Ranked: The Best Credit Card Travel Rewards Programs

For U.S. cardholders, the credit card space has four main travel rewards programs:

• Amex Membership Rewards
• Capital One Venture Rewards
• Chase Ultimate Rewards
• Citi ThankYou Rewards

When you first start collecting travel rewards, you're going to need to choose a program. Having used all four to varying degrees, I can say they each have their pros and cons, including varying quality of transfer partners.

Amex and Chase both have the most comprehensive programs, so they rose to the top of the list. But choosing an exact order for this list turned out to be a little harder than I expected. Here are the results.

1. Chase Ultimate Rewards

I'll be honest, I went back and forth on who gets first and second place. I'm a bit of an Amex enthusiast, so my bias leans me that way. However, I had to objectively give the win to the Chase Ultimate Rewards program.

The main thing that makes this program stand out above the others is Chase's travel portal. Specifically, the fact that a few Chase credit cards give you an increased rate on redemptions through that portal.

If you have the right Chase card, you can get $0.015 per point when you redeem through the portal. This is a great rate for folks who don't want to jump through the regular hoops to transfer and redeem points at peak value.

2. Amex Membership Rewards

The American Express Membership Rewards program is a close second here. And I'd argue that it wins by a big margin if your only interest is transferring your points.

Amex has 17 airline transfer partners, 10 of which Chase doesn't have and three that are exclusive to Amex. (FYI, Chase has only two partners that Amex doesn't: United MileagePlus and TAP Air Portugal.)

All of Amex's airline partners transfer at a one-to-one rate except JetBlue (this transfers at a 1:0.8 rate). This means that you'll get one mile in the partner program for each Membership Rewards point you transfer -- unless you get a bonus.

That's right, Amex regularly has transfer bonus offers. These can give you up to 50% more points or miles when you transfer Membership Rewards points to the eligible partner program.

3. (Tied) Capital One Venture and Citi ThankYou

Neither Capital One Venture nor Citi ThankYou is as robust or lucrative as the Chase and Amex offerings. However, both programs do still have their merits.

Indeed, figuring out a winner here is actually pretty hard. Both programs offer roughly the same number of partners, including 10 overlapping partners. Most are 1:1 transfers, though Capital One Venture has worse rates on two airlines and Citi is worse for one hotel brand.

Both programs have their own travel portals where you can directly use points to book travel. And they both give you a value of $0.01 per point/mile when you redeem for travel through the portal.

In the end, choosing between the two programs will likely come down to one of two factors:

1. Do you like a particular card best? Citi has one travel rewards card that earns ThankYou points. Capital One has three personal card options (plus three business cards). You may want a specific card for its rewards, welcome bonus, or perks.
2. Is there a specific airline you want to use? About half of the partners overlap, but that leaves a lot of partners that don't. If you use one of these specific partners, go with that program.

Overall comparison

Sometimes one good chart is worth a thousand words. Take a look at all of the airline transfer partners side by side:

In the end, as long as you choose a program that you'll use, you really can't go wrong. Points that expire or are allowed to languish in your account aren't worth anything at all.