UPDATE: Referral links for this card are now showing a 90,000-point bonus instead of the normal 75,000-point bonus. Even better!

If you have a Capital One Venture X card, you’ll want to make sure you get the full value out of your $300 annual travel credit to offset the $395 annual fee as much as possible. So how do you use it?

Unlike the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which automatically credits any travel purchases you make anywhere without you having to do anything, the Capital One Venture X applies a credit only to travel purchases you make through the Capital One travel portal. So you’ll need to book your travel that way in order for the credit to apply. And the credit is an annual one, so it’ll renew from year to year around your card-opening-anniversary date.

How is the credit actually applied?

Until recently, the $300 credit was applied to offset any travel-portal purchases on your monthly statement until the $300 cap was met. But Capital One has recently changed how the credit is applied. Now the $300 is applied to your travel-portal purchase as you’re completing the transaction, so it just reduces your total by $300. And if your purchase is less than $300, it will apply toward the whole amount you’re spending and then whatever is left up to the $300 cap will go toward your next portal purchase.

So what travel can I actually book in the portal?

To access the travel portal, log into your Capital One account and click “Travel” > “Start booking now.”

You’ll be able to search for flights, hotels (including “premium stays”), and rental cars.

This is just my personal advice, but I would suggest trying to keep your portal-booked travel to just hotels or rental cars, and not flights. Why? Because booking flights through a portal can be a risk if anything changes with your reservation. Whenever an airline changes their schedule or if a flight is cancelled, you may end up ping-ponging between the Capital One Travel people and the airline representatives trying to figure out a new booking or fix whatever the problem is. If you stick to using the portal to book hotels and rental cars, I think the likelihood of those reservations staying the same will be much more likely. We’ve had about 60% of our flight reservations changed (across multiple airlines) within the past two years, so to me it seems more likely than not that your flights could change. That’s just my personal way of thinking about it, but if you disagree, that’s ok! Use your travel-portal credit however it helps you the most.

Example booking

Here’s an example of how searching for a rental-car reservation on the portal works. We’re planning a spring trip to Texas to visit friends and family and wanted to use my $300 annual travel credit to book the car.

The portal delivers search results across all categories of cars, and you can filter the results by car type, price, company, car requirements, and cancellation policy. Most of the car options that show up when I search include free cancellation only up until 48 hours before the reservation, so be aware of that if you go this route.

When I searched for a rental car that met our needs, I compared the Capital One travel portal to Costco and Alamo, which usually have the best prices and best policies. This time Capital One came out ahead of both Costco and Alamo. Capital One has a price-match guarantee, so their portal prices tend to be better than some other banks’ portal prices.

The week we’re going seems like a high-demand week, because prices were high everywhere I searched. So saving $300 out of pocket on this trip expense seemed like a great idea.

When you select a car and go to check out, it gives you the option to pay using your Capital One miles or money, and I picked money. (My Capital One miles are going to be transferred to airline partners for the best return on my miles, no question.) If you don’t want to pay with money and want to use some of your Venture miles instead, Capital One will apply the $300 credit first and then you can choose to use miles to pay the rest.

And whatever you book through the travel portal that you do end up paying for, you earn 5x (airfare) or 10x (hotels & rental cars).

If you use the portal to book a hotel, I’d suggest trying to use it for a hotel in a place that doesn’t have good options that are bookable with points transferred to a hotel chain. For example, we used our travel credits last year to book a hotel in Annecy, France, which didn’t have any Hyatt or IHG properties (our go-to hotel chains) for us to use our points with. That way we could save our Hyatt points and IHG points for hotel stays in bigger cities where those brands have properties.

Also be aware that if you book a hotel through the travel portal, you usually won’t get any elite member benefits you might be entitled to if you had booked directly with the hotel, and your portal-booked stay will not earn any qualifying nights toward hotel status. If they’ll let you input your hotel-program membership number when you book, do that just in case they do credit you for the stay, but don’t count on it happening.

The Capital One Venture X is my favorite all-around card because it comes with so many valuable benefits and earns 2x on every dollar you spend. It also has some really appealing travel partners to transfer to, such as Turkish Airlines, Aeroplan, Cathay Pacific, Flying Blue, and Singapore KrisFlyer. When you take advantage of the $300 annual travel credit and get your 10,000-mile anniversary bonus every year you keep the card, you’re effectively getting paid $5 to have this card! And then you add the welcome bonus, the 2x, the primary rental-car insurance, and the Priority Pass lounge access that comes with it and it’s an even better deal.

Do you have any questions about using the $300 annual Capital One Venture X travel credit? Let me know in the comments!