Alaska’s Atmos Summit: Best Card Ever?

Tl;dr: With top-tier earning, fast-track elite status, and a companion discount that covers its fee, the Alaska Atmos Summit combines power and simplicity in a way that could displace nearly every other card in your wallet.

Last week, Alaska Airlines revealed their new loyalty program (Atmos) and premium credit card (Summit). The updates improved an already industry-leading loyalty program and paired it with a premium card that makes it not only attainable, but perhaps even relatively easy to accumulate rewards points and elite status–especially if you can reliably take an award flight with a companion each year. 

With a simple main benefit (a 25,000-point companion discount) that can easily cover the cost of the annual fee, a potential 10% points bonus if you have a qualifying Bank of America account (some are free to open and hold), the most valuable airline currency out there, plus spending that counts (generously) toward elite status, the value proposition is so good that I think this single Alaska card has outflanked almost the entire credit market. If they can afford to sustain this level of generosity, it’s hard to make a case for any other credit card or loyalty program.

In this post, I’m breaking down the many places where this single card ranks near the top of the market–if it isn’t setting the pace itself. 

What makes Alaska and the Summit so strong?

Across the vast majority of common credit card scenarios, the Summit is one of, if not the best card for the situation. 

If you want a single card

If you like to keep it simple but lucrative, you can’t do much better than the Summit. The Summit’s potential 3.3x points earning on dining is roughly the top of the market, and the only top card that can get you fast-tracked toward elite status with that spending. And that’s just baseline spending. If you are able to spend $60,000 on the Summit, the resulting 100k-point companion award discount should vault the Summit’s points-per-dollar ratio well over 4x. Similarly, even the Summit’s single point per dollar spent on base spending could end up being much more valuable than competitors’ offerings when factoring the potential BoA bonus, spending bonus, and status benefits. 

The card’s main shortcomings are its limited lounge access and lack of hotel rewards or perks. However, infrequent travelers may get all the lounge access they need with the two quarterly lounge passes, especially if they translate the Summit’s status benefits into Atmos Gold status, which unlocks access to partner lounges abroad. Earnings on hotels can be boosted by booking through RocketMiles or Alaska itself (which accelerates status even faster). 

If you want a single system

Some people like to earn in a single system, for example building a “trifecta” of Citi or Chase cards. This combines the simplicity of a single points system with the benefit of having a few different cards that earn more efficiently in different categories.

Alaska’s setup in this regard is as strong as any. Strong base earning, 3x on the airline, dining, and foreign purchases with the Summit, 2x on gas, EV charging, cable and streaming, and local transit with the Ascent, and 2x on gas, dining, and groceries with the Hawaiian card. With Bilt, you can also earn 3x on dining, 2x on travel, plus points on rent (mortgage payments soon, too). Currently, you could earn 1x Bilt points on rent with no fee with the Bilt Mastercard, or pay a 3% fee and get 3x miles plus status points when paying with the Summit. 

And an Atmos/Bilt trifecta is much simpler than the complex maze of statement credits that might await you if you build a wallet full of Amex, Chase, or Citi cards and try to break even on the annual fees. 

If you want a portfolio

None of the Alaska cards, though, offer benefits like unlimited lounge access or strong earning on hotels or car rentals. The Summit card functions wonderfully as a centerpiece to our credit card strategy, which emphasizes prioritizing strong cards when bonuses peak. 

You could add a variety of cards that could fill out the Summit’s few weak spots without requiring you to pull much focus–or spending–off of the card. In particular, the Capital One Venture X could still be great to provide unlimited access to Priority Pass and Capital One lounges while offering cell phone protection and strong earning rates (10x) on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel. Strong hotel cards like the IHG Premier or Hilton Aspire would add options to book a wide variety of hotels with elite perks and substantial discount rates. Or you could spring for something richer like the Citi AA Executive for unlimited Alaska lounge access (albeit not for authorized users). 

If you want to reach elite status

There’s simply no easier way to earn airline elite status than the Atmos Summit–have the card in your wallet and take a single award flight of 10,000 miles or longer. Done. ✅

But that’s not the only path. You can also get there with a combination of shorter paid or award flights on Alaska or partners, credit card spend, purchases with partners, and more. 

If you want to reach peak elite status

If you want to reach the highest tiers of elite status, the Summit card is still probably the easiest path. Top-tier status will cost you about $28,000 with Delta, $22-28,000 with United, while you’ll need to earn 200,000 Loyalty Points with American (Loyalty Points are complicated, but spending $10,000 on flights would probably still require at least another $100,000+ in partner or credit card spending). 

