The Capital One Venture X Rewards Card announced lounge access changes. I think the extreme nature of the changes are a mistake for the card issuer, but they don’t affect me personally with the card. In fact I will come out ahead.

• Additional cardmembers lose free lounge access: Effective February 1, 2026, Capital One Venture X and Venture X Business cards can continue to have additional cardmembers at no annual fee, however they are unbundling lounge access from these cards. Lounge access is added for $125 per additional cardmember as an option. (You can also keep additional cardmembers on the account without lounge access, and those cards retain their no annual fee.)

  

• Capital One lounges will require $75,000 annual spend for free guests: Starting February 1, 2026, Capital One Venture X and Venture X Business cards will no longer allow complimentary guest access to the issuer’s own lounges. Guest access (2 complimentary guests at lounges, 1 at Landings) is restored for accounts that spend $75,000 per calendar year. Complimentary guest access is valid for the calendar year in which the spend requirement is met, and for the following year.

  
  Capital One Lounge, Washington Dulles

• Venture X Priority Pass loses all complimentary guests: Even cardmembers spending heavily on Venture X will no longer receive free guests. In contrast, Venture X Business will receive 2 complimentary guests for the primary cardmember, and beginning February 1, 2026 this will extend to additional cardmembers.

  
  Plaza Premium Lounge DFW Is Priority Pass-Accessible

American Express has a fee for additional cardmembers on their Platinum product. Capital One won’t – just for extending the lounge benefit to additional cardmembers. That’s smart because they aren’t necessarily cutting themselves off from additional cardmember spend. A fee for additional cardmember lounge access is a benefit cut, but one that might also improve crowding for primary cardmembers and heavy spenders who keep guest access.

Requiring $75,000 spend for free guests copies American Express. It’s a benefit cut, but not outside industry norms, and probably better than having a comparable annual fee or going the coupon book route to justify those higher fees.

On the other hand, cutting guests from Priority Pass is just a straight benefit cut that gives Venture X the worst in class Priority Pass. This is stingy and, I believe, a mistake.

$75,000 a year spenders should keep full Priority Pass and additional cardmember benefits. Capital One is cutting benefits to their heaviest spenders, just cutting them less than for cardmembers who don’t spend $75,000. Capital One should be keeping benefits for heavy spenders, or even improving them, not cutting them. I believe this is a mistake.

However, I won’t be hurt by their card changes. In fact I will end up coming out ahead.

• I actually spend $75,000 on the card as it is. I use it for unbonused spend, which is a lot of spend. So I keep guest access on my card.

• Instead of paying a lounge access fee for my wife’s additional card, I’ll just get her a primary card. She’ll come out ahead because of the $300 travel credit and annual 10,000 bonus points ‘covering’ the card’s annual fee in their entirety, from my perspective, which is better than paying a net cost for her to have lounge access as an authorized user. And she’ll earn the new cardmember bonus.

Capital One will wind up spending more on our family, and not getting more spend. Meanwhile we’ll wind up with just as much lounge access. We do not use the Priority Pass from Capital One to begin with, since we have several other cards with the benefit. I tend to use a Chase-issued Priority Pass instead.

The card was too generous at the price point – lower annual fee than similar offerings from Chase and American Express – and their lounges are generally nicer in my opinion, too. The lounges are also too crowded.

Here’s a 2 hour 14 minute wait to get into the Las Vegas Capital One lounge. And you can only access is 3 hours prior to your flight, which likely boards 40 minutes prior to departure (and you would leave the lounge 5 minutes before that). If you showed up to access the lounge 3 hours out, rather than adding yourself to the waitlist before arriving at the airport, you would wind up exactly 1 minute in the lounge before needing to leave.

LAS Lounge Wait Time
byu/yasho2249 inVenturex

At the same time, it’s a mistake to take away benefits across the board from their best customers. Impose the $75,000 threshold for full lounge access, ok, but then continue to offer those customers full lounge access! Don’t require them to spend more to keep it for their authorized users, and take away Priority Pass guests from your highest spenders!

In fact, when you take something away, give a new or better benefit to customers who are engaging in the behavior that you want (big spend). Give your best customers a couple of skip the line passes each year, so that they aren’t disappointed when accessing lounges matters most to them.

Ultimately I will come out ahead by these changes because I expect that I’ll finally be spurred to get my wife a Venture X card to replace her authorized user card on my account and because I don’t use the Capital One-issued Priority Pass anyway. But I think some of the nuance of these changes go too far.

Capital One Venture X Rewards Card