Frequent Miler on the Air - Are those Sapphire Reserve offers worth pursuing? | Coffee Break Ep60 | 6-24-25

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

Updated new cardmember bonus offers just came out for the newly-refreshed Chase Sapphire Reserve card (consumer version) and the Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. Everyone's talking about it...but are they worth pursuing for everyone?You can read more about these offers here.(00:52) - Chase Sapphire Reserve welcome offer: 100K points + promo credit good for up to $500 towards a single Chase Travel℠ booking after $5K spend in 3 months(02:01) - There are some things to keep in mind about that $500 promo credit(07:20) - Is this worth pursuing for some people?(11:12) - Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business welcome offer: 200K points after $30K spend in first 6 months(18:37) - Do we think this card is worth pursuing (personally)?Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

This is a VoyEscape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less for your money back. On today's Frequent Miler on the air coffee break. Are those Sapphire Reserve offers worth pursuing? The Sapphire Reserve card is now a $795 travel card

that comes with a slew of coupons to help offset the annual fee if you make use of those coupons. And there's also now a business version of the Sapphire Reserve Card. We've gone into great detail on other shows about what both of those cards entail. As we're recording this, both cards are out with new welcome offers, and we're going to talk through those and debate, are they worth pursuing? So first up, the consumer, Sapphire Reserve Card.

We're expecting a huge offer. And since we recently saw a 100,000 point offer on the $95 Sapphire Preferred Card, we figured it's gotta be way bigger than that, right? Right. Here's the offer. You can get 100,000 points. Yep, 100,000 plus $500 promotional credit towards a single chase travel booking after

$5,000 spend in three months. All right, Nick, is this way bigger? Is this big? Is this worth pursuing? Well, you know, it's interesting because, you know, as you mentioned a moment ago, recently there was an offer on the Sapphire Preferred card for 100,000 points and that card, like you said, has a $95 annual fee. Now the newly refreshed Sapphire Reserve has an annual fee that's $700 more than that.

So we figured for sure there'd be a much, much bigger offer. And in fairness, this is bigger-ish. It's got the same 100,000 points, but it adds that $500 coupon. But there's a few things you need to know about the $500 coupon that it adds. And we're not talking about the coupon benefits of the card. Like Greg said, we discussed that at length

on previous Coffee Break and Freakamiller on the air, so you can look back at our various show descriptions to read more about what those all entail. But I mean the welcome offer, the new welcome offer includes this $500 credit for a single Chase Travel booking, but there's a lot of detail you need to know. First of all, that's part of the welcome offer, so you need to first spend the $5,000 in the first three months in order to get that coupon. So don't go straight to Chase Travel and book travel and think you'll get the discount right off the top. You're gonna have to first meet the welcome offer terms by spending the five thousand dollars in the first three months. Then

you'll get this coupon. It's one-time use. It's five hundred dollars off of a single Chase Travel booking and like I said one-time use. So if you use it on a booking that costs less than five hundred dollars, that's it. You forfeit the remaining values. So if you use it on a booking that costs less than $500, that's it. You forfeit the remaining value. So if you use it for a rental car that only costs $350, you don't get that other $150. That's it. It's gone. Done.

You just only got $350 out of it. So that's kind of a bummer that it has to be used in one shot. At the same time, there are probably a lot of people that spend more than $500 at one time on a travel booking. So maybe not the hugest bummer in the world, but of course you also do have to book through Chase Travel, which means if you're booking, for instance, a normal hotel, you probably won't get Elite Night credit, you might not get your hotel Elite benefits, and you won't have access to things like a AAA discount, etc. that you might have elsewhere, so I don't value that at a full $500,

that you might have elsewhere. So I don't value that at a full $500, you know, for that use case, a hotel or a rental car, a similar thing. Oftentimes there are different discounts you might qualify for booking a rental car in other places, whereas you might not get that same discount booking through Chase Travels. So I don't value it at $500, but I do value it. I make enough bookings every year.

I'll find a $500 hotel if I need to. So I'm not too concerned about using it, I find a use for it. And in some cases you may actually be excited about, for instance, the edit from Chase Travel where you can kind of have like an MX Fine Hotels and Resorts style booking. So there are use cases where you'll probably be able to use it, not quite worth $500 to me and I expected more, like 100,000 points. And let's say we value that $500 coupon at even $400. Like, you know, would you pay $400 for that coupon?

