Enhanced Chase Sapphire Preferred Benefits
The Chase Sapphire Preferred card is the card that I’m most likely to recommend to people starting out in the miles/points game: the 2x points on dining and travel is great, there are no foreign transaction fees, it has a good sign-up bonus with first year annual fee waived, and Ultimate Rewards points can be transferred to United and Hyatt which are two of the best rewards programs.
I recently received a letter in the mail detailing the latest Guide to Benefits for the Chase Sapphire Preferred, and here are the “enhanced” benefits that are actually enhancements.
1) Primary rental automobile insurance if you’re renting outside of your country of residence
Many people laud the Chase MileagePlus Explorer card for offering primary rental car insurance, although that doesn’t really matter to me as I don’t have a car and thus don’t have car insurance so even secondary car insurance functions as primary car insurance for me. But now, it’s explicitly stated, “Outside of your country of residence or if you do not have automobile insurance, you do not have to claim payment from any other source of insurance before receiving coverage under this benefit”. All you need to do is complete the entire rental transaction using your Chase Sapphire Preferred card (which is the card I would use anyway since it’s a VISA card, there are no foreign transaction fees, and you’d get 2x points back on the rental car since it’s a travel purchase) and decline the rental company’s collision damage waiver.
2) Purchase Protection is extended to 120 days from 90 days
Purchase protection is pretty great in that most new purchases are covered from theft, damage, or involuntary or accidental parting provided that you charge some portion of the price of the purchased item to your CSP credit card (note that the guide to benefits explicitly says “portion of the price” rather than the “entire transaction” as is required for the auto rental insurance). Each claim can reimburse up to a maximum of $500, although this protection is in excess of any collectible insurance that you already have (e.g. homeowner’s insurance). Previously, this protection was only for 90 days, but now you get an extra 30 days with this enhanced benefit.
3) Extended Warranty Protection is guaranteed for one additional year on eligible warranties of 3 years or less, rather than doubling the manufacturer’s warranty up to 1 additional year
Extended warranty protection essentially means that you have additional time in which repairs and breakage of items is covered. Previously, the manufacturer’s warranty was only doubled up to 1 year, but now you’re guaranteed an additional year, which means that if the manufacturer’s warranty is for less than a year, then you get an incremental couple of months with this new policy.
What do you tell people about keeping the CSP past year 1? Is it worth the $95?
I kept my card past year 1. The 7% annual dividend on my first year was enough to offset the $95 annual fee for me, and I haven’t gotten a Chase Ink or Bold card, so I wanted the flexibility to transfer points earned from my Chase Freedom to airline and hotel partners. If you’re actively churning, though, it probably doesn’t make that much sense to keep the card past the first year since most of your spend should be going to sign-up bonuses and other cards can collectively do just about everything the CSP can do. This is a good question, though, and I’ll write a blog post about it more in length soon.
Now that I look at my 2013 summary, I charged about 4K on travel, and 4K on dining. So that’s about 8K extra pts just for having the CSP…it’s pretty close for me. My first dividend was skewed by the signup bonus, but I don’t anticipate too much for 2013. Like you said, I had a few other CCs that ate up my spend.
Is it harder on these sorts of cards to get the annual fees waived? I’ve never paid an annual fee on a credit card; I just keep calling and asking to cancel before the fee comes up, and they waive it/give me credit if I make a few purchases.
While that’s a good strategy for other credit cards, the Chase Sapphire Preferred is notoriously hard to get any sort of retention bonus for. I’d say 99% of people aren’t going to get anywhere by calling about the CSP annual fee, even with high amounts of annual spend.