Travel hacking is dead.

And I blame TikTok.

After three weeks of travel, including a trip to France, it’s time to make a tragic announcement.

Travel hacking is dead and I blame TikTok.

For the uninitiated, travel hacking (aka credit card churning) uses credit card rewards and sign-up bonuses to cover the costs of hotels, flights, and other activities.

Is it a bit dramatic to say travel hacking is dead? Yes. There are still zealots dedicated to figuring out every possible loophole and maximizing all benefits. Those diehard fans, who are willing to spend hours on research, can yield a quality return. But for those of us who implemented a somewhat casual approach, or simply don’t travel quite as much as we used to, run the risk of not recouping the cost of the annual fee. A major offender: Chase’s Sapphire Reserve card.

Chase Sapphire Reserve promo at a Chase Bank branch in Manhattan. It’s odd to me that they’re “introducing” a card that’s almost a decade old.

The bank sent shockwaves through the travel hacking community when it announced it would be increasing the annual fee on the Sapphire Reserve to $795, up from $550. The Sapphire Reserve has long been a cornerstone of many a frequent traveler’s point strategy.

Chase claims the upgraded Sapphire Reserve offers “over $2,700 in annual value” — according to the promotional mailer I, a current cardholder, received earlier this week. And, I’ll be honest, the mailer was seductive. Suddenly, I started debating whether or not I should downgrade my card or could I milk at least $795 in value in order to justify the annual fee aka $66.25 per month?

For years it made sense to pay a hefty annual fee in order to hold this and other cards because the benefits so dramatically reduced the price tag — and the benefits didn’t involve activations and hoops to jump through.

Here’s a sampling of what that looked like for the Sapphire Reserve:

• $300 annual travel credit: This is applied automatically as a credit back on your statement for the first $300 in spend on anything coded as travel, which can include Uber/Lyft trips and refilling an EZPass. Basically, I think of this as automatically reducing the annual fee to $250 because I always use the $300 travel credit.

• $100 credit every four years to reimburse for TSA precheck or Global Entry fee when you use your Reserve card to pay for the application.

• Priority Pass lounge access: You automatically get access to a Priority Pass membership which enables you to use lounges in airports around the world.

Vetting the value of credit card rewards and perks

Under the relaunch, a lot of the new perks are highly lifestyle dependent (e.g. DoorPash membership, StubHub credit, Peloton membership credit) and means swapping over preexisting subscriptions. Credit card rewards are fundamentally designed to make us spend more on the credit card, which also means a lot of these perks were developed to encourage signing up for new services or memberships, especially modestly priced monthly subscriptions we might set and forget.

For example, the Peloton membership credit is $10 a month with a $120 annual max. The cheapest membership option Peloton offers, with no equipment purchased, is $12.99 per month. That means you start with spending $35.88 annually just to get the $120 credit. But I’m going to wager a bet that plenty of users will start doing mental gymnastics to justify upgrading to a higher tier. It would look something like this: The next membership level up is $24 a month, but thanks to the Sapphire Reserve credit, that would lower to $14 a month. And $14 a month is only $1.01 more per month than paying out of pocket for the cheapest membership. So basically, you’re paying the same amount for more, right? (When really you’re paying now for a service you otherwise might not have used at all.)

Ah, the psychology of money!

The minds behind the rebrand probably know that plenty of users won’t bother to enroll in some of the perks, especially if it involves swapping over an already existing membership to enroll in a freebie. Well, of course they do, they’ve go the data about what existing cardholders have done for years.

It isn’t just the credit card companies that are making travel hacking less lucrative.

Airlines, especially Delta, have devalued their frequent flyer miles and made it significantly harder to achieve meaningful status. Delta’s co-branded credit cards also received a downgrade in the last few years, including the devastation that many cardholders no longer receive the unlimited SkyClub access (unless they spend at least $75,000 a year on the card). In Delta’s defense, though I am loath to stand up for a major airline, its most frequent travelers were likely getting fed up with the state of constantly overrun lounges.

Why I blame TikTok

Travel hacking has exploded in the last few years, especially when revenge spending set in after the pandemic, and the rise of TikTok made it easy for travel influencers and travel hacking experts to share tips with the masses. The masses decided to try and juice the system which led airport lounges looking more like a hot club on a Saturday night, including lines to get in and velvet ropes! (Do the youths still go to the club?) The airlines had to do something to make their elite offerings feel elite again, which meant changing the rules to keep us credit card holding riff raff at a minimum! And make it harder to achieve status with the airline through credit card spend alone.

Sure, it takes a decent credit score and income to gain access to these credit cards, but they’re certainly not exclusively for the wealthy. The banks just want people to feel special about being a card holder. The cards themselves are modeled to feel hefty and look impressive, but we’re not talking about an AMEX Black card here.

Of course, that is simply my pet theory about why we’re seeing a shift away from accessibility to a higher-level of elitism in travel hacking. Chase’s relaunch of the card clearly received a big marketing budget and the bank is going after higher net worth travelers in an effort to make it seem exclusive and sexy.

My unsolicited advice: time to evaluate all your credit cards. (Even if you’ve never been a travel hacker.)

If you pay an annual fee, on any card, then you need to crunch the numbers and see if the math is still mathing. For me, it’s just not on some of these higher-end travel cards. There are plenty of other cards out there and ways to travel hack, but the sun has set on the casual approach yielding a solid reward for adventurers.

P.S. You don’t have to just outright cancel the card – especially if you’re looking to protect your credit score. You can call and ask to downgrade to a card with a lower or no annual fee. If you do decide to outright cancel, it will cause a short-term, usually modest, dip in your credit score. It will bounce back fairly with good behaviors like low utilization on your other cards and making on-time payments. The only folks who should avoid canceling a card outright are those getting ready to apply for a mortgage or another loan in the next few months. You want your credit score as high as possible!