I don't know, but if you would, then all right, this is $400 better than the offer we saw on the Sapphire Preferred card. Is that enough to justify another $700 an annual fee? I'm disappointed. I expected more. Yeah, yeah. Let me, before I talk about my impression of it,

I wanna ask you a question. What do you think would happen if you've earned the, you've spent the $5,000, so you've earned the 100,000 points and the $500 travel coupon, but you haven't spent any of your $300, your annual $300 travel credits yet. And you book a $500 trip through Chase Travel

for you get the $500 back from the coupon, but you get $300 back from, like, would you get $300 back from your annual credit and only $200 back from the coupon and so you would have wasted $300 of it. I don't know. Well, I don't know. You're right.

That's a risk. And man, that's an ugly nasty risk, isn't it? But I would think, and we don't know, because this is brand new. It just came out. So nobody's got this yet, to my knowledge, gotten the coupon yet at this point. My assumption, maybe not even a bet, would be that it works like a discount. Like you go to book a $500 flight and it comes out to $0. And so you wouldn't actually be using

your card to pay anything if it was $500 or if it was a $550 flight, you'd only be charging $50 to your card and the other $500 would come off coupon style, I would think. But I don't know that for sure. I'm not, I don't know. I'm not sure. It's a great question because that would be really frustrating. And it wouldn't entirely shock me if they just didn't think about that and didn't code it properly to manage that situation. And I'd be super unhappy if that happens. So I guess moral of the story is make sure you use your $300 annual travel credit while you're working on the welcome bonus spent. That's the moral of the story is make sure you use your $300 annual travel credit while you're working on the welcome bonus spend. That's the moral of the story.

Yeah. Well, if we find out it's a rebate as opposed to a credit, then you do need to worry about that. Otherwise, it wouldn't be an issue at all. I think you're definitely right about that. So what do you think? I mean, are you more positive on this than I am? I mean, obviously I'm disappointed. I think it should have been stronger. What do you think? I mean, is this, are you more positive on this than I am? I mean, obviously I'm disappointed.

I think it should have been stronger. What do you think? Yeah, I'm disappointed too. So I think on our show, I said I was expecting it to be around 150,000. I think I said that. Rumors are that the welcome bonus for the new card is gonna be huge.

Is 150,000 points huge? Well, kind of, but not compared to. It's kind of around 150,000, isn't it? It's a hundred plus five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars credit. If you value the five hundred dollars credit at five thousand, at 50,000 points. Sure. Um, I don't.

So yes, it's disappointing, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth pursuing. So let's ask that question is, if you are eligible for this card, should you pursue it? Because I mean, the Sapphire preferred 100,000 offer was great. We said, go for it. This is a terrific offer. Why not go for it if you're eligible? In this case, you can argue that it's similar

because even though it has that 795 annual fee, the $500 travel discount plus $300 in travel rebates $500 travel discount plus $300 in travel rebates that come automatically more than, you know, a race basically or rebate the 795 annual fee. So you can kind of think of this if you if you book enough travel to use both of those fully you could kind of think this as a free after rebate trial of the Sapphire Reserve card and you get 100,000 points on top of it. Yeah, you know, I think there are people that will take pitchforks to you for trying to suggest that the $500 coupon should be worth anywhere near $500 and kind of mapping out

the $800 annual fee. But I think the bottom line is if you're considering an $800 per year travel credit card, you should probably be someone in the crowd that's spending more than $800 a year on travel. And that's not to say everybody needs to be spending more than $800 a year in travel, but there are plenty of people who are, who are spending $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 a year in travel. And if you're in that crowd where you're already booking tons of travel every year, then you probably can get pretty good value out of that $500 and the $300 that Craig's mentioning. So I think if you're in that crowd, then yeah, the math kind of maths out on this one. And the hundred thousand points are nice. If you're not in that crowd,

