One of the most advertised cards out there is the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card. It is one of the easiest rewards programs for beginners to use. If you’re just starting to learn about free travel and you’re looking for a great entry point, then diving into Capital One Venture Rewards is a great start for you.
You get double miles on your purchases, but how do you redeem them?
Other rewards programs have you use their rewards to book travel, but Capital One miles work retro-actively like rebates for purchases you make. (Note: Capital One Miles now includes transfer partners. For more read our Capital One Miles Guide) You have to use the card for your travel expenses, then you can take them off your statement using your miles. So let’s say you use your Capital One card to purchase train tickets for $250. Then a month later you can use 25,000 miles to cover the $250 charge.
Venture Miles can be used easily to pay for a rental car, which is hard to do with some other rewards programs.
Using Venture Miles on Travel Booking Sites
One way I like to use Venture miles is for cheap hotels or rental cars that I find through the big travel booking sites. Sometimes, it makes sense to pay for your travel if you find a great deal. Or, if you like Airbnb since you can’t use hotel points to book these stays. I like to use Priceline to find great hotel deals when I’m not redeeming nights from a hotel rewards program. With the Venture Miles, I can pay for the hotel on Priceline with my Venture card, and then redeem miles later as a statement credit. That’s pretty easy. For rental cars, I use Costco Travel all the time because I normally get far better rates than other sites. I can book the car on Costco Travel, then use my Venture card to pay.
The other great thing about the way these miles work is that you can start using your card right away once you receive your card. There’s no waiting for your bonus to hit. Other card bonuses require you to use miles on the front-end to redeem the travel. With Venture Miles, the redemption is retroactive. So, you can pay for the travel, reach your bonus, and then redeem those miles for free travel when you return from your trip.
For example, say I’m traveling to Hawaii in 3 weeks. I don’t have time to get a new bonus if I want to use points to get a rental car. But, I could reserve the car, then apply and get the Capital One Venture Card before my trip. Once I get to the rental car counter, I can pay for the car with the Venture card. I may not earn my bonus points for a couple of months, but once I earn the bonus, I can go back to that purchase on my statement and redeem miles to get a credit for the charges for that rental car. Make sense?
Overall
Venture Miles are flexible because you can redeem the miles for anything deemed “travel” on your credit card statement. These miles come in handy and can complement other reward redemptions. Check out more information here.
How do you use your Venture Miles?
It’s hard to use other rewards programs for site-seeing. With Venture Miles, if the tour operator codes as “Travel” on your statement, you can redeem miles to cover those charges.
