The portfolio of credit cards offered by the Swiss investment bank UBS tends to fly under the radar. One reason for that is that UBS doesn’t tend to offer a welcome bonus on its cards and another is that you can’t apply for the cards online – you have to call in.
At some point in the recent past, UBS increased the annual fees on its personal and business Visa Infinite cards to $650. So why are we bothering to write about these cards with a high annual fee and no welcome offer? Well, along with the annual fee increases, the card benefits have greatly improved which, for the right person, could make one or both of these a keeper card. The Priority Pass benefit is particularly interesting.
The Offers & Key Card Details
| Card Offer and Details |
|---|
 ⓘ $-200 1st Yr Value Estimate$500 airline incidental fee credit valued at $450 Click to learn about first year value estimates None (call to apply) Non-AffiliateThis is NOT an affiliate offer. We always present the best offer even when it means less revenue for Frequent Miler This card does not currently have a welcome offer$650 Annual Fee Bonus offer is not available to either current or previous UBS credit cardmembers Information about this card has been collected independently by Frequent Miler. The issuer did not provide the details, nor is it responsible for their accuracy. FM Mini Review: May be worth considering if you highly value the card's perks and if you can maximize rewards by purchasing flights costing as close to $900 as possible for 50,000 points (up to 1.8 cents per point value) Earning rate: 3x for commercial air travel, 2x for eligible groceries, select digital entertainment, newspapers and cable TV, and 1X everywhere else Base: 1% Flights: 3% Grocery: 2% Card Info: Visa Infinite issued by UBS. This card has no foreign currency conversion fees. Big spend bonus: Up to $500 credit towards restaurant transactions, Amazon Prime membership fees and airport lounge access fees after $25K calendar year spend. Noteworthy perks: Priority Pass Select ✦ $500 annual airline fee credit for selected domestic airline ✦ $120 towards Global Entry or TSA Pre√ ✦ Primary car rental collision and theft insurance coverage ✦ Travel accident insurance, emergency medical evacuation coverage, lost luggage, trip delay, trip cancellation ✦ Cellphone protection ✦ Event ticket protection ✦ No foreign transaction fees ✦ One annual complimentary 5GB, 30-day cellular data roaming plan per cardholder in 125+ countries via GigSky |
| Card Offer and Details |
|---|
 ⓘ $-200 1st Yr Value Estimate$500 airline incidental fee credit valued at $450 Click to learn about first year value estimates None (call to apply) Non-AffiliateThis is NOT an affiliate offer. We always present the best offer even when it means less revenue for Frequent Miler This card does not currently have a welcome offer$650 Annual Fee Bonus offer is not available to either current or previous UBS credit cardmembers. Note: UBS Business cards DO add to Chase's 5/24 Rule. Information about this card has been collected independently by Frequent Miler. The issuer did not provide the details, nor is it responsible for their accuracy. FM Mini Review: May be worth considering if you highly value the card's perks and if you can maximize rewards by purchasing flights costing as close to $900 as possible for 50,000 points (up to 1.8 cents per point value) Earning rate: 3x for air travel and hotel stays, 2x for eligible business expenses (office supplies, business cable/internet, shipping, business phone and advertising), 1X everywhere else Base: 1% Flights: 3% Hotels: 3% Phone: 2% Office: 2% Card Info: Visa Infinite issued by UBS. This card has no foreign currency conversion fees. Big spend bonus: Up to $500 credit towards restaurant transactions, Amazon Prime membership fees and airport lounge access fees after $25K calendar year spend. Noteworthy perks: Priority Pass Select ✦ $500 annual airline fee credit for selected domestic airline ✦ $120 towards Global Entry or TSA Pre√ every 4 years ✦ Primary rental car coverage for business rentals ✦ Travel accident insurance, emergency medical evacuation coverage, delayed & lost luggage, trip delay, trip interuption, trip cancellation ✦ Price protection, event ticket protection, return protection, extended warranty, purchase protection ✦ No foreign transaction fees ✦ One annual complimentary 5GB, 30-day cellular data roaming plan per cardholder in 125+ countries via GigSky |
Quick Thoughts
I imagine many of you won’t be familiar with the intricacies of these cards; I certainly wasn’t until yesterday when I was updating our Best Credit Card Offers page with the changes on them.
Annual Fees
Let’s start with the annual fees. The annual fee on the personal Visa Infinite card used to be $450, while the business version had a $550 annual fee. Both cards have now had their annual fees increased to $650 – a massive fee considering there’s no welcome offer on either card.
Priority Pass Select
Both cards still come with a Priority Pass Select membership; having checked the card guide, I didn’t see anything suggesting that this type of membership provides access to Priority Pass restaurants and other non-lounge experiences. However, the benefit is much better than I expected. Joel confirmed in the comments below that the business version of the card at least has unlimited guesting benefits and does include Priority Pass restaurants. Karl meanwhile also confirmed that unlimited guesting and all experiences are included, along with the ability to add up to 24 additional users.
