One Year With the Atmos Summit: Still My Favorite Card

Tl;dr: The Summit’s core benefits are powerful but might be difficult for some people to take full advantage of. If you can, though, the Summit offers some of the best—and easiest—points earning and redeeming options on the market. 

The Atmos Summit launched a year ago with a unique collection of benefits that had me questioning whether it might just be the best credit card—and not just “airline card”—ever. I signed up immediately, and now the next annual fee is coming due. The card looks amazing on paper, but after living with it for a year, I want to share my thoughts.

Spoiler alert: This is without question my favorite card… but it’s not for everyone. 

The big catch: a tough sell for solo travelers

The Atmos Summit’s $395 annual fee is hefty. Although the card has a handful of benefits that are unique to travel with Alaska, the core benefit can be useful even if you never fly with the airline: an annual 25,000-point companion discount on award travel. This can be redeemed for award flights even on partner airlines like American Airlines, Japan Airlines, or Aer Lingus. 

And it can be more than valuable enough to justify the annual fee. Almost every year I book a 75k-point-per-ticket round-trip to Japan using Alaska Atmos points. Applied to my wife’s flight, that 25k-point discount is worth about $300 based on my willingness to pay (I probably wouldn’t spend more than $1,000 in cash for that flight), but could be worth over $600 since I often use it for flights that sell for over $2,000.

I book award flights with my wife each year, and Atmos points have been the most reliable way for me to book award trips at a great value, so this companion discount easily justifies the annual fee for me. But I struggle to see how anyone could make the value proposition of this card work without a regular travel companion, or at least a very high degree of confidence that they will book an award flight with a companion each year (thankfully, Alaska doesn’t require you to designate a specific travel partner). Perhaps loyal Alaska flyers could get enough value from the airline-specific benefits to break even on the annual fee, but for people considering this as a general travel card, I think it can be hard to justify without a firm plan to take advantage of the companion discount. 

A smaller catch: a limited lounge network

Although the companion discount is the main benefit of this card, it also offers two Alaska Lounge passes each quarter. Even if you don’t fly Alaska, this can still be useful because you can use the pass when flying a partner airline like American Airlines. The problem? There are only five airports with these lounges: Anchorage, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle. If you don’t frequent these airports, it might be difficult to get any value out of the card’s lounge benefit. 

What’s good—and better than expected

Everything that initially excited me about this card lived up to the hype. 

If you can make that companion discount work, it’s one simple benefit to offset the cost of the annual fee—a nice relief from cards that spread their benefits across multiple small monthly credits. 

The 3x on dining is competitive with the best cards on the market, while the 3x on foreign purchases makes this Visa card an easy single-card solution for foreign travel. The 10% bonus that comes with maintaining a qualifying Bank of America account means you can earn 3.3x on dining and foreign purchases. 

The card is also great for earning elite status: you earn one “status point” for every $2 spent, plus 10,000 status points on the card anniversary. Elite status starts at 20,000 status points, while Gold status starts at 40,000, and there are milestone rewards along the way. I’ve used the status point boosts to help earn and keep Gold status, which has been great for international trips where I can use the elite check-in and Oneworld lounges. 

(I also think the ability to earn a second, 100,000-point companion discount after spending $60,000, as well as the ability to earn points on rent with Bilt are incredible benefits, though I haven’t used either personally.)

But while the card has lived up to my expectations, some changes to Atmos Rewards since the Summit’s release have made the card even more powerful. First, Alaska moved its Global Getaways to a monthly schedule. That has meant not only frequent, sometimes-incredible award discounts, but also deals that are easy to find thanks to their predictable release on the first Wednesday of each month. Second, Alaska raised its nonrefundable fees for booking partner awards from $12.50 to $20 each way. Summit cardholders have this fee waived, which has made my bookings much more flexible and allowed me to casually hold award space with tentative bookings on good deals, knowing I can cancel and get a full refund of points and fees. 

The surprising disappointments

Not everything with the card has been perfect, however.

First, Bank of America’s app and website have some glaring weaknesses. My main complaint is that BoA doesn’t provide an accounting of how you earn points, so you can’t see whether your purchases are qualifying for bonus points. Over my first several months of having this card, I noticed that I was averaging about 2.5 points per dollar spent, even though I used the card almost exclusively for dining and foreign purchases. I eventually stopped using the card at coffee shops, which seemed to solve the problem, but it can be frustrating not being able to check directly whether a certain merchant will earn bonus points. Beyond this, the UX is a step behind competitors like Amex and Chase, and BoA doesn’t offer an online version of the card’s guide to benefits—good thing I kept my paper copy!

Second, I haven’t gotten use out of my “relationship bonus” account. There are a few accounts that qualify for this, and I chose a SafeBalance banking account with the $500 minimum balance needed to avoid monthly fees. Since my primary bank is online-only, I thought I might benefit from a brick-and-mortar option for things like cash deposits. After a year, though, I have never gone back to a BoA branch and that $500 hasn’t earned even a penny of interest. (I’m thinking of switching to a Merrill investment account.)

Finally, I almost learned the hard way that you can accidentally lose the companion discount. I tend to book and rebook flights at will to dial in the best deals and travel dates, and thankfully with Atmos and a Summit card, it’s free to do so. But in doing this, I accidentally canceled a flight that had my companion discount applied (to be fair, the website clearly warned me I was doing so, I just mindlessly clicked through it). If you cancel a booking before the companion discount itself expires at your cardmember anniversary, the discount simply returns to your account. But you can also use it to book travel beyond the expiration date. That makes the discount more flexible, but it also creates the risk that you could lose the benefit entirely if you book future travel and then need to cancel or change those plans. Thankfully, I was on the right side of that line when I made my mistake, but only barely.

Lazy Take 🦥

Although I have experienced a few hiccups, I love this card and will definitely be keeping it. But it’s not for everyone. If you can make use of that companion discount, this card offers a powerful combination of earning power and redemption flexibility. If not, though, $395 is a lot to pay when you’re relying on the card’s secondary benefits to justify the fee.