Frequent Miler on the Air - Wells Fargo's Premier version of the Autograph Journey | Coffee Break Ep109 | 6-9-26

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

In this episode, we'll discuss Wells Fargo's Premier version of the Autograph Journey card, only available to Wells Fargo Premier clients.(01:04) - Almost identical to Autograph Journey, but this one is targeted to WF Premier customersLearn more about the Wells Fargo Premier Autograph Visa Infinite card here(02:09) - Advantages over the Autograph Journey(05:52) - Only available to Wells Fargo Premier clients(07:00) - Greg's experience(09:33) - First impressionsSubscribe and FollowVisit 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 – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkVisit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's coffee break, Wells Fargo's premier version of the autographed journey card. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. Wells Fargo has a really good travel card called the Autograph Journey. It's a 95-5. travel card that has some nice bonus categories and transferable points. But there's a version of that card that's even better that you may not know about. And it's not actually even that easy to find out about.

So we're going to tell you all about it today. Yeah. So remember, if you want to jump ahead to something, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a like or a thumbs up and leave us a review. So the Wells Fargo Premier Autograph Visa Infinite card is what we're going to be talking about today. the premier version of the autograph card. There's actually an autograph card and autograph journey card,

and now this autograph premiere card, and the premier card is the one that most people don't know as much about, but basically in many ways, it's identical to the autograph journey, but it's targeted, of course, to Wells Fargo Premier customers, and we'll talk about what that means and how you can become one later, but let's first identify what's the same,

and then you can tell me what's different. So what's the same on the premier version of the card is it still has a $95 annual fee. It still has the great earning structure of the autographed journey, 5x hotels, 4x airlines, 3x restaurants, and other travel, and then 1x everywhere else. So it's a nice earning structure. Again, remember, these are transferable points, and while Wells Fargo doesn't at this point have an amazing stable transfer partners, they have some very good transfer partners,

and, of course, the 1 to 2 ratio to choice, et cetera, and Windham for that matter. $50 annual statement credit with $50 in airline purchases each year, cell phone protection, with only a $25 deductible and $1,000 worth of coverage per claim, trip cancellation, interruption, lost luggage, stuff like that, the type of travel protections you would expect on a $95 travel card. But that's not all, right? So what are the advantages of the Premier card? Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, what you just listed so far is really excellent. I mean, that's a solid set of benefits and earning structure for a $95 card. But this premier version of the card does have some advantages. And so first up, as we're recording this, it has a significantly better welcome bonus. So it's offering 100,000 points after $4,000 spend instead of 60,000 points with the public offer for the autographed journey. So that's obviously better right off the bat. But as far as ongoing perks, the Premier Card offers $120 towards global entry credit. So if you're going to apply for a global entry, you can get that rebated. And it has better purchase protection. So for example, it includes 12-month extended warranty and purchase security against theft or damage in the first 90 days. So if something happens to, you know, that new. phone or new whatever that you bought in the first 90 days, you can get that refunded up to $10,000 per

item. So that's pretty cool. That's a nice amount of coverage. Yeah, I, one time I, that made a difference for me. I was planning to go to Africa and go to Kruger National Park and I wanted a really nice lens for my camera. But I was concerned that, you know, maybe I would drop it somewhere, you know, maybe an animal would, you know, like come jumping at me or whatever and the thing gets broken or it gets stolen out of my luggage or something somewhere I left it. And so I just wanted, because it was an expensive purchase, a little bit of additional security. And so having that up to $10,000 per item is, I think that's really useful for people who travel a lot because, you know, as you're moving place to place, it's easy to, A, lose track of something, B, to have something get

taken when you aren't paying attention and you're in an unfamiliar place. Did an elephant steal your lens? Or were you? No, but it did come walking directly at our car. And so there was a moment where I was nervous, not so much for the lens, but it worked out okay. They are very big. But that's not all. This card also has better travel protections. It includes primary auto rental coverage, primary CDW, unlike the regular card, which has secondary in the U.S.

Now, both of them offer primary outside the U.S. as do all cards that offer that protection as far as I know. There is an exception in New York, and that seems to be something that we're seeing. on most, if not all, cards these days that have primary, that offer primary coverage, for some reason they have an exception for New York residents. So you're out of luck, Nick. And it also has six-hour trip delay coverage. So you get, you know, things paid for if your trip is delayed by six hours or more

that the regular card doesn't have. So that puts it right up there. That six-hour trip delay is kind of the base amount that the kind of high-end travel cards need to provide in order to be competitive. And so it's kind of surprising and good to see this on a $95 card. It sure is. And we'll be back after this with more details on how you can get the Wells Fargo Premier Autograph Visa Infinite Card. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website?

At Frequentmiler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to Frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back. Okay, as promised, we're going to talk about how you could get. this card because you're not going to find an offer for it online. You're not going to find a link to apply online. You're probably not going to get a letter in the mail telling you how to apply. When we first learned about the card, it was described as a card that was targeted to Wells Fargo's

premier clients. And when you read blog posts from a few months ago about that, they all say, well, to be a premier client, you need $250,000 in qualifying balances with Wells Fargo. And it turns out that that is not true, or is that, that's not the only way anyway. So in early May, I was curious, you know, is there a way I could get this card short of putting $250,000 into Wells Fargo? And it turned out it was there was a pretty easy way, which is they have a version of their checking account called Premier checking. And if you sign up for it, you have Premier status. Like, right, that's it. That's all you need.

