Unless you’ve been living under the rock, you would know that this is the best premium card on the market today, period.
Crystal Visa Infinity by City National Bank has been out for 2+ year yet a lot of its secret were relatively unknown for quite some time. It probably helped that many bloggers didn’t have first hand experience with the card.
It wasn’t until recently, that a major blogger, frequent miler, wrote about his application process for Crystal Visa Infinity card. Up until that point almost (all) reports on major blog were copy pastes and/or based on what someone else was saying about the card. You can read said post by frequent miler by clicking here.
Anyway, let’s get to the heart of the topic – waiving annual fee on Crystal Visa Infinity. Well, you can have the annual fee waived by spending $75k annually on the card.
$75k annual spend may seem absurd but remember that this card is targeted towards high end folks so asking an annual $75k spend for fee waiver is reasonable from bank’s end. As far as the card holder goes note that this card also reimburses up to $550 in airline lounge fee for $50k annual spend. If $550 credit is attractive to you then spending $25k more to get fee waiver isn’t too bad. Additionally, in addition to dining and travel, Crystal Visa Infinity also earns 3x on gas and grocery. In above linked post, frequent miler also claims up to 1.25 cpp on flights…which isn’t too bad.
How do you actually get the fee waived? You’ll have to contact your banker after you’ve met $75k annual threshold and they’ll put in the request to waive the fee. Annual fee is not automatically waived after meeting the spend. If you’re doing funny business, I’m not sure how wise it would be to contact a banker and thus put eyes on your account.
This does not seem to be a well documented benefit. It certainly isn’t in the application forum. However, I’ve verified it through multiple bankers. This is also not a new benefit…it has just been there.
Overall Thoughts
The best premium card even got better.
Spending $75k annually on this card makes sense because of category bonus on gas and grocery, not horrible redemption rate, and also because of lounge fee benefit for meeting $50k annual threshold.
