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Best Credit Cards For Hotel Spending
Get a list of the best credit cards for hotel spend based on your monthly or yearly spend. Compare top rewards cards and hotel credit cards side by side.
When it comes to hotel spending, the best returns will usually come from hotel credit cards which will earn you bonus hotel rewards points as well as grant additional benefits such as complimentary elite status, room upgrades breakfast, annual free night awards, complimentary breakfast, and much more.
If you're loyal to a specific hotel chain, you'll want to check to see if they have a co-branded credit card. Hotel credit cards generally offer better returns than the top bank rewards credit cards.
Hilton offers the best line-up of credit cards when it comes to spend versus rewards. They offer a great return across multiple bonus categories along with complimentary Hilton Honors elite status ranging from Hilton Silver up to their highest of Hilton Diamond. If you enjoy staying at Hilton, picking up a Hilton credit card is a must.
If you enjoy IHG Hotels, IHG is yet another great hotel chain that offers some pretty good rewards. The IHG Premier Card offers a wonderful 10x on IHG spend, comes with complimentary IHG Platinum Status, and a free night annually.
If you're not loyal to any hotel brand, typically book hotels through online travel agencies (e.g. Expedia, Hotels.com), or you just want to earn other rewards, there's lots of non-hotel branded credit cards that earn on hotel and general travel spend.
The Chase Ink Business Preferred is great option if you're looking to earn Ultimate Rewards Points on travel, internet, cable, Lyft, and several other categories. The Chase Sapphire Reserve is also a great option, but you'll want to make sure you spend enough between travel and dining to make up for the high annual fee of the card.
The Citi ThankYou Premier Card is another solid option for travel as you'll earn triple ThankYou Points. The card also earns on gas station, dining, and entertainment purchases which makes it great for travel overall.
Outside of credit cards with transferable points, you have the Wells Fargo Propel AMEX as a solid option that earns a great return on travel (including gas), dining, and streaming service purchases.
The Best Credit Cards By Spend Calculator will find the best credit cards based on the spend and selected filter options. Results will be sorted by net return which is the average value of the total rewards earned, plus annual credits, and minus annual fees. For any of the results listed, you can click on 'Rewards Calculator' to calculate more accurate results. You'll be able to enter spend for as many categories as you want, toggle annual fees, add authorized users, specific elite status and memberships, incorporate sign up and welcome bonus, view rewards as if you transferred them to partners, and much more.
Search for categories and click 'Add Category' to add it to the calculator. If you want to be more specific, you can specify domestic or international spend.
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Category Spend
Enter your spend per month, year, or quarter for the listed categories. You can then click Get The Best Cards to get the list of results.
You can set the duration of the spend for the categories listed above. If you're looking for the best card for only n-months worth of spend, this is where you change the option. If you want to calculate based on a full year, you can leave it set to a duration of 'year'.
Redemption Options
Currencies may have different values depending on how you plan on redeeming your rewards. Most reward values reflected on this site (and countless others) lists the average redemption value based on travel. If you don't plan on using your points/miles for travel, this changes what program may be the best option for you. Listed below are a few popular alternative redemption options that you can base your search on.
Adjust Transferrable Points is not available if this is not set to general.
Adjust Transferable Points
Some rewards programs allow you to transfer your earned points to airline, hotel, and other loyalty programs. These programs will generally have higher point values when doing such. Since these matter so much when choosing a credit card, you can enter your own point value for these programs to include in the calculations. You can set any of the currencies listed below to 0 to calculate based on the non-transfer value (in which most are 1 cent per point with the exception of Chase's 1.25/1.5 cent redemptions).
When transferring to other programs, you should be able to get 1 to 2 cents in value for most of the programs listed below, so I defaulted most to a low average of 1.5 cents. You can click on the to learn more about the value of the currency (opens in a new tab/window).
Include Annual Credits/Bonuses
Several credit cards feature annual bonuses. These are usually anniversary bonuses for having the card, airline credits, hotel credits, and more. If you want these included in the calculation, you can check thy box below.
Bank
The bank that issues the card. De-select the banks that you do not want in the results.
Network
The network that the card is tied to such as VISA, Mastercard, Discover, or AMEX.
Card Type
The type of card such as a co-branded airline card, bank rewards card, or cash back card. Do note that some store cards will appear under cash back if you're able to redeem cash back like a normal cash back credit card.
Reward Type
The type of rewards the card earns. This will either be points, miles, or cash back.
Personal/Business
Toggle the showing of personal or business cards in the results. Card combinations are also featured on this site. The combo option is only available if it's more than one category you're enter spend for.
Annual Fee
The range of fees you're willing to pay to wield such awesome credit cards. Selecting the First Year Free (FYF) / First Year Reduced (FYR) option will calculate FYF/FYR credit cards with their free or reduced annual fee.
Income Requirements
Some credit cards require a certain amount of annual individual or household income. Enter a max income or enter 0 to show all cards.
Foreign Transaction Fees
Toggle whether to include credit cards that have a foreign transaction fee, foreign conversion fee, or any other type of charge that has to do with making purchases outside of the region.
Do note that results may take a few seconds to generate after doing a search.
You can click on the 'More Info' for any of the cards listed in the results to calculate even more accurate results. You can also click Apply to apply for the card.
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