Drafting the Perfect 5-Card Travel Wallet: Who Wins?

The Thrifty Traveler Podcast

Kyle and Nick engage in a fantasy football-style draft to build the ideal five-card travel wallet, debating top credit cards while discussin

Key takeaways

• Chase has regained momentum in the travel card market by expanding eligibility for its Sapphire Reserve and Preferred cards in 2026.
• American Airlines is finally reversing its decade-long decision to remove seatback screens, though retrofits won't begin until the 2030s.

Main topics

• Fantasy football-style credit card drafting
• American Airlines seatback screen reversal

Notable quotes

"It's just such an AA thing." – Nick on American Airlines' delayed seatback screen reinstatement.

Conclusion

Kyle and Nick conclude their playful yet insightful credit card draft with

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Yo, welcome to the show. I am not Gunnar Olsson, who could not be here either because he is on vacation. or because his head is so big after being recognized in the KLM Crown Lounge in Amsterdam last week while he was on a work trip. So instead, across the table from me is Nick Cerati, our resident credit card guru. Nick, welcome back. Thanks for having me on the show, Kyle. Excited to be here. So which option would you take there on why Gunnar couldn't join us today? Speaker 1 (0:27) He may be outside of the studio here. I'm surprised he even made it onto his flight. Like how does his head fit through the boarding door after he was recognized, like you said, by a TTPod listener? Yeah, it's hard to say. My Speaker 2 (0:41) favorite part of that is that this TTPod listener, Staley, her name was, I believe, asked if I was with him. And we had to tell her or Gunnar had to tell her that we follow the designated survivor rules where we can't travel together, much like, you know, somebody from the presidential cabinet has to stay outside of the chamber of Congress during the. the State of the Union address. That's the rule here. We need to keep the longevity and the continuity of the show alive. So today on the show, Nick and I are going head to head building the ideal wallet in a fantasy football style draft, drafting our favorite credit cards out there right now from the cards we swipe every single day. to the premium cards, airline and hotel cards. You'll see all what we have in store. Plus, we're going to break down some surprisingly good moves from both American and United and some shockingly, woefully, pitifully bad changes from our beloved Air France KLM Flying Blue program. But first, Nick, I want to find something out from you. It's been a crazy year of travel credit cards and credit card news so far with Built 2.0. Yes, that was, in fact, earlier in 2026. I checked the calendar. Chase revamped his popular Sapphire Preferred card and paired it with a massive bonus. Citibank is still being Citibank. What's the biggest story in travel credit cards so far this year? And what do you think that means for the rest of the year ahead and beyond? Speaker 1 (2:04) Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, when I think about 2026 in terms of the credit card landscape, it's hard to overlook what Chase has done with both the Sapphire Reserve, which... They refreshed last year and then most of the start of this year was on a great limited time offer. They then relaunched the Sapphire Preferred, kept the annual fee at $95, just came off a huge limited time offer on that card as well. But I think importantly, they have really reworked the eligibility requirements of those cards, just making a lot more people eligible for both of those. So just looking at 2026 chases, it seems like they've kind of, admitted that Amex took a pretty big leap forward in 2025 with their relaunch of the of the platinum card and just how much buzz that card was getting. Chase has made more people eligible for for their flagship cards. And, you know, they've really come into 2026 trying to acquire customers. And I think I think that's the headline that that sticks with me. Speaker 2 (3:06) Yeah, I mean, I think the big story from 2025, what we spend a lot of last year talking about was just how. seemingly badly they fumbled the new Chase Sapphire Reserve card. And the story, at least so far in 2026, is kind of how Chase got its groove back. That now I think the onus and the expectation is that Capital One is next because it's probably time for Capital One to do something with both the Venture card as well as the Venture X, which at this point, you know, is going on five years old without any really significant changes since that card first hit the market and made a huge splash. So today on the show. Some of these cards may fit into our wallet in our draft. All that and more. Speaker 1 (3:44) This is Igor coming to you