Atmos’s top tier requires 130,000 status points. You get 10,000 just for having the card, and 1 for each $2 in spending on the card. If you pay your rent with Bilt you could fairly easily hit the $60,000 spending threshold to receive a 100k-point companion award discount and get another 30,000 status points. From there, you could earn the remaining 90,000 status points by spending $18,000 if you choose to earn revenue-based status points, or by traveling 90,000 “miles.” (Earn rates vary, but that would be about 9 cross-ocean roundtrip award flights or partner flights booked via Alaska.)

That’s neither easy nor cheap, but it’s both easier and cheaper than the competition. 

If you are a big spender

Several cards encourage high spending by offering additional rewards upon hitting a certain spending threshold in a year. The best of these, in my opinion, are on the Bilt Mastercard and Chase Sapphire Reserve. Bilt offers Flying Blue Gold status (including international lounge access with SkyTeam and Delta benefits like SkyPriority), a complimentary flight with Blade, plus the highest priority and bonuses on Rent Day (like a 100% transfer bonus to Alaska and temporary elite status) after spending $50,000. The CSR offers Southwest Airlines A-List elite status, a $500 Southwest flight credit, and IHG Diamond Elite status after spending $75,000. 

The Summit has both beat, for my money (if I had that kind of money). Spending $60,000 will net you a 100,000 companion award discount, easily worth $1,000, and potentially more. Plus, you will automatically receive Atmos Gold status thanks to the status points boosts from the card. This comes with Oneworld Sapphire status: access to partner business class lounges abroad, priority check-in and boarding, standby priority, priority baggage handling, an extra checked bag for free, plus access to preferred seating. 

If you rent

If you rent, you can earn 1 Bilt point per dollar spent on rent, with no fees, when you pay with the Bilt Mastercard (if you make a minimum of five purchases with the card in a given month). Those points can be transferred to Alaska Atmos. Alternatively, you could use your Summit card to pay rent, earning triple points but paying a 3% fee. The latter may well be worth it.

For example, if your monthly rent is $2,500, paying with the Summit card would cost $900, but net 90,000 points plus 15,000 status points, and get you halfway to the $60,000 in spending required to unlock the 100,000-point companion award. This might be a great option if you don’t otherwise spend $60,000 on a credit card each year. Two round-trip tickets for two to a far-flung destination may well be worth $900!

(We’ll see how this looks for those with a mortgage once Bilt 2.0 rolls around.)

If you are a global nomad

I’ll keep this short: if you’re spending any significant amount of time abroad during the year, the opportunity to earn triple points on all foreign spending is revolutionary. It makes the Summit indispensable if you can break even on the annual fee.

If you have a partner

Obviously, to get the most out of the Summit, you’ll want to be able to reliably fly with a companion each year. But the card unlocks some incredible opportunities for partners to optimize–or lazy-ize–their points and miles strategy.

Traditionally, in “two player mode,” a couple can take turns referring each other to cards to collect two welcome bonuses plus a referral bonus, or they might add each other as authorized users to unlock benefits or hit spending targets. 

With the Summit, though, they could do all this with just one card. The Summit has no authorized user fee, so each partner could have a card. While $60,000 might be a lot of spending to hit in a single year, it might be more achievable split between two people, especially if rent is included. The net result would be almost as good as a sign-up bonus: at least 60k points from the card, plus a 100k companion discount. Every year. With just one card. And you could still mix in well-timed bonuses on other cards for even more points–maybe for hotels after those free flights.

What’s more, as I mentioned above, the main cardholder would automatically get Atmos Gold status from this setup. But the companion could get elite status too–two long-distance award flights could do the trick. Or they could get an Atmos Ascent or Hawaiian Airlines Mastercard and earn their own status points (at a slightly less favorable rate of 1 per $3 spent). Any Atmos points earned can be shared freely with the Summit cardholder as a perk of that card. Heck, if you take three award flights per year, maybe both people could benefit from having their own Summit! 

One nice thing about the Summit is that its best categories–dining, flights, foreign travel, and rent–are all expenses that are commonly shared. That also makes it a great card to use as a “shared expenses” card to simplify household accounting.  

Lazy Take

The Atmos universe is so compelling that the Summit card may have lapped the field–it is now the must-have and should-use card in an unreasonable number of situations. And it’s lazy-friendly and affordable to boot. 

Alaska really is trying to take over the world, and it’s ironic (and delightful) that they have teamed up with Bilt, who also has their own plans for world domination. I love my Amex and Delta points, but at this point I see very little reason to spend outside of the Atmos/Bilt universe except in niche situations like hotel stays where I have a co-branded card or when another card has a good merchant offer. I’ll be keeping my complementary cards (in the sock drawer, mostly) and won’t be turning down any irresistible welcome offers, but for the foreseeable future, I really am all-in on Alaska.

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Solo traveler? Amex addict? Check out this article on turning Amex points into Delta bargains.