Why I Got the Chase Sapphire Reserve… Even With Its $795 Fee

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Long-time readers know that we’ve been playing the credit cards travel rewards game for several years now. The more we learn how to play the game more efficiently, the further the rewards have taken us.

Without a doubt, credit card travel rewards have easily saved us tens of thousands of dollars on travel and helped us vacation in some amazing places.

Regardless, we’re still pretty judicious about which cards we apply for. Just because a bonus is good, if it doesn’t help us accomplish what we want, it’s not as valuable to us.

So when the Chase Sapphire Reserve annual fee went from $550 to $795, I was not impressed. Paying close to $800 for a credit card fee isn’t something we’ve ever done before.

At $795, you gotta have some good rewards to justify paying so much money.

Fortunately, with the refresh of the card, the sign-up bonus helped skyrocket the value. We think we’ll be able to get just over $3,000 of value from it – and that’s aside from the perks we get that we wouldn’t have on our agenda otherwise.

Here’s why the Chase Sapphire Reserve card made sense for us…

The Chase Sapphire Reserve isn’t our first high-annual-fee card… but it is the highest!

A few years ago, I wrote the post Is It Worth It to Open a Credit Card With a Huge Annual Fee? about the Capital One Venture X card. The card had a $395 annual fee (and still does). We applied for it mainly because of the sign-up bonus, but the card has paid for itself every year with a $300 annual travel credit and 10k in anniversary points that are easily worth $100.

Normally, this would be a card that we would cancel after the first year… breaking even doesn’t really do much for that “value” we’re after with a credit card.

However, we’ve kept this card for a few years because of some other perks:

• 2x points on every purchase (and 5 to 10x on travel booked through the Capital One Travel portal) – not a lot of cards offer this
• The credit for Global Entry or TSA PreCheck – we love our Global Entry (which includes TSA PreCheck)
• Airport lounge access with Priority Pass and to Capital One Lounges and the ability to bring two guests

There are other benefits, but those were the worthwhile ones for us. In particular, the airport lounge access has been invaluable for us. Not only does that usually give us a more comfortable place to relax before flights, but we always squeeze in a meal. That saves us big money versus the cost of buying food at an airport restaurant.

For 2025 alone, we should end this year with having visited a whopping 22 lounges! Let’s do some ballpark conservative math:

22 lounges x 3 of us x $15 (ultra-conservative cost of an airport meal) = $990.

That equates to us saving nearly a thousand dollars in 2025 just because of free lounge access!

If the Capital One Venture X card interests you, I’d appreciate you using my referral link here (at no cost to you, obviously) or signing up for a free Travel Freely account and applying for the card there (and I highly recommend anyone working on credit card travel rewards sign up Travel Freely!).

The big letdown with this card though is that they are making a dramatic change to lounge access. Beginning February 1, 2026, you won’t be able to bring any guests into the lounges for free. You could spend a stupid $75k a year on the card to get access, but that’s just silly.

Since we value the lounge access so much, this might not make the card as worthwhile for us anymore.

Enter the Chase Sapphire Reserve card (even though the annual fee is $400 more than the Venture X card!).

The new perks of the Chase Sapphire Reserve card

Ok, let’s start with why the Chase Sapphire Reserve sucked me in. The biggest reason is the bonus:

💰 Sign-up bonus

• Introductory bonus: 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points plus a $500 Chase Travel promo credit after spending $5,000 in the first 3 months.

If done just poorly (i.e., cash back), anyone should be able to get $1,000 out of 100,000 Chase points. That’s the bottom rung of the value you can get.

If done a little more strategically (i.e., getting 1.5¢ per point booking travel through the Chase portal), they’ll be worth about $1,500… sounding better!

If done optimally (by transferring to better partners and using strategically), we’re looking at maybe $1,700–$2,500+ of value… ding, ding, ding!!

I’m going to put the value we’ll get out of the 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points at about $2,000. Maybe we’ll do better – hopefully we won’t do worse – but I think that’s a pretty solid guess since we’re getting better at understanding the ins and outs of using points effectively.

Plus, there’s the $500 travel credit. That credit is interesting because it needs to be used through the Chase Travel portal, it’s only good for a year after you get it, and it’s a one-shot deal. If you spend $300 booking travel with it, you lose the other $200. We won’t have a problem making sure we get the full $500 out of the credit.

So right there, just from the sign-up bonus, the Chase Sapphire Reserve card should be giving us about $2,500 of value. Of course, we have to deduct the annual fee, but we’ll do that shortly.

Let’s hit on the other stuff and then circle back to what we value on the card.

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🛍️ Rewards & Earnings

• 8× points on travel booked through Chase Travel, including The Edit collection
• 4× points on flights and hotels booked directly
• 3× points on dining worldwide
• 1× point on all other purchases

For booking travel and dining, this card is pretty good. Outside of that, we’ll use one of our other credit cards for our day-to-day purchases.

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🎁 Statement Credits (Annual Value)

• $300 travel credit
• Up to $500 hotel credit via Spend on The Edit (Chase Travel)
• Dining credit: $300 via the Reserved by Sapphire/OpenTable program
• StubHub/Viagogo credits: $300 total ($150 per 6‑month period)
• Apple TV+ & Apple Music: up to $250 annually
• Peloton credit & 10× points: $120 annually on qualifying purchases
• Lyft credit & 5× points: $120/year through September 2027
• DoorDash perks: DashPass membership + $300 in promos through 2027
• Global Entry/TSA PreCheck/NEXUS: $120 credit every four years

If you haven’t noticed, a lot of credit cards are going to this “couponing” system where you don’t just get the bonus – you need to sign up for something, and they give you some sort of credit back.

