I just signed up for a new 'Venture' Visa card from Capital One. You should too. Here's why.
I'm not sure I'll use this credit card much, but I do know I'll go out of my way to spend $1000 on it in the first three months, thereby activating an amazing deal from them.
They will give me a 10,000 mile signup bonus – okay, so that's fairly standard. Now for the special part – they will give up to 100,000 additional miles, matching the balance in any of thirteen different US frequent flier programs up to the 100,000 mile limit, making a total of 110,000 miles.
The Venture Visa card waives its annual fee for the first year, and if you decide to keep it, charges $59/year in the future.
You earn two miles for every dollar charged to the card, and can redeem them with each mile being worth a penny. So, in a way, you sort of get a 2% discount off all future purchased charged to the card, but the big deal for most of us is in the up front signing bonus of 110,000 miles. That is worth $1100.
Too good to be true? There are three catches.
The first is that the total miles they will give away is limited to 1,000,000,000 miles. That might sound like a lot (one billion), but at up to 100,000 miles per new card member, that means potentially as few as 10,000 new members will get miles.
The second is that the deal expires on 13 May. That's hopefully not a problem, depending on when you're reading this.
The third is that you need to have an existing airline affinity credit card and show them one statement balance from one of the following list of airlines/affinity cards. Whatever the total mileage balance is on that one statement, which can be up to 100,000 miles, is the bonus miles you'll get.
Eligible Airline Rewards Programs and Match Conversion Value 1-for-1 Mile Matching (1 Venture Mile per 1 airline rewards mile/point):
- Alaska Airlines® Visa® Card
- American Airlines® Card
- Continental Airlines® Card
- Delta® SkyMiles® Card from American Express®
- Frontier Airlines® MasterCard®
- Hawaiian Airlines® Visa Card
- JetBlue® Card from American Express
- Spirit Airlines® Free SPIRIT™ MasterCard
- United Mileage Plus® Visa Card
- US Airways® Dividend Miles MasterCard
- Virgin America® Visa Card
Other:
- AirTran Airways® A+ Visa® Card (1,000 Venture Miles per A+ Rewards® Credit)
- Southwest Airlines® Rapid Rewards® Visa Card (1,200 Venture Miles per Rapid Rewards® Credit)
So, if you have an existing airline affinity credit card in the list above, and a reasonable balance in that airline's frequent flier program, you can get a matching mileage bonus of up to 100,000 miles into your new Venture account.
Details here. You can sign up online, and in my case, I got an instant approval. It takes up to a couple of weeks to get the paperwork from them subsequently in terms of the process to get the mileage bonus.