That’s superb and is a benefit that would make this card worthwhile for some people, especially those with large families who travel frequently.
As for new and updated benefits, here’s what’s changed:
Global Entry / TSA PreCheck
The cards previously had a reimbursement benefit for Global Entry and/or TSA PreCheck. That was previously limited to $100 in statement credits every four years; seeing as those fees have gone up, the statement credits have now been correspondingly increased to $120 every four years.
Airline Fee Credit
Both of these cards have an airline fee credit benefit akin to cards like the Amex Platinum and Business Platinum. In the past this benefit was for up to $250 of statement credits each year on the personal Visa Infinite card and $350 on the business version; that’s now been increased to $500 per calendar year. The fact that it’s on a calendar year basis is particularly interesting because it means that for the cost of the $650 annual fee, in your first year you could get up to $1,000 in reimbursements.
Note that the benefit is similar to Amex’s in that you have to select a qualifying airline first, so you sadly can’t seemingly pay for checked baggage fees for American Airlines, Delta and United all in the same calendar year. You can however change your selected airline in the next calendar year, so you could spend $500 with one airline now and then change it to a different airline on January 1 (or later) to use next year’s $500 credit.
Something worth noting is that the card guide states the following:
The selected airline applies to all cards in the card account. For example, a card account with two or more cards receives one $500 credit value per year
I’m assuming that relates to a primary cardholder having authorized user cards, rather than someone having two or more Visa Infinite cards as the primary cardholder only being eligible for one $500 annual fee across all those cards. If you were planning on getting two or more UBS Visa Infinite cards though, that’s something to keep an eye out for.
Karl has confirmed in the comments that the airline fee credit works in a similar way to the Amex airline fee credit from a decade ago in terms of the kind of charges that are accepted; that’s very good news.
$500 Annual Credit
In addition to the $500 airline fee credit, there’s an entirely separate $500 annual credit you can earn when spending $25,000 on a UBS Visa Infinite card in a calendar year. That’s an improvement in a couple of key ways.
One is that the spending requirement to earn the $500 credit has been halved as it used to require $50,000 of spend. The other positive change is the list of expenses that you can redeem it against.
Previously, this $500 benefit was only valid towards airport club day pass or annual airport club membership. Depending on which airports you’re flying through, in which cabin, and your airline elite status, that might not have been much of an incentive if a premium cabin booking, elite status and/or Priority Pass would cover your lounge needs. Airport lounge fees are still eligible for reimbursement under this benefit, but UBS has also added restaurant spending and Amazon Prime membership fees as eligible charges. Even if you have zero interest in getting Amazon Prime or a lounge membership, I’m sure most people who’d get one of these $650 annual fee cards would be more than capable of spending $500 on dining on it, especially considering it includes meal delivery services like DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub.
Something important to be aware of with this benefit is that you have to manually request each individual reimbursement within 120 days of the transaction. That adds hassle to the benefit, but it can be done online rather than having to call which is at least something I guess.
If you were to value this $500 benefit as good as cash, that initially seemed to me to represent an incremental 2% bonus on your spend. However, it’s better than that. Karl has shared in the comments that it’s more like 4% because apparently the bonus is awarded if you spent $25,000 during the current year or the previous year, meaning you only have to hit that $25,000 spend requirement every other year.
Earning Categories
The bigger question will be if it’s worth spending $25,000 on the personal or business UBS Visa Infinite cards. There’s definitely potential there, especially considering how much the points can be worth.
On the personal card, you earn:
- 3x for commercial air travel
- 2x for eligible groceries, select digital entertainment, newspapers and cable TV
- 1X everywhere else
On the business card, you earn:
- 3x for air travel and hotel stays
- 2x for eligible business expenses (office supplies, business cable/internet, shipping, business phone and advertising)
- 1X everywhere else
With regards to redemptions, UBS points can be worth more than 1 cent per point (cpp), but it gets a little convoluted. You can redeem points at 1cpp as standard, but they also offer a couple of fixed rate redemption options that get you more value.
You can redeem a fixed 25k points for a flight (booked through UBS) worth up to $350. If maxing that out, it’s 1.4cpp of value. Alternatively, you can redeem a fixed 50k points for a flight (again, booked through UBS) worth up to $900. That’s worth 1.8cpp, but only if maxing out on a $900 flight. For flights costing more than $350 or $900 respectively, you can redeem points in 5k increments, with each 5k points being worth $50 (i.e. 1cpp).
That means a redemption could have a blended redemption rate. For example, let’s say you want to book a $500 flight. You’d redeem 25k points for the first $350 of that, with another 15k points being required for the additional $150. That’s a total of 40k points for a $500 flight which works out at 1.25cpp.
