Why I’m Keeping My $795 Chase Sapphire Reserve and How I’m Changing My Points Strategy

For most of us who have enjoyed the bougie benefits of the Chase Sapphire Reserve card for years, the enormous annual fee hike came as a shock — and so did the changes to bonus categories. I ditched my AmEx Platinum last year because I was tired of tracking monthly, semiannual, and annual credits, and now CSR is pretty much doing the same. But there are a few reasons I can easily justify (or zero out) the hefty fee — at least for now. That being said, I won’t be charging my entire annual travel budget to this card anymore. Here’s how I’m justifying the expense and what I’m changing.

1. We Can Zero-Out the Annual Fee

The CSR comes with both old and new credits. The key is always to review those credits and make sure the ones that justify your fees are things that you would be buying anyway. For us, that’s simple:

• $300 travel credit (obviously)
• $300 StubHub (we go to a few live events every year and usually look between Ticketmaster and StubHub for the best deals)
• $120 Lyft (even though it’s $10 per month, so it won’t cover an annual Capital Bikeshare fee, we rent bikes and take Lyfts often, so we do expect to get max value or close from this credit)
• $300 in dining credits. We love to try new restaurants around town and while other dining programs are limited, the CSR options are plentiful in DC. This credit is offered as $150, twic a year. We’d definitely try a new spot twice a year anyway. I’ve made a list of the included places I want to try and am looking forward to some new local experiences.

I am disappointed that Apple One is not included in the Apple TV/Music credit, but I need the bundle for News and iCloud storage. If Chase broadened this category, the card would be a no-brainer. For now, the credits listed above will justify the expense, but it’s something we’ll have to monitor. You can check out additional benefits here to see what works for you.

2. We Don’t Want to Lose Exclusive Benefits

We also love our Capital One Venture X card, and Option B is to ditch CSR and use this one exclusively. But there are a few benefits that are available only through CSR:

• Hyatt as a transfer partner (if you don’t know, this is points and miles gold and deserves its own category as the easiest way to get the most value for your points)
• Southwest and United as transfer partners. While these aren’t the best value for your points, we fly both airlines frequently and it’s super convenient to top off our points with CSR transfers to get flights faster.
• Free guests at Chase and Priority Pass lounges. While C1VX is currently the best value for bringing guests to lounges, the overhaul taking effect in February will put CSR in the lead.
• Amazing travel insurance. CSR gives us comfort when we travel by offering top-quality insurance coverage.

3. We Have Time to Try It Out

The CSR changes take effect in late October, but our next annual fee isn’t due until June, so we have plenty of time to decide if the changes work for us before we have to pay the hefty annual fee for the first time.

The C1VX makes more sense to us for lounge access because we’re based in DC and have Capital One lounges at Dulles and DCA, plus access to other great Priority Pass participants at Dulles. So it mostly comes down to those points transfer partners we don’t want to lose. We’re still not sure if it will be worth it in the long run.

Changing My Points and Miles Strategy

While it still makes sense to keep my CSR, I will be charging less to it each year because of the changes they made to bonus point categories:

• CSR will offer 8x points for travel booked directly through the portal, but I find that it’s almost always better to book directly through an airline or hotel to get the perks and flexibility they offer for direct bookings. Also, Booking.com offers way more competitive pricing if you want to use a third-party portal.
• CSR will no longer offer 3x points on a broad range of travel purchases. This is so disappointing. We used to get 3x points for everything from Airbnb to airfare, to Booking.com, to EZ Pass — literally everything categorized as travel. That’s now changing.
• We’ll still get 3x points on restaurants and will start getting 4x points on airfare booked directly with the airline, so that’s all we’ll be charging to this card other than what is covered by the credits mentioned above. Note that hotels booked directly with the hotel will also get 4x points, but we tend to stay with Hilton and Hyatt and use our hotel cards for these purchases (for even more points and elite perks).

So Where is the Rest of Our Spending Going?

In prior years, we put all travel and restaurants on CSR (for 3x points) and everything else on C1VX (for 2x points). But we made a huge change this year.

While we typically wouldn’t recommend going all-in on an airline co-branded card, we’ve been putting anything that doesn’t get CSR bonus points on our American Airlines card to get elite status that comes with free Main Cabin Extra space seats, upgrades as available, and priority boarding — not to mention a bunch of points we can trade in for flights.

The price of seat selection, extra space seats, and other perks is shocking these days, so having elite status is a huge cost savings and benefit. While we’d prefer Star Alliance status, American Airlines and OneWorld make the most sense for us based on the credit card strategy, our home airport, and our frequent travel destinations.

We like to keep things really simple for budget purposes, so we’re hesitant to have three cards in our monthly mix, but the changes to CSR mean a lot of travel purchases that used to get 3x points will only get 1x. So we’ll now break it up as follows:

• CSR for airfare (4x) and dining (3x)
• American Airlines (Citibank) for everyday spending until elite threshold is met through a combination of AAdvantage frequent flyer points and credit card loyalty points. Note that you can also get loyalty points by booking hotels and other travel through AAdvantage shopping, hotels, dining, and other programs — so the threshold isn’t as daunting to meet as it might first seem.
• C1VX for all other spending (2x)

We plan to try this strategy through 2026 to see if the value outweighs or is comparable to our prior strategy. So stay tuned for more updates!

What is your points strategy? Are you ditching your CSR card? Let us know in the comments.

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