Frontier Airlines Card Review: So-so, Unless You Earn the Voucher

Flight voucher (with caveats)

If you make $2,500 in purchases per year — averaging $208 per month — with your Frontier Airlines World Mastercard®, you'll earn a $100 Frontier Airlines flight voucher after your account anniversary, which more than makes up for the card’s annual fee.

That’s the end of the good news, though. Read the fine print and you’ll see that the voucher is good only toward Frontier airfare booked on the website. You can't use it to cover fees for seat assignments, reservation changes or membership in the airline's Discount Den program. And if your ticket price is less than $100, you forfeit the remaining value. One more gotcha: The voucher expires in six months. To use it, you must book the flight before it expires, although the flight can take place after expiration.

Good introductory offers

The card comes with a nice sign-up bonus: Earn 40,000 Travel Miles after spending $500 on purchases and paying the annual fee in full, both within the first 90 days of account opening. Depending on where and when you travel, that could be worth a round-trip flight.

Unlike most airline cards, it also comes with 0% intro APR on Balance Transfers for the first fifteen billing cycles, and then the ongoing APR of 20.24%-29.99%, Variable APR. Keep in mind that balance transfers don't earn miles.

Priority boarding

Airline credit cards with an annual fee typically come with some type of early boarding, so you can get settled and find space for your carry-on if you have one. With this Frontier Airlines card, you get Zone 2 boarding, meaning you generally get to board before passengers in Zone 3 and 4.

Progress toward elite status

With your card, you’ll earn 1 qualifying mile toward elite status with every $1 spent on purchases. The lowest elite tier is Elite Silver Status, earned by accumulating 10,000 qualifying miles in the same calendar year. It includes such benefits as preferred seat at check-in and priority customer care.

Locked into Frontier

This card makes sense only if you’re loyal to Frontier Airlines and regularly fly from an airport it serves. The usefulness of its rewards currency, Frontier Miles, is limited because the airline is relatively small, so it might not fly where you want to go. And it has no partner airlines that you can transfer miles to.

If you want more flexibility, a general travel credit card may be more appropriate for your lifestyle. The Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card earns bonus rewards in a variety of popular spending categories, including dining and travel. Plus, there's a rich welcome offer: Earn 100,000 bonus points after you spend $5,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening. Points can be redeemed for a variety of things, but they’re more valuable — worth 1.25 cents apiece — when redeemed for travel through the Chase portal. You can book airline tickets, hotels, rental cars there. It's also possible to transfer your points to several airline and hotel partners. The annual fee is $95.

It has an annual fee

Assuming you fly Frontier and can take advantage of the flight voucher, you'll likely be able to get enough value out of the Frontier Airlines World Mastercard® to cover the annual fee. But if not (or if paying an annual fee is just a dealbreaker), you'd be better off looking elsewhere.

For example, the $0-annual-fee Wells Fargo Autograph® Card earns an unlimited 3 points per dollar spent on multiple useful categories:

• Restaurants.

• Travel and transit.

• Gas stations (and electric vehicle charging stations).

• Popular streaming services.

• Select phone plans.

Other purchases earn 1 point per dollar. It also comes with a rewarding sign-up bonus: Earn 20,000 bonus points when you spend $1,000 in purchases in the first 3 months - that's a $200 cash redemption value.

Like the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, you can also transfer any points you earn to airline and hotel partners, though Frontier isn't one of them.