live from Speaker 2 (3:47) the Torrey Pines State Preserve and the Pacific Ocean in beautiful Southern California. Welcome back to the Thrifty Traveler Podcast. Speaker 2 (4:01) Okay, welcoming us back this week was Igor at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego. Nick, have you ever played that course? I have played Torrey Pines, and Speaker 1 (4:10) I can tell you the exact date that I played it, which is kind of a fun backstory here. So I played it on November 9th, 2021, which was also the day that Capital One launched the Venture X card. I was in San Diego with my wife. We were celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary, which was November 8th of 2021. Speaker 1 (4:31) And we found out Capital One was launching this card, which was like probably one of the biggest things to happen in travel cards in quite some time. Our team was a little leaner back then. We didn't have Jackson. So I woke up very, very bright and early on the West Coast to get our website ready to rock and get everything ready. And we had a tea time at Torrey Pines later that morning. But like an hour before we teed off, we had the website in a good spot. I applied for the card for both. My wife and I, we both got immediately declined. And I was like, what is going on? I was so flustered by it. And then I played just a horrible round of golf. But Torrey Pines itself is beautiful. It was a very fun, very fun afternoon right on the ocean. And it's surprisingly cheap for a course of that stature. And it's even cheaper if you're a San Diego resident, which I'm not. But that round will always remind me of the Venture X launch day. That's a fair. Speaker 2 (5:23) Fair correlation. I think of our friend Max Miles Points, who is a San Diego resident and plays it all the time. I also think of the time when one of my coworkers asked whether I played golf the same way that you do. And I had to say, no, I have enough other reasons to hate myself without playing golf Speaker 1 (5:39) constantly. Speaker 2 (5:41) All right, let's move to something hot and something cold. I'll look at the good and the bad from travel in the last week. And we'll start, as always, with something hot, which. This time, surprisingly, is American Airlines, which is waving the white flag on seatback screens and admitting they're actually important. Just don't expect to have a seatback screen on your next AA flight anytime soon. So last week, American announced its reversing course and will begin outfitting its entire fleet of narrow body planes with seatback screens. The good news, they will all be 4K screens, probably quite big, though they haven't said what they have said, however, that every single one of them from first class all the way to the very final row of economy will be outfitted with Bluetooth connectivity. Bad news. is that this won't start for new deliveries until sometime in 2028. And to retrofit its entire existing fleet of hundreds of Airbus A320s and Boeing 737 MAXs, that won't be done until sometime in the 2030s. So here's the best part about all of this, which you pointed out. While they began ripping out seatback screens from their domestic fleet, you know, basically a decade ago, they haven't actually finished that work. So the final American Airlines domestic narrowbody plane is currently scheduled to go into the factory and have those screens ripped out sometime this month before a couple of years from now, they're put back in. This is just the most classic American Airlines move of all moves. The airline called it. quote, one of the most significant investments in the onboard experience in our history, leaving out the fact that Delta has been doing this for the entire decade that American has been reversing course. United beat them to it and saw the error of their ways when they began ripping out their own seat back screens about a decade ago before reversing course within the last few years. I mean, this is good news. It's just hilarious, right? It's Speaker 1 (7:35) like you said, it's just such an AA thing. uh as somebody i've flown a probably three or four times in the last year a couple of those times with my family and uh my daughters uh who are who are ages eight and six i'll never forget this they they got down into the plane it's the first time they had flown american and they sat down and they looked at me like where are the tv screens right and so when you're as a as a parent like i have to figure out some other form of entertainment when we fly delta like they just plug in and there's lots of stuff for them to do on the on the cpac screen so When American first made this decision back in 2017, the whole premise was that people want to bring their own devices. They want to bring their own content, which, yes, that's true. But even if I bring my own