Summer travel: 5 great travel rewards programs

Summer travel can be cheap with the help of credit card rewards. Here are five great credit card rewards programs to fit your vacationing style.

4. Show-me-the-money vacationers

Eduardo Munoz/Reuters/File
A customer exits the lobby of JPMorgan Chase & Co. headquarters in New York in May. The bank's Chase Sapphire Preferred Card offers 40,000 bonus points, good for $500 in travel accommodations, if you spend $3,000 during the first three months.

If you aren’t quite sure what you want your summer vacation to be like or just want to replenish your bank account after an impending trip, the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card is a great choice. It gives you 40,000 bonus points if you charge $3,000 during the first three months, which are redeemable for $500 in travel accommodations or a $400 statement credit. It doesn’t charge foreign fees and the $95 annual fee doesn't kick in until the second year.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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