Capital One Announces Changes to Its Rewards Program and Venture X

As of today, Capital One is spicing it up with some new changes to its rewards program. You’ll see a new transfer partner, elevated transfer bonuses and even new cancellation options to keep you feeling confident when booking flights.

New Transfer Partner

First up, Capital One is adding a brand-new transfer partner, Virgin Red. If you aren’t familiar with Virgin Red, it’s Virgin Group’s new rewards club program that launched in the United States last fall.

It allows you to earn and redeem points through flights, hotel stays, experiences and charitable donations. It can be linked with your Virgin Atlantic Flying Club account to pool your points together.

With Capital One adding Virgin Red as a transfer partner, you’ll now be able to transfer points from most of the flexible currencies including Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points and Bilt Rewards. If you’ve got your eye on booking the Delta One suites through Virgin Atlantic, it’s now even easier to earn the points to do so.

Increased Transfer Bonuses

For a limited time from March 1 through March 31, Capital One is offering a 20% transfer bonus to its partner programs Aeroméxico Club Premier, Avianca LifeMiles and Wyndham Rewards.

If you’re looking to book Lufthansa first class through Avianca LifeMiles during the transfer bonus period, you’ll need to transfer 73,000 Capital One Venture Miles rather than the standard cost of 87,000 miles.

Wyndham Rewards isn’t spoken about a lot in the points and miles community, but it actually has a simple award chart. It consists of three tiers requiring 7,500, 15,000 and 30,000 points per night.

For just 7,500 points per night, you could book a stay at the TRYP by Wyndham Panama Centro in downtown Panama City, Panama, and relax in the rooftop pool.

Fifteen thousand points per night can book you a night at many of Wyndham’s vacation club properties that typically have full kitchens and laundry facilities available.

At the top of the award chart, 30,000 points per night could have you enjoying a night in Portugal at the Wyndham Grand Algarve, which is a short distance from the beach and has multiple pools. With Capital One’s transfer bonus, you’ll need 20% fewer points for any of these stays.

Aeroméxico can be a difficult airline to redeem award flights through since you have to call customer service to book them, but there is still value to be found and that’s mainly in its SkyTeam Go Round the World Award Ticket.

Normal pricing for one of these tickets is 352,000 miles for business class, but with the transfer bonus, it would require just 294,000 Capital One Venture Miles. You can include up to 15 stopovers per single itinerary, so fewer than 300,000 points for this type of trip is a pretty incredible deal.

Improved Cancellation Feature

Over the next few weeks, Capital One will be rolling out a new feature that gives you the ability to pay a small fee within Capital One’s travel portal to cancel a flight for any reason. With this feature, you can cancel a flight up to 24 hours prior to departure and get most of your ticket cost back.

We’re not sure what the fee will be yet, but since travel has been so unpredictable over the past two years, having a feature like this gives you another layer of protection when making your purchase through Capital One Travel.

High Welcome Offer

The Capital One Venture X Rewards Card launched in November 2021. If you’re over 5/24 and can’t get any more Chase cards, this is a great card to look into.

Final Thoughts

Over the past year, we’ve seen Capital One make a concerted effort to improve its rewards program by adding new transfer partners, improving the transfer ratios of those transfer partners and launching a new premium travel rewards card that is competitive with the top cards on the market.