Honestly most of the advice here is solid. Sapphire Preferred or Venture X are both great starter travel cards. Just make sure you pay them off in full every month or the points/cashback don’t matter. One thing a lot of people overlook though: you don’t have to only rely on the credit card rewards. There are websites/apps that stack extra cashback (like TryBrazen) on top of whatever card you’re already using. You'd be surprised at how much that adds up, especially for random stuff like restaurants or hotels that aren’t tied to a specific loyalty program. You can usually get 2x-3x the cashback regardless of which card you use, specifically on travel. More on reddit.com

Almost as if there isn’t one because it completely depends on your circumstances and there totally isn’t a !template to fill out or anything like that to give us any insight on what exactly it is you’re looking for. Also, here’s my obligatory paste text on point travel: Btw if you can’t be bothered to read all that and the linked readings in it, maybe rethink the point travel thing. Because “point travel” and “what card should I get” is kinda 1+1=2 in terms of self-explanatory.” Okay, I’m going to break this down as simple as possible. The Amex Gold is 4x on Dining. You can get cards with 5% cash back on Dining. If you spend $500 a month on Dining (the rough cap of most 5% cards), then you earn either $300 in cash back or 24,000 points per year. Points operate on a basis of cents per point, or CPP for short. The bare minimum you should aim for 1 CPP, or in other words, each point is worth 1 cent. This means every x points card is worth its equivalent in % cash back (2x=2%). This means if you redeem the $300 cash back and buy a $300 ticket, you must purchase that same ticket for 24,000 points for the 4x Amex Gold to break even against a 5% card. This puts your evaluation at 1.25 CPP. Any more and your effective value is higher than just getting a 5% card. Any less and you were better off getting the 5% card, assuming you do not hit spend limit cap of $500/month on Dining. So now you might be wondering, how do I even book a points trip? Read the doc in this thread Also in that doc is another guide on credit cards and techniques that is a prerequisite read. And yes, they’re long as fuck. You back yet? Cool. Now I’ll give you some homework. Go ahead and try and book a flight you would take right now that can use Amex transfers and is valued at 1.25 CPP or higher. After you’ve done that, congrats! You’re a points person if you decided this is what you’re willing to put up with. Hold up, one last thing. That $300 dollars? That’s cold hard cash. You can take that and do anything with it. Spend it. Light it on fire. Put it in a fund making 10% So, what if you just sat your ass on those Amex points? Let’s say you don’t use those points until 3 years from now. That $300 dollars if stuck in a 10% is no longer just $300. It’s now ~$399 dollars. Uh-oh. Now if you redeem at 1.25 CPP, you’re losing out. In order to beat it out, you have to redeem at 1.66 CPP. And as you can probably imagine, the higher the CPP, the harder it gets to redeem for value. And this isn’t factoring external factors like inflation reducing the value of cash, and therefore points redeemed in relation to cash, on top of things like point devaluations. “What’s point devaluations,” you say? Basically, these companies do not want to lose money on you. So what they do is change the values of points bookings over time. A 25K flight this year might be 30K in a year or two. So if the ticket price doesn’t increase at the same relative percentage (it doesn’t), this means your CPP will decrease. More on reddit.com

You need one without foreign transaction fee More on reddit.com

When you say travel rewards, do you mean good earnings, good travel partners, or good travel perks? Since your highest spend amounts are in dining and grocery, IMO it’s great that you have the AMEX Gold. You could go full force in the AMEX ecosystem with the platinum - which would give you 5x back on flights booked direct too. Lounges are plentiful especially if you fly Delta, and you get access to priority pass lounges too. It also comes with several other perks such as hotel status and other travel related credits. AMEX also has the *most travel partners (Citi has a lot too, but I prefer AMEX’s). Plus if you’re open to business cards you could eventually get the BBP to give yourself a flat 2x on everything. Venture X is a card that pays for itself - between the $300 travel credit (which is very easy to use) and the 10k anniversary points. It’s a Visa (accepted everywhere overseas which is great), earns 2x back on everything (which at a -$5 EAF, would be great for your other spend besides what the AMEX gold earns). Not too many C1 lounges yet, but comes with priority pass lounge access. Also has a primary auto insurance (as opposed to AMEX plat which has secondary). The travel portal is great - competitive prices and very easy to use. Chase Sapphire Reserve used to have a 3x general travel which I believe included Airbnb, but has since gotten rid of that perk. None of the credits really appeal to me, so personally I don’t get positive value from the card, as much as I wish I had a use for this card. But if they’re credits you already use, could definitely be an option. IMO, the multipliers don’t really match your spending though. CS Preferred is a good entry level travel card - gives you access to Chase’s travel partners (if they appeal to you), and you’d get 2x on other travel as well as 3x on streaming (other multipliers overlap with your AMEX gold). But you wouldn’t get the bells and whistles (I.e. lounge access) that you’d get with the other 3 cards. The Citi Strata Premier has by FAR the best multipliers on one card - pretty much every large spending category. But IMO the credits don’t really create a positive EAF. If you like the Citi travel partners and find positive value despite the EAF, could be worth it. Personally if I were you, I’d go for the AMEX platinum to compliment the gold, then go for the Venture X to have an international Visa card with great travel perks, while having a great multiplier on everything else (2x on Airbnb, which is in line with the CSP). More on reddit.com