Now, it does have a $35 monthly fee, which is waived if you have $250,000 or more imbalances. But I signed up in kind of. mid-May and haven't been charged that $35 fee yet, a reader wrote in with the same solution after I'd already signed up, but who said that in Branch, he was told that that fee is waived for six months. So I'm hoping that's going to be true for me. Otherwise, I'm going to be looking at, you know, what will happen to my Premier card if I try to downgrade, for example, my my premier checking account because I doubt they would take away my new credit card, but I don't know. Anyway, that's where things stand. So that's an easy way to get it. If you are somewhere where you

could go in branch, look for an offer to get like a deposit bonus for setting up a new premier checking account. I had found one, but I did not find any way to apply online with that offer. And I don't have any Wells Fargo branches anywhere near me in Michigan. So I just applied online without any kind of bonus. I deposited just $500 just to put some money in there. And then I waited and watched for this special card offer, the 100,000 point premier autograph visa infinite card offer. And you know, I kind of hoped it would show up right away when I applied, but it didn't. And I kept logging in on desktop and the Wells Fargo app to see if it was there. Finally, I was traveling. I was in Ireland, and it was almost exactly two weeks after I set up my checking count. Might have been

exactly, I don't know, when finally the offer for the 100,000 point thing showed up, and I applied through the, on my phone and was approved. And yeah, so I have the card and so far so good. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. That's a great tip. That's interesting that you can get it without having deposited the $250,000. I thought that was surprising, but also it makes some sense. And obviously they want to be able to get people into this, into their ecosystem.

So I'm kind of interested before we even talk about your first impressions of the card. Well, no, you know what? Let's talk about your first impression for you. But let's talk about your first impressions first. So what do you think of it? So I mean, you had it presumably for a little while now. Have you used it at all? What do you think about it?

Yeah, yeah. I've only had it for about a week now. And so I haven't used it a lot. But it, first of all, it's an attractive card. If you care about that, it's an elegant. looking card with a nice design. One thing I've noticed from this card, and also I have the regular autograph card that has no annual fee, is that points don't get awarded until your statement closes, much like how Chase does

it. But unlike, I think, Capital One and Bill, for example, both give you points pretty much right away. So that's, you know, that's too bad, but it's not unusual. I have a question. So looking over the details of this card, like, it's quite good, you know, for a premium sort of a product, right? I mean, it earns great bonus categories, 5x hotels, 4x airlines, 3x restaurants. And, you know, it's got the stuff you would expect, the good travel protections that you'd expect on a more premium card.

Is it worth more than $95 a year? Like, if Wells Fargo were charging $500 a year for this card, would that be reasonable or would you feel like they'd need to add more to get that much for it. I think they would have to add a lot more. Most, you know, most $500 cards offer, as much as we complain about all the coupons and stuff, they do offer some valuable coupons that actually make up for a lot of the annual fee. This one has a $50 coupon, which is the airfare one. It should be very easy to trigger and you'd want to use it for airfare anyway because it earns a what, 4X on airfare. So, you know, that's a good coupon. because it's easy, but it, that's not enough to make up for. And plus, it doesn't even have

priority pass or, you know, it just doesn't have enough high-end features. In fact, it doesn't have that much going for it above the fee-free autograph card other than all these protections we talked about. So from a point of view of what it earns on spend, it's better when used directly at hotels where you get 5x or directly with flights where you get 4x because the no fee autograph card gets 3x for those things. But the no fee also gets 3x for all travel and all transit, which this card does not bonus. It gives you, anyway, so there's a bunch of specific,

yeah, you know, there's some ways you can earn better with that fee-free autograph card, but that fee-free one doesn't have these kind of, purchase protections and travel protections that if those things are important to you, then this is the one to go with. So it wouldn't make sense to pay the $35 monthly fee for Premier checking. That's where you're going. In other words, if this is the only reason to do it, right?

I mean, really, there wouldn't probably be a reason to pay the $35 annual fee. If your choice were to put in the $250,000 to keep Premier checking fee free, pay the monthly fee, give up the credit card, which would it be? If they told you you had to give up the credit card, what would you do? I mean, I would give it up. It's not a big deal to me. As I mentioned, I think the plain autograph is really good. And I would, you know, I would consider just dropping down to the autograph journey if they made me give this up. But I'm not even sure, because I have other cards that I could use for flights and hotels. I'm not even sure that I would do that. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's worth the experiment to see whether can you keep it.

Also, a lot of people have investment accounts that they don't care who the custodian of it is. And Wells Fargo does have, you know, self-invest investing that you could set up and move your investment, you know, custodial to Wells Fargo qualify for that $250,000 fee-free waiver without really losing anything, I think. So that's worth considering as well, especially if you could get some kind of bonus for moving that money into Wells Fargo, which it's worth looking for and even asking Wells Fargo about if you give them a call. Yeah. And if you have a branch near you, then it's particularly worth it. I get mailers pretty frequently. I don't have a branch near me, but I get mailers pretty frequently for a $2,500 bonus for opening a premier checking and for getting or a premier relationship and putting 250K into Wells Fargo. And so I would assume, I haven't actually looked at the details, but I would assume that moving investments over would count. And so that would be worth it if you live somewhere near Wells Fargo. And like Greg said, you don't care about the custodian of your account.

If you've got an IRA, you can move there or something. It might be worth considering doing that in order to get yourself premiere without any fee and get access to this card. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email, inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week

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