If you tend to book paid airfare in that kind of price range, you could certainly value UBS points at greater than 1cpp. Given the limited ways to get value in excess of 1cpp though, I wouldn’t value them too highly. That said, earning 2x or 3x in the bonused categories and redeeming for ~1.4-1.8cpp of value certainly isn’t an awful return on your spend, especially if you’re spending $25,000 over the course of a calendar year in order to get the additional $500 airport lounge / restaurant / Amazon Prime fee credits.
GigSky
A few months ago, we shared that a new benefit on Visa Signature and Infinite cards is a GigSky benefit. Seeing as both these UBS cards are Visa Infinite cards, cardholders are eligible for one annual complimentary 5GB, 30-day cellular data roaming plan per cardholder in 125+ countries via GigSky.
GoGo Passes
The personal UBS Visa Infinite card used to come with 12 GoGo internet passes. That benefit is no longer listed on the UBS website and I’m not seeing it listed as a benefit in the card guide, so it appears to have been removed.
NetJets
A benefit that caught my eye in the card guide is for NetJets. As a UBS Visa Infinite cardholder, you can pick one of the following benefits:
- One (1) guaranteed complimentary round-trip upgrade with the purchase of a 50-hour NetJets Fractional Share or NetJets Fractional Lease, per contract year, on a light or midsize aircraft
- Reduced pricing for all daily flight times at or above 2.5 hours AND guaranteed availability to one (1) annual roundtrip upgrade, at the then current applicable interchange rate
- Annual $10,000 credit applied to your NetJets account each contract year with the purchase of a NetJets 25-Hour Lease
- NetJets Card with only 12.5-hours of flight time to be used over a 12-month term
- 355 days of guaranteed access on a NetJets Card purchase of 25-hours or more
- One (1) complimentary flight hour added to your NetJets Card purchase of 25-hours or more
For someone interested in flying privately using NetJets, this benefit could prove to be very valuable. That eye-popping $10,000 annual credit for a NetJets 25-Hour Lease in particular grabbed my attention until realizing that a 25-Hour Lease usually costs $223,000 per year, so that $10k discount “only” represents a 4.5% discount. Still, for someone dropping that kind of money, $10,000 of savings for simply having a $650 annual fee card isn’t too shabby, assuming that kind of discount isn’t widely available through other means.
Final Thoughts
Getting a card with a $650 annual fee but without a welcome offer – and the requirement to apply over the phone – is a bit of a hard sell. However, with the improved benefits on these cards, there’s definitely some kind of value proposition for someone who can get good value from the benefits, especially if they’d be spending $25k on the card each year anyway.
These cards also come with a whole host of other benefits such as travel protections, primary auto rental collision damage waiver, cell phone protection, event ticket protection, discounts on meet and greet services at airports worldwide, discounts on Wings Air Helicopters, and more. You can find the full card guide here; scroll down to the bottom of the Visa Infinite card section where you’ll see it say ‘Download the UBS Visa Infinite credit card benefits and My Choice Rewards program details, terms, and conditions’.
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All airline tickets purchased with Points are non refundable, non-transferable and non-changeable. Thats kind of a blow!
The way it works at UBS is you pay for flights through the concierge with your credit card. You get an actual charge for the full ticket price on your card. And then UBS issues you a statement credit redeemed from your points to the card in the amount of your ticket price. So, yes, the points are not refundable — but you wouldn’t want them to be. Once they’ve been converted to cash that’s the best case scenario for you.
The actual ticket is the same as it would be for booking at any other 3rd party site. I got 4 United economy tickets last year. I canceled all 4 through the United app just hours before the flight. I got Future Flight Credits which showed up on my United account which I used for a different flight later in the year.
Thanks for info!
Not only is the Priority Pass unlimited guest and all experiences, AUs also get their own Priority Pass and you can have up to 24 AUs for free.
The 25K spend requirement for the $500 dining credit is only necessary every other year, since the bonus comes if you spent during the current year or the previous year. So it can be up to a 4% bonus, in addition to normal spend earnings.
Also any trick that worked for the Amex airline fee credit 10 years ago probably still works on the UBS card today. You should be able to get practically full cash value on both credits for $1000.
Wow, this is making the card seem even more enticing. I’ve updated the post with the additional details you provided – thanks!
Also the $500 dining credit and the $500 airline fee credit count as spend toward the 25K making it really 24K additional. Redeeming points for airfare comes in the form of a statement credit, so it also counts toward spend requirements (and 3x points, as does the fee credit.)
And then there’s the City National Bank Visa Infinite.
Stephen: I’ve had the business visa for several years. The priority pass has unlimited guest benefit including Priority Pass restaurants. I was at the San Francisco Giants clubhouse in SFO about 5 years ago and some dude had 25 fraternity friends and each got $28.
Helpful five years ago.
That’s awesome news, thanks for confirming that!