Sapphire Reserve $75K Spending Bonus
There was a lot of news going on last week, especially at Chase. They launched a new premium business card, completely refreshed the Sapphire Reserve and launched increased offers for the Sapphire Preferred and the United Quest cards. Oh yeah, not to mention they dropped a whole new list of application rules on us. Buried a little bit by all of that craziness was a new Chase Sapphire Reserve $75K spending bonus card perk. When I saw it initially I didn't give it much consideration, but figured I should run the numbers to see if I was wrong there. Let's dive in!
What You Get By Spending $75,000 On Your Sapphire Reserve
You may have not even noticed there was a Sapphire Reserve $75K spending bonus with everything else that happened last week. Here are the details of what you get if you put that much spend on your card within a calendar year:
- Customers who spend $75,000+ per year get the following perks
- $500 Southwest credit, but must be booked through Chase Travel
- IHG Diamond Elite Status
- Southwest Airlines A-List status
- $250 to spend at The Shops at Chase
None of these perks scream huge value, except maybe the Southwest credit. Even that one is a bit deceiving though…
What Are These Spending Perks Actually Worth?
It is hard to put a value on some of these, since so much will depend on your travel patterns. If you stay at a lot of IHG properties, or fly Southwest pretty often, then you may find this a heck of a lot more valuable. I'll take the approach of looking at these Sapphire Reserve $75K spending bonus perks from the every-person point of view. You should tweak it as needed to fit your own situation.
$500 Southwest Credit For Chase Travel
The easiest perk to quantify is the Southwest credit. Getting $500 looks like a nice perk, especially if you enjoy flying Southwest. Although, your opinion may have soured some on this recently. Even though $500 looks great, it is actually worth a heck of a lot less than that for a few reasons. Southwest sells $500 gift cards for 10% -20% off at warehouse clubs and other stores semi often. Because of that we should discount this perk a bit. If Chase works this like they do their $300 travel credit then you won't earn points on the flight purchase either. It may even come right off the top of your booking and you will just get billed for whatever is leftover. That would be similar to what we see with the Venture X travel credits. That is a loss of 8x earning via the portal, or 4x if you were booking direct. I would put the true value of this perk at around $425.
Southwest A-List Status
Everyone loves themselves some airline status, but Southwest A-List status isn't it. The best perk is your first bag free, which was never needed before. Guess what? You can get that by holding a Southwest credit card. The cheapest option comes in at an affordable $69 too. That is exactly what you should value this status at because of it. If you already have a Southwest credit card then it would be a $0 valuation.
IHG Diamond Status
Chase kept the kind of worthless status train rolling when it brought IHG Diamond all aboard as a perk. Unfortunately for us, Chase selected the 4th best hotel program out there to pair up for this Sapphire Reserve $75K spending bonus perk. That isn't to say that I don't find value in the IHG ecosystem, because I do. Having said that, even as a somewhat enthusiast, I stay 3-5 nights in an IHG hotel a year. There are just so many better options available often and it slides down the list of booking options for me because of it. The biggest perk of IHG Diamond status is free breakfast. Let's assume you use that for two people five times a year. That has a replacement cost of like $30 per visit, so around $150 in value. (Remember that hotel breakfast is never worth what the bill says it is.) This could be worth $0 or several hundred dollars to you depending on how often you visit IHG hotels.
Shops At Chase
Get ready for some packing cubes you never knew you wanted! I have a feeling Shops at Chase will be super expensive products that a $250 credit maybe gets you to just below the price you could get elsewhere. If you thought the struggles with the Dell credit were real, then I can't imagine what this will look like. I'll put the value at $50 because there might be something you find kind of useful that you never knew you had to have. Enjoy those cashmere socks!
Is Is Worth Chasing These Spending Perks (Pun Intended)
Getting to the Sapphire Reserve $75K spending bonus will wear your credit card out from swipes. Most will probably say that a welcome offer will be a better focus of that spend, but that can be seriously flawed logic. We don't know what one person's spend is. Maybe they have massive amounts of work travel that makes this simple. Because of that we should look at this analytically. Let's see what the total value earned is:
- Southwest $500 credit – $425
- A-list status – $69
- IHG Diamond Status – $150
- Shops at Chase – $50
- Total Value = $694
My total valuation for these perks comes in at $694. That is taking the approach of looking at it for the masses. You could change some of these around depending on how often you expect to use the earned perks. Maybe you don't have a Costco or Sam's Club membership, so you add the cost of that membership to the Southwest credit perk. Maybe your work puts you up in IHG hotels all the time and the free breakfast saves your per diem for other things. Shops at Chase could have a great deal on something you needed to buy and the $250 is worth the full freight. It all depends on YOU, so crunch your own numbers here too.
On their face, the Sapphire Reserve $75K spending bonus perks would give you an additional return of $0.009 per dollar on that $75K in spend. Yes, you are seeing clearly – that is under 1% of extra value. A complete joke for that level of spending if you ask me. If you were spending that much anyway because of the card's earning structure, then great, these are added perks for nothing. If not, this is as far away from worth chasing as you can get.
Sapphire Reserve $75K Spending Bonus: ToP Thoughts
Sometimes I am surprised by the numbers when I sit down and actually go through them, but this isn't one of those times. The Sapphire Reserve $75K spending bonus perks sound good in theory – they just fall short in terms of execution. They fall wildly short if I am being honest. Chase would have better off giving 75,000 Ultimate Rewards points for the spend level, but they wouldn't be able to have partners carry their water that way.
Let me know your thoughts on the Reserve spending perks over in the ToP Facebook Group.