if you're like, no, I'm trying to spend as little money on travel as I possibly can, then I have a harder time justifying this. And, you know, I'm conflicted because somebody asked, do I think we'll see a better offer? And I mean, I can't think of a time when Chase has launched a brand new card or like refreshed a card and then like increase the offer later. Usually it's the other way around. You get a great offer to begin with, and then you don't see that again for maybe ever or years or a long time, you know. So I don't have high hopes of it being a better offer. I just wish that it was a better offer. So since I don't think it's likely that they'll launch a better offer, I think if you're interested now is probably the time. I'm probably

going to give this a shot, even though I'm over 524 because oftentimes they'll approve people who are over for the first I don't know however long while they're promoting a brand new offer like this So I might give it a shot because I don't think we'll probably see better and I need a hundred thousand points I could use those points, but I'm disappointed. I should have gone for the Sapphire preferred I feel like after if I knew what this was gonna be I would have applied for the Sapphire. Yeah. Yeah I agree. So so if you applied for Sapphire Preferred 100K and got in on that, that's great. That was the better overall move, I think, for most people. The Sapphire

Reserve, in my opinion, if you're one of those people like Nick said, who is sure you're going to be able to use the $800 combined of travel credits, no problem. And you think you might be able to use all those other types of coupons and credits, then this is, I think, a very good offer to pursue. So it gives you a year to sort of free after rebate, try out this card,

and then you can either downgrade it or cancel it when the next annual fee comes due. So, yeah, I think it's an offer worth pursuing for many people, but that doesn't mean we're excited about it. Yeah, there you go. I think that's a great nutshell description there. So let's talk about the business card.

Business card is out with a much bigger number, so it looks exciting initially, 200,000 points. So double the welcome offer points, 200,000 points after $30,000 in purchases in the first six months. So it requires a lot of spend for most people. I think by most people's opinions, that'd be a lot of spend for most people. By most, I think by most people's opinions, that'd be a lot of spend. Although, most business owners, not necessarily, that's not, you know, over six months,

that's what, $5,000 a month, and I'm sure there are a lot of business owners spending well more than that over the course of six months. So, what do you think about this? 200,000 points, that's the biggest, I think, number of points we've seen, that I can recall, on a Chase card for the welcome offer transferable points at least, right?

Absolutely, for sure. The biggest I can remember is, and it happened a few times, I think 120,000 points for the Inc. Business Preferred card. But keep in mind, that's a $95 annual fee card and only required, if I remember right, I think 8K spend to earn the 120,000 points. So this requires more than twice the spend

to get less than twice the number of bonus points. Yeah, more than three times the spend. Yeah, actually good point to get less than twice. Yeah, so based on that metric, to get less than twice. Right. So it's, yeah. So based on that metric, it's not nearly as good as that old offer. Right, right. But it's 200,000 points,

and based on our reasonable redemption value, one and a half cents per point, that's like $3,000. That's essentially like 10% return on spend. You get $3,000 worth of return on $30,000 spend. So if you'd make use of the coupons and find the coupons to be worth the cost of the annual fee, I mean, getting 10% back everywhere on 30 grand over six months sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yes. I mean, so if you think of, another way to think about the welcome bonuses is like good bonuses are usually, with transferable points usually in the like 10X, 11X range, meaning the amount you spend, you're going to get a bonus that's about 10 times that this isn't that high. This is what, six and change X, I think. X, I think. So, you know, just based on like, you know, pure math reasoning, it's like not that great of an offer. But yeah, it has a big splashy big number attached to it. And if you can

easily spend a lot of money and you're not into serial signing up for cards, then it's an excellent offer from that point of view because if you're going to do $30,000 spend anyway getting a 200,000 point bonus on top of that, great. The Capital One has bonuses that are in a similar range or has often had them in a similar range as well with $30,000 spend and actually a little bit better if you consider also that the capital one cards are in 2x for all spend so you'd be getting you know 60,000 points from $30,000 spend with capital one but only 30,000 points on average I mean if you're spending at 1x on the Sapphire Reserve business card.

