Chase has doubled the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card’s annual Chase Travel℠ hotel credit to $100 while keeping the card’s $95 annual fee unchanged. That means a single qualifying hotel booking can now cover the full fee before any points, travel protections or Chase Ultimate Rewards flexibility are counted.
The math is simple. Before the Sapphire Preferred refresh, cardholders got a $50 annual hotel credit and still had $45 left to make up against the $95 fee. Now, a one-night hotel stay costing $129 would effectively drop to $29 after the new $100 credit, compared with about $79 under the old setup. For anyone searching the Chase Sapphire Preferred fee update today, that is the whole point: the card’s annual credit now does more than trim the fee. It can erase it.
That shift matters because the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card has long been one of the easiest travel rewards cards to recommend, and the fee update lands at a time when more travel cards are pushing well beyond the $100 mark. Chase did not change the annual fee, so the card still asks for $95 up front, but the bigger hotel credit makes the value case easier to see in one trip instead of over a full year of smaller savings.
There is still a catch. The $100 credit only works if cardholders book through Chase Travel, so the perk is not as flexible as cash in hand. That leaves the real question not whether the credit is larger — it is — but how many cardholders will actually use it on a hotel stay and capture the full value. For those who do, the fee is no longer the hurdle it was before the refresh.