content, I still want something on that screen, whether it's the map or whatever else. It just seemed like a very short-sighted decision at the time. And 10 years later, it seems like American is agreeing on that. I think, above all, it has just Speaker 2 (8:29) sent a very present signal for the better part of the last decade that... American just doesn't care as much about the user experience as Delta or United. And when you walk on one of those planes and see there aren't seatback screens, it says something about where American is spending its money. And it was not on making sure that users and passengers and customers were comfortable and happy and willing, therefore, to spend more money flying American, which is the core of the problem that they're trying to fix right now. Speaker 1 (8:57) Yeah. Even even though that this is coming, like you said, we're still like years away from this. So. It's going to be a while before you start to see screens on AA planes. Speaker 2 (9:06) All right. And then quickly, we'll move on to United, which just this week on Tuesday announced a baker's dozen of new routes. I'm going to take a deep breath. I'm going to try and get through all of these in one breath. There's no way this is going to work, but let's try it. Okay. United next year is adding flights from Newark to Luxembourg, Ljubljana. No way I pronounced that correctly. Slovenia, Olbia. in Sardinia, Italy, and Catania, in Sicily, Ibiza in Spain, Valencia in Spain, Tercera in the Azores of Portugal, Marseille in France, from D.C. Dulles to Toulouse, as well as D.C. to Milan in Italy, Denver to Paris, San Francisco to Okinawa, L.A. to Osaka, and they're also resuming San Francisco to Tel Aviv, Israel. Take a breath. You Speaker 1 (9:57) did Speaker 2 (9:57) great. All right. Anything here really exciting to you? What stands out? Speaker 1 (10:01) Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a lot of a lot of these routes are really fun and interesting. And, you know, United flying the new Airbus A321 XLR is making a lot of these routes possible from the US. I think just looking at this list, you know, the San Francisco to Okinawa in Japan is a super fun and exciting route. I've never been to Okinawa, but it is high on my list. And this is, I believe, the first U.S. airline that's flown directly from the Speaker 2 (10:28) mainland. Speaker 1 (10:28) I think United did like in the 80s very briefly. But it has been decades since Speaker 2 (10:34) there Speaker 1 (10:34) has been nonstop Speaker 2 (10:35) service to this southern island of Japan. Speaker 1 (10:37) And then, you know, some of these European routes like the nonstop to Slovenia, that's super cool. One of my good friends, Luke, is very excited about this new Ibiza route. He might be the biggest Ibiza fan of anyone I know, but I sent him our article on it on Tuesday morning, and he is sharing it like wildfire, trying to find somebody to go back to Ibiza with him because his wife said, no, she's not going with them. Yeah, Luke, you're going to be alone Speaker 2 (11:02) on that one. Sorry, buddy. No, on the whole. really exciting. United does this better than everybody, kind of packaging it into this thing that yes, of course, it's exciting that you can fly nonstop to places like Slovenia or Sicily or Sardinia or the Azores and a smaller island in the Azores than where most airlines fly. But I think big picture, United just gets that doing things this big and this bold just makes that airline as a whole more exciting. More than half of these are destinations where not just no U.S. airline presently flies, but no airline, period, flies nonstop from North America to many of these destinations. And this new narrow-body A321XLR, which can fly these long distances with 150 seats on the plane instead of as many as 300 seats to fill, allows them to fly to somewhere like Ibiza or Valencia, places that you just can't. possibly fill a full 787 Dreamliner with these seats. So really, really fun. I'm personally, the Slovenia one is number one on my list. Slovenia has been high on my list for the last several years. Really excited at the prospect of being able to get there nonstop from Newark. You ready to talk about something cold? Let's do it. So Air France KLM Flying Blue is one of the best airline mileage programs on the planet and has been for years. We talk about it all the time because it's got pretty cheap award rates, reasonable-ish fees, and just insanely easy miles to earn because you can transfer them from all the major banks, Chase, American Express, Capital One, Citi, the list really goes on. And over the last, I don't know, let's call it two years, they've steadily increased surcharges on their award tickets, gotten much stingier with award space, especially if you're trying to put business class with