This piece follows directly from Priority Pass as a Family Travel Operating System. When I went back through our 2025 travel, I found that five members of our family had made 40 Priority Pass lounge visits involving 100 admissions.
Much of that use came from having Priority Pass memberships distributed across the family. The kids could use lounges when traveling without us, while my wife and I could do the same on our own trips. The fact that several of those memberships came free through authorized-user cards made the arrangement particularly useful.
Capital One changed that equation on February 1, 2026. Additional Venture X cardholders no longer receive lounge access automatically. Adding it now costs $125 per person per year, while guests at Priority Pass lounges cost $35 per visit.
That left me with a fairly specific question:
If independent lounge access for several family members was the part we actually valued, what was the best way to preserve it?
The System We Had, Briefly
By early 2025, our household had five active Priority Pass memberships, most generated through authorized users on a single U.S. premium card. That allowed parents, teenagers and young adults to use lounges independently even when nobody was taking the same flight.
Guesting was useful, sometimes extremely so, but it wasn’t the foundation of the setup. The important feature was that the memberships themselves were distributed.
What Venture X Changed
Capital One announced the changes in 2025 and implemented them on February 1, 2026. Additional cardholders can still have lounge access, but it now costs $125 per person per year. Priority Pass guests, meanwhile, cost $35 each per visit.
Paying $125 for an additional cardholder who uses lounges frequently could still make sense. Paying it several times simply to recreate our old family arrangement was much less attractive.
So the question wasn’t whether Venture X Priority Pass still had value. It plainly did. The question was whether it remained the right card for distributing Priority Pass across our family.
Why the Ritz Card Became the Obvious Alternative
Once I framed the problem that way, the Ritz-Carlton Credit Card became much more interesting.
The card is closed to new applicants, but its current Priority Pass terms are unusually generous. Both primary cardholders and authorized users receive their own Priority Pass Select memberships. Each can bring two guests at no charge, with additional guests currently costing $27 each.
Most importantly for our purposes, Chase does not charge an additional annual fee simply for adding an authorized user to the Ritz card.
That means the Ritz structure preserves the part of our old Venture X arrangement I cared about most: several people can hold their own Priority Pass memberships rather than depending on one family member to bring everyone else in as guests.
For New Applicants, the Route Is Less Direct
For someone without a Ritz card, the usual route is less direct. The card is no longer available to new applicants, but existing Chase Marriott cardholders have long reported being able to product-change eligible cards to the Ritz after holding them for at least a year. The Marriott Bonvoy Boundless is therefore one possible starting point.
That route isn’t guaranteed. Chase doesn’t publicly promise that the Ritz product change will remain available, and the card’s benefits could change before a new Boundless card becomes eligible. But that doesn’t necessarily make starting with Boundless a bad decision. The case for starting with Boundless is simply that having the option to upgrade later may be worth more than having no route to the Ritz at all.
The Boundless card stands on its own. If the Ritz card is still available as a product change after a year, authorized users still receive Priority Pass, and independent lounge access still serves the household, upgrading may make sense. If not, you still have whatever value you received from holding the Boundless card. Nothing requires you to make that decision today. After a year, you can see what the Ritz card looks like then and decide whether upgrading still makes sense.
Ritz Guesting Is Less Generous Than It Was
Ritz wasn’t completely untouched by the lounge cutbacks. Its old unlimited Priority Pass guesting has gone too. But the replacement rule is still generous: the primary cardholder and each authorized user can bring two complimentary guests to participating Priority Pass lounges. Additional guests currently cost $27 each.
For us, that’s a much less important downgrade than the Venture X change. Our 2025 usage showed why. We benefited most from having several people with independent memberships, not from routinely moving large groups through lounges on one card.
There will be exceptions. One of the kids once took five friends into a lounge while traveling through Asia, and that obviously doesn’t work the same way anymore. But it was an outlier rather than the reason we valued Priority Pass.
What Our Setup Looks Like Now
The Ritz structure gives us a straightforward way to replace the independent memberships we lost through Venture X. The plan is to have the kids hold their own Ritz-authorized-user Priority Pass memberships, leaving each of them able to enter lounges independently and bring up to two guests.
There is an important caveat. We haven’t really tested the new arrangement yet. Our kids haven’t done the kind of independent travel in 2026 that generated so much of our Priority Pass usage in 2025.
So I can say that the structure survives on paper. I can’t yet say that our replacement has reproduced the results of the old setup in actual travel. That’s something our next round of independent family trips will answer.
What Others Can Do Without Ritz Access
Ritz is an unusual solution because it combines free authorized users with separate Priority Pass memberships. Without access to it, recreating the same arrangement becomes more expensive.
Venture X itself remains an option: $125 per additional cardholder buys that person lounge access, including Priority Pass. For someone who travels independently often enough, that could easily be reasonable. What has disappeared is the ability to distribute several memberships around a household at essentially no incremental cost.
That means the calculation should probably start with who actually needs independent access, rather than how many family members you could theoretically cover. A household with one independently traveling child has a very different problem from one with three.
Where That Leaves Us
Looking back at our 2025 usage made one thing clear: the feature worth preserving wasn’t unlimited guesting. It was independent lounge access distributed across a family whose members increasingly traveled without one another.
Venture X no longer provides that cheaply. The Ritz card still does, albeit with tighter guest limits than before. On paper, that makes it a remarkably good replacement for our particular use case.
The part I can’t tell you yet is how well the replacement works in practice. Our kids simply haven’t traveled independently enough this year to put it through the same workout as the old setup. When they do, we’ll have a much better answer.
For now, I’m comfortable that we’ve preserved the part of Priority Pass that our 2025 travel showed we actually valued.