Should You Get Hilton Honors American Express Surpass Card? Amazing Sign-up bonus and Benefits!

Today I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know about the Hilton Honors American Express Surpass Card. We'll cover everything you need to know so you can make a decision on whether it's a card you want in your wallet. We've spent years in the financial services industry and we've studied tens of thousands of people's personal finances. We want to use that experience to help you make the decisions that are best for your personal circumstances. The Hilton Honors American Express Surpass Card is one of three Hilton rewards cards offered by American Express. It offers some of the best rewards and benefits and the annual fee is reasonable for these benefits as long as you are taking advantage of them all. First off, let's talk about getting approved because none of this information does you any good if you can't get the card. American Express has three basic rules for card applicants. First is the five card rule. American Express limits you to five American Express cards at one time including both personal and business cards. Keep in mind that cards with other issuers do not count towards their five card limit. Also, these American Express charge cards do not count towards your limit either. The second rule is the one in five rule. American Express will only approve you for one card in five days so if there's more than one card that you think you want to apply for you'll have to wait a week to apply for the second one. The third rule is the two in 90 rule. American Express will only approve you for two cards in 90 days so again if you're looking for the third card you'll need to wait three months before you can apply. In addition to these rules they have standard underwriting like any other lender. American Express doesn't provide details on their approval criteria but I suspect that you will need good credit to be approved. I think you will struggle to get approved if you don't have a credit score of 680 or higher. Also, you will likely need an annual income of at least $30,000. The income limits could be higher but most of the time your income will be a key factor in the credit limit that they offer you and not necessarily a key factor in whether you will be approved. The Hilton Honors American Express surpass card has pretty standard fees and APRs. They charge $150 per year to keep the card and retain access to its rewards and benefits. There are of course cards with higher annual fees and there are credit cards with no annual fees. Whether this card is worth $150 a year to you will depend on whether you can take advantage of the rewards and benefits that they offer. The surpass cards APR ranges from 20.99% to 29.99%. If you want to pull cash out of the card they also charge a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% whichever is greater. If you are looking to move your credit card balances this is probably not the card for you. The surpass card does not offer balance transfers. If you travel abroad regularly you will want a credit card that does not charge when you use the card out of the country. This card will not charge foreign transaction fees. Now let's get to the good stuff. Rewards, benefits, and sign up bonuses. This is where you will see if the card will be worth the cost for you. An important feature of this card is that it grants you complimentary gold status at Hilton hotels. With gold status you get free room upgrades, bonus points when you stay, and a daily food and beverage or continental breakfast. Keep in mind that these benefits vary by brand and region. It's not available at some Hilton hotels so before you count on them you'll want to make sure that it works for how you commonly travel. If you are a big spender you need to know that they will upgrade you from gold to diamond status if you spend at least $40,000 on your card each year. Every year the card will give you $200 in statement credit for purchases charged directly at Hilton. There are a couple of stipulations to this credit though. You don't get the credit if you book the room through a third-party site. Also this credit shows up as a $50 credit each quarter so in order to take full advantage of this credit you have to stay at a Hilton property pretty regularly. If you spend at least $15,000 on the card in a year they will award you with one free night at a Hilton hotel. Now while there are restrictions on the location the exclusion list is much smaller than I expected. That means that you could easily use this for a stay at a $500 per night hotel. Between the room credit, the free night, and the gold status I would place the value of this card at $500 or $800 annually assuming that you travel regularly enough to use all these benefits and you like to stay at Hilton hotels. Since that's far more than the $150 annual fee this could be a really good value for you. Before you run to apply you need to take a look at the points rewards as well to see if you even want to spend the $15,000 annually on this card to get your rewards. So let's talk about where you can use this card to get the most points. The Hilton Honors American Express Surpass card offers some good bonuses when it comes to points per dollar spent. The base rate is three points for every dollar spent but there are several categories where they offer much more. For online retail purchases they offer four points per dollar. For drugstores, U.S. restaurants, supermarkets, and gas stations they give you double rewards or six points per dollar spent. And when using your card at Hilton hotels and resorts you get a whopping 12 points per dollar. That's great and all but what are the points worth? These points are not valued at one dollar per 100 points like most other credit cards. We logged into the Hilton rewards account to see what these points are worth and it's pretty interesting. The value of these points varies greatly depending on the hotel and the room type. We checked rooms in different cities and compared the room costs to dollars versus points. What we found was that the points seem to be worth between 27 cents and 45 cents per 100 points. You seem to get the best value by booking the lowest cost room at each hotel. Overall I would peg these points to be worth about 33 cents per 100 points or roughly one-third of the value of a standard Chase rewards points or American Express points. This makes sense. Most cards offer a base rate of one percent cash back with a few bonus categories in the two to four percent range. That fits nicely with the values I described. That means that I would value this program as the same as a base one percent cash back card with some great offers to get two to four percent cash back on some categories or purchases. Now let's look at the current sign up bonus. Right now American Express is offering 165,000 points when you sign up plus gold status with Hilton honors. So if you think this could be a good card for you now might be the time to sign up. I would value this offer for new card holders at 550 dollars. That's a pretty awesome deal since you will only need to spend three thousand dollars in the first six months to get the bonus. That means you can get two to four free nights at Hilton hotels for simply using the card to make everyday purchases and then paying the statement balance in full each month. That's a nice reward for spending the money you were going to spend anyway. The card does have some other benefits we should mention. The list is quite extensive so I won't share it all but here are some of the top items. American Express preferred access for some entertainment as well as American Express venue collection. This gives you access to events at some stadiums and arenas. Free shop runner membership. This is an interesting benefit for people who do a lot of online shopping. This membership offers free two-day shipping on most items and discounts on many exclusive brands. Extended warranties and purchase protection. Some of the travel benefits they offer include baggage insurance, instant emerald status at national car rental, car rental loss and damage insurance, and lowest hotel rate guarantee. Now this only applies if you book through American Express travel which means that you're not getting the maximum Hilton value. These are great benefits to have on the card that you use for everyday purchases. There are rules and stipulations of course like the fact that the card must be used for the purchase that you want covered but overall these benefits can really add to the value of the card. Now that's not to say that the benefits are unique to this card though. There are similar benefits with other American Express cards as well as other credit card issuers. However these benefits are rarely offered on cards with zero percent annual fees. So you have to decide whether these benefits are worth the $150 annual fee for you. On its own the Hilton Honors American Express Surpass card has great value and may be just the thing you're looking for if you frequently stay at Hilton hotels. If you're considering getting one of these cards or any card please help support our channel by going to our credit card marketplace page at the Yukon Project. There you can research more than 150 cards. We have the latest rewards, terms and conditions, and sign up bonuses. From there you can find and apply for the perfect card for your lifestyle. If you found this information helpful please like this video and subscribe to our channel. It really helps us out. Thanks for watching.