Yeah yeah so and I mean I think the other thing you need to consider is if you're open, willing to open just two cards, I mean, forget about the serial opening of cards, there's some people that will be happy to open six cards if they had that that amount of spend. But, you know, that's not everybody. And I recognize that if you are somebody who would consider opening six different cards with five thousand dollars spending requirements, well, then by all means, skip this offer and go open those other six cards because you'll end up with way more

points probably. But forget about that for a second and just consider if you're a business owner and you're willing to open just two cards. The Chase Inc. Business Preferred card at the time that we're recording this has a welcome offer of 90,000 points after 8,000 spend and we've seen it go as high as 120 before in the past. And the Chase Inc. Business Unlimited offers, at the time we're recording this again, 75,000 points after $6,000 spend. And again, that's one we've seen go up

to as high as 90,000, I think. But if you were to do the spending, the minimum spending requirements on just those two cards, that's $14,000 in total purchases and the bonus points you would earn would be at the time of writing or recording this be what 165,000 bonus points plus the points you earn from spend now if you were at you know if you actually went and spent $30,000 at one and a half X on the chase Inc. business unlimited in the end when you do the math,

you'll come out with not quite as many, but almost as many points as you would with the Sapphire Reserve business card with the same amount of spend. And you'd only be paying the $95 annual fee on the Chase Inc. Business Preferred, because there's no annual fee on the Inc. Business Unlimited. So, you know, and that's two cards.

If you do three cards, obviously you can do better yet. So there's, there's a lot of ways to earn 200,000 points on the business side with Chase without spending the $800 annual fee on the Sapphire Reserve business card. So I think, you know, if the Chase Sapphire Reserve for business makes sense because you spend a lot on flights and hotels through either through Chase or, or directly with the airlines and hotels, or you spend a lot on social media advertising another bonus category on the card and you can make good use of the coupons like I mean if that's you then this card might make sense this one's one that I think does not have the same wide appeal that a lot of other cards have though and you look

at a card like the MX business Platinum that sometimes is offered as much as 250,000 points after just $20,000 in spend. I have a hard time justifying this one for a lot of people I think. I'm not too enthused about the business offer. Yeah, I agree. I mean there are people where the business card makes sense. Then there's, and for you, and if you can easily do $30,000 spend, then that's great. I think you have six months to do it. So that's nice that it's not a three month requirement. And in fact, like in my case, when I think about it, I think about, well, I just paid estimated taxes,

but in three months I can do it again. So it would give me that extra time to use my estimated tax payments at 1.85% of a fee. And I could do it that way. But really for me, for a lot of people, I think it would come down to, do you know, are the perks of the card? It's more about, do you want the card?

Right. And then if so, yeah, you might as well get this bonus while it's available. Right. If you, if you don't want the card and you're just looking at it for the bonus, as Nick said, I think you, you should be looking at other cards that have. Bigger bonuses relative to the amount of spend and also relative with the annual fee and get more of those and also relative to the annual fee and get more of those and put your spend towards those.

Agreed, agreed. So again, I think that interestingly, that's what it comes down to with the Sapphire Reserve cards. If you're already interested in the cards, these bonuses are probably as good as we're going to see for quite a while. And if you saw the perks of the cards, you're like, I don't know, there's got to be a really good bonus to tempt me, then these might not be enough to tempt you.

All right, real quick, Nick, is anyone in your household going to apply for the consumer Sapphire Reserve card? I'm probably going to apply for it. I don't know that I'll be able to get it because I'm over 524. But I'm probably going to give it a shot. It hasn't been available yet via referral. That might make a little bit of a difference. If my wife can earn 20 or 30,000 points referring me, then that might push it a little bit further over the edge. So maybe that, not going to go after the business one.

Okay. Yeah. Probably my wife and maybe my son will go after the Sapphire Reserve, see if they can get the consumer version. Maybe, maybe I'll lob in an application for the business card, more because this is our business. So having the card to play with and that big bonus obviously will make up for the cost of paying for a year of the card. So I could definitely see lobbying in the application, especially since I know that I'll have big spend coming up in September that can meet the minimum spend requirement.

Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get on our email list, you wanna go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media and check out our Frequent Mylar on the Air episodes dropping every Friday. I'm Pauline Fromer.

I've spent most of my life writing, talking, and thinking about travel. frequent mile around the air episodes dropping every Friday. about the why as much as the where. I hope you'll join me. You can find new episodes weekly at voyascape.com