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The next card to be released in Canada with the World branding from Mastercard is the Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard®. With a scheduled street date of June 8, 2010. This newest offering from Capital One® is targetted towards the higher end market and is designed to compete with the Visa Infinite cards that have been attracting a lot of attention in the last two years. This card may make other credit card issuers rethink what they are offering due to its large sign up bonus, renewal bonus, high redemption ratio and a first for travel cards in Canada, price protection insurance.

Overview
Looking to storm onto the Canadian market with a new and larger set of bonuses, the Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard® provides an above average insurance and benefit package that comes at a cost equal to or lower then other high end credit cards in Canada. The card features a good earning ratio and provides the ability to book reward travel when, where and with whomever you like. Add to that, features like no fees for adding authorized users, and this card is ready to set a new standard in the Canadian Travel credit card market. For those who do not need all the features and benefits of this card, Capital One® also offers the Capital One® Aspire Travel™ Platinum Mastercard®, which is a no fee travel card and has the same interest rate as the World Mastercard.

Costs
The Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard® comes with an industry standard $120 primary card annual fee. The card offers a whopping 35,000 point welcome bonus with your first purchase which is equivalent to up to a $350 travel credit. Adding an authorized user is free which puts this card ahead of almost all of the Infinite/Platinum/Gold travel credit card offerings from other banks. The interest rate on the card is Prime + 16.8% placing it right in the middle of the pack of competitors. Please Note: A requirement of this card is a minimum personal income of $60,000 or household income of $100,000.

Earning
The Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard® Earns 2 reward miles for every $1 – on all purchases. This earning ratio puts the card ahead of all other travel point credit cards. The card features a nice 10,000 mile bonus for each year you renew the card. Effectively, this card gives you up to $450 back in your first year of card membership. Only a few other cards in the Canadian market offer renewal bonuses and they come in at 2,500 to 3,000 miles depending on the card placing this card well ahead of that.

Features and Benefits
As stated above the Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard® comes with an insurance package that competes with all the other high end cards. The card features your standard travel accident, baggage and car rental insurance that are found on almost all fee based rewards cards but it also includes some that are only found on a few select cards. These include, Trip cancellation which is only offered as a standard feature on four other travel rewards cards and Travel Medical insurance which only comes standard on about 50% of the cards in the market.

What is good about this card
This card has many great attributes, the sign up bonus of 35,000 miles with your first purchase, the yearly renewal bonus of 10,000 miles, the earning ratio of 2 Miles per dollar, no fee to add an authorized user and the whole host of insurance including trip cancellation.

What is not so good about this card
I can only think of two potential downfalls to this card, both of which may not even come into play for many people. The first is that this card offers no business class lounge access or at least a free membership into the Priority Pass lounge access program like some of the other high end cards. The second is that the 2% return is eroded on lower bookings based on how redeeming the miles is structured. See application for details.

Conclusion
The Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard® is ready to set the standard in Canada for travel point credit cards. With its big bonuses, relatively low costs, good earning ratio, benefit package and ability to book travel anywhere, we would have to rate this card as above average in the high end credit card market. In fact this card easily falls into the top 5 of all credit cards in Canada for travel rewards. If Capital One® markets this card properly to l Canadians, I think you will see a good amount of them reconsidering what card they carry in their wallet and making a switch to this one.

We would like to hear your thoughts on the new Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard® by commenting on our blog!

Related Links:
Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard® on Capitalone.ca
Rewards Canada's Canadian Travel Credit Card Comparison including the Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard®
Rewards Canada Blog Post on the Capital One® Aspire Travel™ World Mastercard®

“The interest rates, fees, rewards details, benefits and other details of the Capital One product(s) described in the article may have changed since the time of publication. Please consult the product information pages on the Capital One website for accurate product details. In the event of any conflict between the product details in this article and the Capital One website, the details on the Capital One website shall prevail.”