Best cards for hotels

Featured cards

All 12 cards in this ranking, with what each one is actually best at. Tap any card to jump to its row.

1. 1 Wells Fargo Autograph Journey — Best overall for hotels: 5x on hotels, $95 a year — 5.0¢ back per dollar
2. 2 Sapphire Reserve for Business — Best for business spending: 4x on hotels, $795 a year — 5.0¢ back per dollar
3. 3 Chase Sapphire Reserve — 4x on hotels, $795 a year — 5.0¢ back per dollar
4. 4 Delta SkyMiles® Platinum Business American Express Card — 3x on hotels, $350 a year — 3.5¢ back per dollar
5. 5 Delta SkyMiles® Platinum American Express Card — 3x on hotels, $350 a year — 3.5¢ back per dollar
6. 6 Aer Lingus Visa Signature Card — 2x on hotels, $95 a year — 2.6¢ back per dollar
7. 7 British Airways Visa Signature Card — 2x on hotels, $95 a year — 2.6¢ back per dollar
8. 8 Iberia Visa Signature Card — 2x on hotels, $95 a year — 2.6¢ back per dollar
9. 9 United Explorer Card — 2x on hotels, $150 a year — 2.5¢ back per dollar
10. 10 Southwest Rapid Rewards Performance Business Card — 2x on hotels, $299 a year — 2.4¢ back per dollar
11. 11 Norwegian Cruise Line World Mastercard — Best with no annual fee: 2x on hotels, no annual fee — 2.0¢ back per dollar
12. 12 Royal ONE Plus Visa Signature — 2x on hotels, $99 a year — 2.0¢ back per dollar

The ranking

6 more cards can reach up to 5% here through rotating or pick-your-own categories — powerful, but only in the right quarter or with the right election, so we rank them separately: Chase Freedom Flex, Discover it Balance Transfer, Discover it Cash Back, Discover it Student Cash Back, NHL Discover it, Venmo Credit Card.

Co-brand and portal-only cards — only at their own brand or portal

28 co-brand cards print a hotels rate that only pays at their own brand. Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card pays 14x at Hilton — worth 7.0¢ per dollar there; at any other hotel it earns 3x, or 1.5¢. That is a loyalty rate, not a hotels rate, so it is disclosed here rather than ranked as if it paid everywhere.

"Value there" is the brand-locked rate × our conservative point value. "Anywhere else" is what the same card earns on hotels spending that is not at that brand — usually its base rate. If most of your hotels spending really is with one brand, the app scores that card on your actual charges.

What these actually pay on a year of hotels

A rate is a promise about one dollar. This is the same ranking run over 9 real hotels charges totalling $2,891 — our sample year — scored one charge at a time by the same engine the app uses on your own statement. Caps, category rules and point values all apply; nothing is annualised or rounded up.

On this spending the gap between top and bottom is $45 a year — the effective rate, after caps and point values, runs from 3.45% to 5.00%. Your own charges are what matter, and the app scores those rather than a sample.

How we rank

One arithmetic rule, applied by code to our maintained card database. There is no editorial pick, no hand-ordering and no sponsored slot.

• Printed earn rate. The hotels rate each issuer actually prints in its terms, read from our maintained database — not a promotional headline and not an average. A rate that only pays at one brand or through one portal is not a hotels rate and is never ranked here; it is listed separately below the table.
• Conservative point value. That rate is multiplied by our conservative mid-range value for the currency it pays. It is the step that turns "5x" into cents, and the reason a big multiplier in a weak programme does not win here. Every point value we use, published →
• Annual fee. Printed next to every card and used to break ties — where two cards pay the same, the cheaper one ranks higher. On this page the best fee-charging card needs about $3,167 of hotels spending a year before it beats the best free one. We never net the fee out of the rate for you, because whether it is worth paying depends on how much you spend.
• Caps and limits. None of the 12 cards ranked here caps its hotels bonus, and the cap column says so for each. Where a cap exists we print it rather than ranking as if it did not.
• Pool and cutoff. 221 open US cards are in our database; 12 of them print a flat hotels rate and qualify. All 12 are ranked above — that is under the 12-card cutoff, so nothing was left off.
• Rotating and pick-your-own categories. Kept out of the headline ranking, because they only pay in the right quarter or with the right election. Issuer-travel-portal-only rates are excluded for the same reason: they pay only if you book through the portal.
• Commission. The ranking code has no access to which cards pay us a commission — the ordering function never reads the affiliate file. Any apply link is attached after the order is already fixed, so it cannot move a card up or down. How that works.

Full methodology, including how each point value is set: how we value points and rank cards →

The honest caveat

The best hotels card for you depends on what you actually spend — a high-rate card with a $325 fee loses to a no-fee card below a certain volume, caps bite, and your redemptions may beat or trail our point values. That math is exactly what the optimizer does: it re-scores your real charges against every card here.

Common questions

More guides

Every guide on this site is built by the same code from the same card database, so the numbers on one page mean exactly what they mean on another. Jump sideways:

All 70 best-card guides → · Best card for a specific store or bill →