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A travel credit card can help you earn rewards that you can redeem for your next vacation. And some travel credit cards can make your travels more enjoyable or luxurious with additional benefits, such as access to airport lounges, status in loyalty programs or statement credits to offset travel-related purchases. However, you often need a credit score above 670 to qualify for premium travel cards.
Why You Need a Good Credit Score for a Travel Card
The best travel cards tend to be for people who have established their credit and shown they can use credit responsibly. Generally, that means you've taken out loans or opened credit cards and paid your bills on time, and you have a credit score in the good to exceptional score range.
For FICO® Scores☉ , those ranges are:
- 670 - 739: Good
- 740 - 799: Very good
- 800 - 850: Exceptional
A good credit score indicates someone is less likely to miss payments in the future—which can cost card issuers money. Although you may be able to get some travel cards with a lower credit score, the cards might not offer as many rewards or benefits as the top cards.
That said, credit cards don't necessarily have a strict minimum credit score requirement. In fact, a FICO® Score or VantageScore® credit score might be one of many factors a credit card company considers when reviewing your application.
Other Factors Lenders Consider During the Application Process
Although your credit score can affect your application, it's only one of the factors that credit card issuers will consider. Other factors may include:
- Your income and debt-to-income ratio (DTI): Your income, monthly housing expenses and other bill payments can affect your approval and credit limit. Some premium cards have a minimum required credit limit, which means you might not get approved if your income or DTI doesn't qualify you for at least that credit limit.
- Your current credit limits with the issuer: Your income or DTI also might affect how much total credit a card issuer will extend. If you already have credit cards from the issuer, you could try asking if you can decrease the credit limit on one of your cards to help you qualify for a new travel card.
- Your history with the card issuer: Card issuers will consider how you manage your other credit cards from the company; for example, whether you have an account with a past-due payment or if one of your cards was recently charged off.
- How many credit cards you've recently opened: Some credit card issuers will automatically turn down credit card applications from people who've opened other credit cards recently. In some cases, this includes cards from different issuers.
If you're interested in a specific travel credit card, you could search to see if other people have written about issuer-specific policies that might affect your application.
How to Get Preapproved for a Travel Credit Card
If you're not sure whether you'll likely get approved for a travel credit card, you could try to get preapproved or prequalified before applying. After gathering basic information from you and reviewing your credit report with a soft inquiry—the type that doesn't affect your credit scores—the card issuer may show you card offers.
- Go to the card issuer's website. You can look for card issuers that have preapproval tools—some do, others don't. Sometimes you'll have to check with each card you're interested in, or the issuer might show you several cards that you're preapproved for at once.
- Use Experian CreditMatch™. With Experian CreditMatch, you can get matched with multiple credit card offers from multiple credit card partners based on your unique credit profile. And using CreditMatch won't affect your credit score.
A preapproved card offer doesn't guarantee you'll get approved. But it can give you some assurance you'll likely qualify unless there are significant changes in your income, debt or credit before you apply.
How to Quickly Improve Your Credit Score
You may be able to increase your approval odds if you can improve your credit score before applying for a travel credit card. Generally, improving your credit score takes time as you make on-time payments, the average age of your accounts increases and the impact of negative marks diminishes.
However, there are also a few things that might quickly increase your credit score:
- Decrease credit card balances. The portion of your credit card balances that you're using—your credit utilization ratio—is an important scoring factor. Paying down credit card balances can decrease your credit utilization ratio and improve your credit scores. Learn more about how credit utilization ratios are calculated, because the timing of your payments can be important.
- Use Experian Boost®ø. Sign up for Experian Boost to add positive utility, phone, rent and streaming service payments to your Experian credit report. These types of payments often aren't part of your credit report, but once you add them, the on-time payments can quickly improve credit scores based on the report.
- Pay off collection accounts. Newer credit scoring models may ignore collection accounts once you pay off the balance. Even if your credit score doesn't go up, credit card issuers might look more favorably on you if you don't have any outstanding collections.
- Become an authorized user. If your spouse or a close relative manages their credit responsibly, you could ask them to add you as an authorized user on one of their credit cards. Some card issuers will report the account to the credit bureaus under your name, which could improve your credit history and score.
- Dispute credit report inaccuracies. Closely review your credit reports for errors or potential fraudulent activity that could be hurting your credit score. You have the right to dispute information on your credit report. Having inaccurate information corrected or removed could also quickly improve your credit score.
Even with these relatively fast methods, it may take around 30 to 60 days to see an improvement as many creditors only report updates to the credit bureaus monthly.
Check and Monitor Your Credit Score
Knowing your credit score can help you determine if you'll likely qualify for different types of credit cards, including the best hotel, airline and general travel cards. You can check your credit report and FICO® Score for free with Experian. You'll also receive insights on the factors affecting your credit score the most and can monitor your credit score for free. Additionally, you can use Experian CreditMatch™ to review your current credit card offers at any time without hurting your credit score.