Chase Sapphire Cards NEW Benefit + NEW Capital One Lounge

In this video, I want to talk about a new benefit on both the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Sapphire Reserve. And then we have a new Capital One airport lounge about to open at one of New York City's airports. We'll tell you which one and give you a sneak peek of the lounge at the end of the video. Hey, credit warriors, welcome to the show. My name is Ben Hedges, a.k.a. The Credit Shofu. And on this channel, I cover U.S. credit cards, personal finance and luxury travel. If you like the sound of that, please subscribe. But let's get into it. The Chase Sapphire Reserve has just added a new benefit worth $359, and that is a year's free membership of Whoop Life. I kept saying whoosh when I was recording this, but it is Whoop Life, OK? The Chase Sapphire Preferred card is also offering a scale down credit. Now, what is Whoop Life exactly? Well, Whoop is a system where you wear a wristband and it measures your body's vital signs and gives you all sorts of information about your health. And it's kind of getting funny at this stage because, you know, Amex Platinum now gives you the credit for the Aura Ring and its health monitoring system. And so Chase is following up with a credit for this alternative system from Whoop. Now, these two systems have pros and cons, and there are articles online comparing them. But what I understand from a little bit of research that I did is that the Whoop system goes deeper into health statistics and tracking. It's also more performance based, OK, for enhancing your athletic performance. And it also has longer battery life. But the Aura Ring system is more discreet since it's a ring versus a wristband, and it is also cheaper. Now, I'm not really that into this stuff, so I don't have much of an opinion on this, but I'm sure, you know, some people in the audience will actually be looking for something like this. And, you know, they certainly would want to do a bit of research so that they can choose which one of these two systems is better. Now, let's look at the actual deal that Chase is offering on both the Sapphire Preferred and the Sapphire Reserve credit cards. So there is a landing page for this deal. I'll paste it down below in a pinned comment so you can look at it. But let's read what they say. Receive a statement credit for three hundred and fifty nine dollars when you use your Sapphire Reserve card to purchase a Whoop Life membership and your plan on whoop.com by five twelve twenty six. That's May 12th, twenty six. You must activate your offer on your Chase account before placing your order. No promotion code is required at checkout. So that one is for the Sapphire Reserve, and it appears in your account as a Chase offer that you do actually have to activate. And if it's hard to find, there is a link that will take you directly to the offer on that landing page after you've signed into your Chase account. I can't show you in my account, unfortunately, because I did cancel the Chase Sapphire Reserve a few years ago. Currently from Chase, I just have two Chase Freedom cards, the Inc. Unlimited and the Inc. Preferred. And so the Inc. Preferred is the card I use to redeem points like transfer to airlines, all that stuff. So I'm a little bit more skewed towards the business side with Chase. All right. Here's what they offer on the Sapphire Preferred. Receive a one time hundred dollar statement credit when you use your Chase Sapphire Preferred card to purchase any WOOP membership on WOOP.com by 5-12-26. OK, May 12-26. And then they say the same thing about activating it in your account. But notice on the Preferred, it's for any WOOP membership. OK, whereas on the Reserve, it is for the WOOP Life membership. Now, WOOP has three different tiers of memberships and they each give you a different model of the WOOP wristband. And they also have some differences in the vital signs that they monitor. I guess the higher level tiers monitor everything that the lower level tiers plus some. All right. So the Reserve gets you the Life membership completely for free for one year. And you have to do that when you can't choose any other one. All right. Can't be applied to any other one. The Preferred would get you $100 off any of them. OK, so with the Preferred, you do have the choice and you could effectively get the one membership for $49 after that $100 credit because it used to be $199. So basically $200. It's currently on sale for $149. And then after the $100 credit, that brings you down to just $49. So, yeah, I would say it's worth it if you have the Reserve since it's completely free for one year. If you have the Preferred, you'd actually have to spend some money since the credit doesn't cover the whole thing. So I'd recommend that people with the Reserve, you guys should just do it, even if you weren't originally interested, since it's, you know, it's worth trying out. Right. Just remember to cancel it or cancel it if you don't like it before year two rolls around. That is, if you have to set it to auto renew, which you probably do. People with the Preferred, though, it's probably only people who are considering something like this anyway that would get it. OK, this might be the thing that just, you know, has you decide to do this instead of the Aura Ring or whatever other ones are available. All right. Let's now talk about this new Capital One Lounge in New York. But first, if you do like earning a lot of points that you can go on to use for free travel or whatever you like, I encourage you to check out the Built Dining Program. Now, you probably know Built because of the launch of their three new credit cards. Right. Which kind of had a few hiccups to say the least. But you can be a member of Built without having their credit card and you can still earn their points, which can be transferred to a load of transfer partners, including Hyatt Hotels and a load of airlines. And one of the easiest ways to earn built points is through their dining program. It gives you three extra points on top of whatever you earn on your credit card at most restaurants in the program. So if you use the Annex Gold, for example, that's three points from Built and four points from Annex every dollar for a total of seven points per dollar. Link for