My Plans With The New Atmos Summit Card

As someone based in San Francisco with current American Airlines status, the introduction of the new Atmos Summit card has basically given me a pretty easy way to switch over to the Atmos/Alaska Airlines loyalty ecosystem.

I’m planning on dropping my American Airlines status starting in 2026 and am going to start fully investing into the Atmos program.

What Is The New Atmos Summit Card?

This credit card is the result of Alaska Airlines/Hawaiian Airlines newly merged loyalty program. While it carries a hefty $395 fee, it also has some of the most unique benefits ever seen when it comes to credit cards:

• Global 25K Companion Award awarded every year on your account anniversary: this benefit alone could be (in theory) be used to justify the annual fee on the card. It gives 25,000 points off a companion’s award ticket. So if you’re trying to book two tickets for 30k points each, instead of paying 60k points, you’d pay just 35k points.
• Receive 8 Alaska Lounge passes annually: while these are divvied up into 2 each quarter, they provide access to Alaska lounges, which aren’t as easy to access as other lounges. This likely means I can drop my Citi Executive card
• Earn 1 status point/$2 spent on purchases: pretty powerful feature if you consider Alaska Airline’s status bands—this means you need to put $40k in spend to get Atmos Silver status (the lowest status tier)
• Instant $50 Travel Delay Credit: if your Alaska Airlines flight is canceled or delayed by more than 2 hours, then you get a $50 voucher, up to one per calendar day and must be used within 48 hours of issuance. Incredibly unique perk with a lot of potential value if you fly on Alaska frequently; however, the limited timeframe to use the voucher will likely be a bit annoying
• Same-day Change Fee Waiver: this is an awesome perk that again will provide tons of value for Summit cardholders who don’t already have Atmos Gold status. It basically allows you to skip the initial status requirements and get an extraordinarily strong perk that is typically only accessible to higher elite tiers
• Point Sharing: super useful benefit that lets you share points with up to 10 other Atmos Rewards members. I can already see how this is going to be useful for my close friends/families, but I can also see how this is likely going to be an abused benefit due to how easy it feels to use—we’ll see how Atmos reacts
• Earn 3x on Foreign Purchases: wow. This is literally a gamechanger type of benefit. Think of it this way: imagine if your floor spend on all your purchases was 3% back. The only cards in the game that offer an earn rate like this are the Robinhood Gold or Bank of America Unlimited Cash rewards with Platinum Honors status.

To put it simply: Atmos has designed a new, innovative credit card that isn’t exactly something that can be churned/burned; rather, it is an excellent card to have in your wallet if you have any type of Alaska Airlines loyalty.

Just these benefits alone make the card extremely easy to justify if you fly Alaska more than a few times every year.

What Happens If I Spend A Lot On This Card?

After spending $60,000+ on this card in an anniversary year, you get a Global 100k Companion Award. This, again, is an incredibly powerful benefit/high value item to have in your credit card wallet.

To put it simply: let’s say you’re booking a Starlux business class flight from San Francisco to Taipei on the overpriced, yet always available 175k points/seat. With a Global 100k Companion Award, you can make the cost for two people come out to 125k points/seat. Although this is still expensive for some savvy award travelers, it’s still a great way to make use of the 100k points savings provided by the card.

What is this Bank of America 10% Bonus?

If you have an eligible Bank of America® account, you will earn a 10% rewards bonus on all points earned from card purchases.

This… makes the value proposition of this card all that much stronger and is making me even consider opening a Bank of America account soon. What’s an “eligible” account? As far as we can tell:

• Bank of America Advantage Savings
• CD Accounts
• Merrill Lynch investment account

It’s not totally clear if Bank of America IRAs count.

Anyways, the math on this is simple: if you have an “eligible” Bank of America account, you get 10% more points. So that means foreign purchases earn 3.3x points/$1. This is actually a ridiculous amount of points to be earning.

The primary tradeoff is that you need to park some money into Bank of America accounts, which don’t earn a significant amount of interest. Some ballpark math here is that $500 in a checking account waives all fees, so if you’re forfeiting 4% APY in a HYSA, you’re losing out on $20 to earn 10% more points yearly. You’d breakeven on that investment with more than $700 on foreign purchases per year.

What Are The Sweet Spots When Spending On This Card?

There are a few factors that I think are worth considering when analyzing this card in terms of spend:

• You earn 2x status points for every $1 spent on the card
• You get a 100k Global Companion Award when spending $60k/cardmember anniversary year

The most obvious one is putting $60k of spend on this card gets you quite a bit. But, not many people are typically spending $60k/year on a credit card. That’s where one of the more interesting plays (that I’m excited about) comes in: using the Atmos Summit card for rent payments.

How Can You Earn Points On Rent Using The Atmos Card?

Bilt and Alaska Airlines have a unique partnership that allows you to pay your rent using the Atmos Summit and Atmos Ascent cards to earn 3x points per $1 dollar paid for rent, at the cost of a 3% transaction fee (up to $50k in annual Rent Spend per calendar year).

So, that means if you put $1,000 in rent down, you:

• Get charged a $30 fee
• Get 3,000 points (via the Bilt/Alaska 3x points partnership)
• Also get 300 bonus points via the 10% Bank of America eligible account
• Earn 500 status points

The Atmos Summit Card has a very interesting sweet spot when you max out the $50k cap per calendar year:

• Charged $1,500 in fees
• Earn 150,000 in Atmos points (via the Bilt/Alaska 3x points partnership)
• Get a bonus 15,000 Atmos Points via 10% bonus from having eligible Bank of America account
• Earn 25,000 status points
• Gets you 5/6 of the way there to the elusive $60k spend requirement for the 100k Global Companion Award

Obviously $50k in rent annually is… very very high, but you can see the gist that comes to play here. High spend on this card, especially on the rent and foreign purchases categories can deliver a lot of value.

How Do You Maximize The Atmos Summit Card?

For me, I think the Atmos Summit card is going to become a primary player in my day-to-day.

One of my old companies hosted their 401k via Merril Lynch, so I incidentally am already eligible for the 10% bonus. So, no need to open any other Bank of America accounts.

Firstly, for all foreign purchase spend, the Atmos Summit Card is going to become the undisputed, set and forget option. Literally for any purchases abroad, there’s almost no reason to ever use another card. Earning 3.3x points per $1 spent beats just about every other card in terms of convenience and value, especially given that foreign purchases can oftentimes code weirdly.

Next, I am going to put all my rent spend towards the Atmos Summit Card via Bilt’s partnership. Since I pay my apartment’s entire rent, I’m expecting to actually get pretty close to maxing out the $50k calendar year limit.

With these two factors at play, I expect to be able to get very close to meeting the required $60k spend for this card, which will not only net me the lucrative 100k Global Companion Award but also 30k status points.

These status points will then position me to get Atmos Gold Status in 2026 pretty easily.

Should You Get The Atmos Summit Card?

I think the equation is pretty simple:

• Do you fly Alaska more than 2-4 times a year? If yes, the Summit card is likely to provide a lot of value with its lounge access benefits, $50 same day change credit, etc
• Do you want Alaska status? If yes, this card is significantly better than its $95 counterpart when it comes earning status via credit card spend
• Do you use Atmos miles to fly internationally frequently? If yes, you’re going to really appreciate the waived $12.50 partner award fees

I check off all three of these boxes, so it’s a pretty easy value add for me. This card is going to be the key for me to achieve Atmos Gold/Platinum status in 2026 and will also likely get me in a good spot to pursue Titanium at some point.