You don’t need a massive credit card portfolio. For a lot of people, two well-matched cards are enough to cover most spending situations, unlock useful perks, and give you strong redemption options. Here are the pairs I’d choose for a few different kinds of lazy points travelers.
Lazy Pair — Capital One Venture X + Savor
If you want a single great all-around credit card that’s relatively easy to manage, the Venture X is my choice. For its $395 annual fee, you get a $300 annual credit to use on Capital One Travel and 10,000 bonus points on renewal (worth at least $100). The card has all the big premium perks and protections, including access to Capital One’s outstanding lounges.
With the Venture X, you can earn 2x on every purchase, and the miles are really easy to redeem for any kind of travel without having to master transfer partners or loyalty program quirks. The Venture X also offers bonus points when booking travel via Capital One Travel. But if you want to boost your earnings without complicating things, you can add a no-fee Savor to earn 3x on dining, groceries, and certain entertainment and streaming options. (It’s cash back, but you can take it as Venture miles if you decide to use Capital One’s transfer partnerships.)
I like a little more punch on the redemption side, but if you want an easy-to-manage setup with top-tier perks and simple redemptions, this is a great setup.
Power Pair — Bilt Palladium + Atmos Summit
If I could only have two cards right now, it would be these two, and I wouldn’t hesitate about that decision for a second.
I get 3x or more on every purchase with these two cards. With the Summit and a qualifying Bank of America account, you can earn 3.3x on Alaska Airlines, dining, and foreign purchases. With a little setup, the Palladium can earn 3x or more. A few cards out there have a higher ceiling on a few bonus categories, but I don’t think you’ll find a higher floor. And it’s easy to keep track of: dining out or traveling abroad, whip out the Summit—otherwise, the Palladium is your go-to.
On the redemption side, Alaska Atmos is my favorite program with great, repeatable award-chart value and monthly award sales that offer genuine bargains. Bilt points transfer to Atmos, and having a Summit allows you to pool points freely with up to ten friends and family members. You can use your Bilt points to boost your Atmos strategy or complement it by using them to book other flights or hotels, either directly through Bilt (with their 1.25¢-per-point value in the Bilt travel portal) or with partners like Japan Airlines, Hyatt, or Accor.
These cards can also help you unlock status. The Summit offers a headstart toward status qualification on renewal, and you can make more progress by spending on the card or taking award flights. If you earn Bilt Platinum status, meanwhile, that can get you Flying Blue Gold Status.
No setup is perfect, of course. The Palladium isn’t a model of simplicity, the Summit only really works if you take an award trip with a companion each year, the lounge access from these two cards doesn’t quite match up to some competitors like the Amex Platinum, and neither card has outstanding earning rates on hotels. But I’d take those tradeoffs over any other card pair, any day.
Cheap Flights Pair — Amex Gold and Delta Gold
If you specifically want to turn a lot of dining out or takeout/delivery orders into maximum international trips, this pair is golden.
This two-card pair has $475 in combined annual fees, and while they offer more than that in annual statement credits, there are a lot of them to keep track of. Thankfully, a lot of them are food-based, so it might not be too painful if you are like me and choose this path because you can’t (or won’t) cook for yourself.
The Gold Card earns 4x at restaurants and U.S. supermarkets (up to $25k each year for the latter), plus 3x on flights booked directly and some bonus points when booking other travel via Amex. The Delta Gold doesn’t add much in terms of bonus points, but if you use it for non-bonus spending you can earn a $200 Delta Flight Credit after spending $10,000 in a calendar year and earn directly in SkyMiles to avoid Amex’s annoying fee when transferring points to Delta.
Delta SkyMiles get a bad rap, but I think they have the best bargains, if you can snag them. I have a Thrifty Traveler subscription, and in the last three months they’ve sent me the following Delta deals from my home airport (all round-trip, basic economy starting prices with the Delta Gold cardholder discount included): Australia for 60k SkyMiles, South Africa for 71k, Spain for 33k, Morocco for 43k, South Africa (again) for 58k, Hong Kong for 29k, Australia for 43k, Tokyo for 56k. Almost all of those were available from dozens of airports nationwide, albeit with some pricing variation.
If you spend a lot on food, don’t aspire to business class travel, don’t mind playing Amex’s coupon game, and just want to stretch your points as far as possible, this is a powerful setup.
Low-Fee Pair — Chase Sapphire Preferred and Bilt Blue
If you want the premium travel card experience without paying high fees, this combo would be my choice.
The Sapphire Preferred charges a $95 annual fee while offering a $100 annual hotel credit. That card offers up to 5x through Chase Travel, 3x on dining, gas, vacation homes including Vrbo and Airbnb, streaming, and online groceries, plus 2x on general travel. All that plus outstanding travel and purchase protections like trip delay reimbursement and extended warranty coverage.
The CSP only earns 1x on base purchases. You could boost that with a Chase Freedom Unlimited, which earns 1.5x on base spending. But I prefer the Bilt Blue. It only earns 1x, but with 4% “Bilt cash”—if you use it to earn housing rewards, you could earn over 2x per dollar spent on the card (I talk about the mechanics here). Bilt shares many of Chase’s best transfer partners, so you can funnel points from both ecosystems into the same airline or hotel programs, but Bilt also offers other (better, in my opinion) options like Alaska, JAL, and Accor that wouldn’t be available with a Chase card alone.
Actually, I might prefer a single Bilt Obsidian rather than this combo, but the Sapphire Preferred comes with a much better welcome bonus, and its hotel credit is much easier to use. If you start with this pair and find the Bilt ecosystem more compelling, you can always switch later.
The No-Fee Pair — Amex Blue Cash Everyday and Wells Fargo Autograph
I like the Blue Cash Everyday because it’s the rare no-fee card that actually offers a statement credit benefit: $7 back per month on Disney Streaming purchases (I use it on my Hulu subscription). And with 3% back on gas, groceries, and up to $6,000 per year in online retail purchases, it’s a useful everyday-spending card, too. I think the Autograph is a great complement because it earns 3x points on restaurants, gas, transit, streaming, phone service, and travel. Those points can be redeemed as a statement credit for 1¢ each, but Wells Fargo also has some decent transfer partnerships. And the Autograph is a widely-accepted Visa Signature, with rental car insurance, cell phone protection, concierge services, and no foreign transaction fees.
Really, you could mix and match as many no-fee cards as you want—there are no annual fees to worry about, after all. Some other great contenders include the Citi Double Cash (2% cash back on all purchases), Bilt Blue (earn bonus points on housing expenses), Discover It and Chase Freedom Flex (5% back on rotating quarterly categories), and the Citi Strata (5x on travel booked through Citi). These two cards get the nod because I think they have the highest ceiling. (3x earning, statement credits, transfer partner upside, higher-end purchase protections, etc.), so they narrowly beat out the Double Cash (which has the highest floor with 2% back on every purchase) and the others, but your mileage may vary.
Lazy Take 🦥
You don’t need a wallet full of cards to build a strong points strategy. A good second card can fill the gaps in your first—whether that means better earning rates, easier redemptions, lower fees, or access to another rewards ecosystem. I’m firmly Team Bilt/Atmos, but the best pair depends on what kind of lazy traveler you are.