that is below. There's no cost to sign up. Just be sure to link the card that you're going to use for dining so that you can actually earn points. You can also link your Lyft account as well and you can earn extra built points on your Lyft ride, too, and also redeem built points for Lyft rides as well. And using our links really helps us out. So we very much if you do. All right. So check out this headline. Capital One's LaGuardia Airport Restaurant signals a new era for credit card travel perks. And OK, so from that headline, you know that it's from LaGuardia, one of New York's three airports. It's a little bit of an over-the-top headline. But the reason they say what they do is because this is a Capital One landing, not just a Capital One lounge. And in this article, they describe it as a full scale restaurant. It looks like they have some of the official marketing photos in this article. So we can have a look through those and we'll show you some more realistic photos in a moment from some other articles. But these seem to be the official ones where it looks really, really beautiful. All right. They've done a lot of post-production airbrushing and stuff. The lounge is twelve thousand five hundred square feet, which is definitely on the big side. And it is in Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport, which is New York's kind of number three airport, I would say, after JFK and Newark. And then you've got LaGuardia. But they just did a big renovation there. So maybe it's coming up in the world. Maybe it isn't like, you know, the worst one anymore. I'm not sure. I haven't lived in New York City for quite a few years now. The big issue with LaGuardia is that there is no subway station there. So you have to either get a taxi or a bus or drive there and park. Actually, I just looked it up on my phone. It's the only U.S. major airport that doesn't have a direct rail access, whether that's subway or a train or whatever. So the only major U.S. airport to be like that. And that was the reason that I almost never flew from LaGuardia when I lived in New York. I think I came back to LaGuardia one time, just one time, the whole like six, seven years I lived there. But, you know, I was pretty poor at the time. So I took the subway everywhere because you could just buy the monthly pass and then it's basically free or it's, you know, unlimited with that pass. So, you know, perhaps now it wouldn't be an issue, especially if I'm going there with my kids. I'm going to either drive or get an Uber or something. So anyway, View from the Wing, which is a really good blog. They have a load of good photos of the lounge and his description of it actually really makes it easy to understand the differences between this and regular airport lounges or regular Capital One lounges. Think of it more as a 180 seat restaurant than a lounge, but one that's designed to accommodate carry on luggage with nooks to store bags at seats. Also hooks for purses beneath tables and laptop work, power outlets everywhere. So to be honest, the main reason I go to lounges is to eat food. OK, since food on planes, it just sucks. Even if you're in business class, the food still really isn't that good, especially on the majority of US airlines like United and stuff. It's, you know, maybe good for something on a plane, but it would be trash if it was on the ground. Right. Like literally it would be like IKEA cafeteria food. Actually, not even as good as that. Those meatballs are amazing. So I like the idea of really focusing on providing delicious food before your flight. And in these photos, the food does look really delicious. So how do you get in? Well, if you have the Capital One Venture X or Venture X business credit cards, you get unlimited access with a same day boarding pass within three hours of departure. Guests are no longer free after recent changes to their policies. They've done an Amex and they now make you spend seventy five thousand dollars per year on your card in order to qualify for free guest access. And even then at Capital One landings, it's only one complimentary guest versus two free guests at Capital One's regular lounges. If you need to pay for guests, they cost forty five dollars with guests under 17, costing twenty five dollars and kids under two getting in for free. If you're not a cardholder, you can actually buy a day pass for ninety dollars. But I seriously doubt that's going to be worth it. Also for Venture X and Venture X business card holders, you can actually make a reservation at this lounge up to two months in advance through the Capital One app. So you can completely eliminate the risk of having to wait in line or even not get in. And this is becoming such a big issue with airport lounges, especially the really good ones. I tried to get into the Sapphire Lounge on a stopover in Boston recently. And look at that line. It was like a 40 minute wait. And if I'd bothered to wait in line, I would have got in, had like five minutes there and then had to go and board my flight. So really no point. So it's really good to see that you can book and every guest at the Capital One landing at LGA will be sat at a table. OK, because I guess you're eating a meal. So you will have a reserved seat. But yeah, it looks really cool. The opening times are five a.m. to nine p.m. and it actually opens on February 18th, which is next Wednesday. But there was a first look for journalists and I guess I could have gone actually. But it's like a two hour drive for me, so I couldn't really be bothered. But anyway, I'll post some articles of it down below, especially the ones that we showed you on screen. If you want to have a look at their photos and also learn a bit more, they talk about the chef who is some highly arcane chef. I know I didn't really go into that, but, you know, I wanted to keep the video not too long. All right. Thank you so much for watching, guys. Don't forget to sign up for the built dining program below. It is free and it can earn you three extra points per dollar on top of what you earn on whatever credit card you're using for dining. Just don't forget to link your card so that you can actually earn points. Link for that is down below. Please subscribe to the channel if you're new. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.