I’m not a fan of this. And I’m someone who will take advantage of it. I’ve already gotten things connected for Apple TV+, Apple Music, DoorDash, and Lyft. I also added StubHub to my list of things to do to see if there’s something we want to take advantage of with that.

But honestly, most folks aren’t as OCD as I am. I would bet that’s the case for someone more affluent who’s spending the $795 on the card without even thinking about it. Most of these credits will likely go to waste with cardholders, but I’m sure they already know this, and that’s a big part of why they do it that way.

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🛫 Travel Perks & Protections

• Airport lounge access:
  • Unlimited access to Chase Sapphire Lounges and Priority Pass Select lounges; includes up to two free guests
  • Access to 20+ Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounges on Star Alliance flights (with one guest)
• Hotel status:
  • Automatic IHG Platinum Elite status until Dec 31, 2027
• Robust travel protections: trip cancellation/interruption, auto rental insurance, baggage delay, lost luggage, emergency medical/dental, plus primary rental car insurance

And there it is, folks, one of the other reasons for us getting the Chase Sapphire Reserve card… the lounge access. This will basically restore the Priority Pass lounge access that we’re losing at the beginning of next year due to Capital One removing free guest access on the Venture X card. So with this, we’re back in business!

Plus, access to the Chase Sapphire Lounges is nice. Those are a lot better than most of the Priority Pass lounges. Of course, they don’t have a ton of airports with the Sapphire lounges, but still cool if you happen to be in one that does.

And then, there’s the IHG Platinum Elite status. I activated that for my IHG account, even though we don’t currently have any IHG hotel stays booked.

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🚀 New Features

• Points Boost: Redeem Ultimate Rewards points for up to 2× value on rotating first-class/chosen travel redemptions via Chase Travel, replacing the old fixed 1.5× redemption
• Supplemental perks:
  • Exclusive dining experiences via the “Reserved by Sapphire” program
  • Concierge & travel designer services
  • Access to “Summer, Reserved” dining events

The only thing that’s worth knowing about here to me is the Points Boost. According to the guys from the Frequent Miler podcast, my understanding is that this change will make booking economy flights a lot less worthwhile and booking first/business class flights a lot more worthwhile when booking through Chase Travel.

My take on this credit card

Well, it’s obvious that I think the card is worth applying for (at least for us). I already mentioned that I expect that we should get about $2,500 from the sign-up bonus alone.

Then there’s the $300 annual travel credit for when booking through Chase Travel. This is separate from the $500 sign-up bonus travel credit.

That brings us to $2,800 in expected value.

Here’s the thing – when I look at a credit card’s value, I take what the value is of perks we would likely utilize even without the card and then subtract out the annual fee.

Here’s what I don’t do – I don’t count most things I wouldn’t have purchased without the card. Yes, we’ll take advantage of them, but we wouldn’t have gotten if they weren’t free with the card. So yes, they’re a benefit, but they’re not why I signed up for the card. For the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, some of these are:

• Apple Music and Apple TV+
• The StubHub, Lyft, and DoorDash credits
• IHG Platinum Elite status
• Some of the other perks that if we find a reason to use them, we will, but if not, no big deal

That said, I will count the lounge access as a point of value since we’ve grown accustomed to using this a lot, and it was a legitimate reason why we applied for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card.

However, we do plan to travel somewhat less in 2026 (it’s been an amazing year of travel in 2025 so far, with more to come!). So I think it’s safe to value this benefit at no less than $250 for us. We already have a big trip to Hawaii with friends booked in early 2026. That alone will consist of at least 6 airports with lounges and maybe more. And there might be another cruise in our future (I’m sorry, I can’t stop! I love ’em!!). So that would be at least two more lounges.

In other words, even if we still go ultra conservative with that saving us $15 in food per person per visit, we’d knock out that $250 in 6 airports ($15 x 3 persons x 6 airports = $270).

So when all is said and done:

Benefit	Value
100,000 Ultimate Rewards points	$2,000
$500 travel credit	$500
$300 annual travel credit	$300
Airport lounge access	$250
Annual fee	($795)
Total credit card value	$2,255

The way I’m looking at it, this card will give us over $2,255 in value even after the annual fee… that’s a substantial win! And that doesn’t count the other benefits like Apple TV+ and the Lyft credits, which we’ll be sure to take advantage of over the year. We’ll re-evaluate after year one to determine if the card is still worth the cost, but for now, this is an easy win for us.

What you value is probably different than what I do, so you’ll need to do your own math.

But if you find the idea of the Chase Sapphire Reserve to be worthwhile and you want to jump on the 100k point and $500 travel credit sign-up bonus while it lasts, now’s the time – it won’t last long. If you do apply for this card, please consider hooking a brotha up and either:

• Sign up for a free account at Travel Freely (recommended) and apply for the Chase Sapphire Reserve from there. I’ve written more about how cool Travel Freely is in my post, The #1 Best Way To Track Credit Card Rewards.
• Use my Chase Sapphire Reserve referral link to apply for the card.

I love using Travel Freely and recommend you sign up for that as well, but that’s up to you.

As a side note, be aware that Chase might not offer you the bonus if you currently have any other personal Sapphire cards open, previously held the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, or you’ve already received a new cardmember bonus for this card. Chase’s site should let you know if you’re not eligible when you apply.

And that’s it on this one. I’m excited about the value this card is going to give us. We just got the card a couple of weeks ago and we’re already more than halfway through the spending requirement for the bonus (we had a little bit of a big-spend purchase to make). So hopefully we’ll be there soon!

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Plan well, take action, and live your best life!

Thanks for reading!!

— Jim