) 

 

 

Overall, we have been extremely pleased with this card and happily recommend it to anyone who travels frequently! Also, keep in mind it’s only $155 more than the Chase Sapphire Preferred after your travel credit is applied and comes with way more benefits! 

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Chase Sapphire Preferred

Similar benefits, lower annual fee, and easier to get approved

A more budget-friendly option with a lower annual fee. Perfect for casual travelers looking for rewards and benefits without the higher annual fee.

*We do not get a bonus for referring this card, just thought it would be helpful! 🙂

This card is also a great choice for travelers, especially if you take trips more infrequently! It is supposed to be a bit easier to get approved for and offers a lower annual fee of $95, but also still provides great benefits like 5x points on hotels and car rentals, as well as 2x points on all other travel purchases and 1x on everything else. Plus, this card also offers an annual point bonus – which is awesome!

Although this card has a lower redemption value for travel and does not offer airport lounge access or some of the other perks of the CSR, it still has some great travel protection benefits/insurance and doesn’t cost any extra to add additional users!

We definitely recommend this card to those who still want great benefits and the same ease of use, but are less frequent travelers, don’t need extra travel insurance, don’t plan on using airport lounges, or are still building their credit!

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Charles Schwab

A debit card without foreign fees

Popular with travelers as a debit card because it offers reimbursements on ATM fees worldwide and has no foreign transaction fees.

*We do not get a bonus for referring this card, just thought it would be helpful! 🙂

As a traveler, you should definitely keep a debit card on hand to be able to pull out cash from ATMs in the local currency. It is so much easier than carrying around large amounts of cash or trying to deal with currency exchanges!

We use this debit card because it offers unlimited worldwide ATM fee reimbursements, no foreign transaction fees, a 0.45% APY on your balance (that’s interest paid to you!), and no minimum account balances or annual fees! 

There is no approval process or anything, you just need to sign up with a Schwab Bank Investor Checking account, which will also automatically open up a brokerage account with them. You can either ignore the account or use it as a convenient way to transfer funds! (More on that below!)

*Tip: It is generally better to use credit cards while traveling as they tend to be more secure, have higher limits, better benefits, and can earn you points/rewards. However, we always travel with a debit card to be able to easily pull cash, something that credit cards and currency exchanges typically charge a LOT for. To keep yourself safe, we recommend using this card and not carrying a large balance in your checking account—just fund it as necessary, which you can very conveniently do with that brokerage account they opened for you! 🙂

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