Best Credit Card Airmiles / Rewards

[sbones]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here and this is my first post. I guess you can say I am in the infancy of my elimination stage. More on me later;

I wanted to ask if anyone could help me pick a credit card with the best airmlie rewards. There seems to be a few top contenders I found from:

Creditcardguide.com:

http://www.creditcardguide.com/airline-frequent-flyer-cards.html#airmiles-section

Creditcards.com:

http://www.creditcards.com/airline-miles.php

Has anybody used these? What did you learn about them. Do you recommend any others? How hard was it to apply for them?

Any help would be appreciated~!

[frekwentflier]

Those sites you posted are just affiliate sites with links to many different cards. They get a referral fee if you apply thru them. They do not actually provide the cards, banks do that.

When looking for an airline credit card, there are many different things to consider. If you go to flyertalk.com/forum, there is a discussion forum there solely about using cards to get miles/hotel points I suggest you study a lot, but I'll try to summarize my feelings here:

First, you have to remember that using miles for free tickets, especially International tickets, is becoming more difficult to do as airlines are reducing award availability all the time. So you have to decide if you want an airline-specific card or just a generic one.

The airline-specific cards rack up miles on that particular airline and you have to hope you can get an award ticket in the timeframe you want to travel. Fortunately, most people interested in 4HWW will probably have very flexible timeframes, so this might not be a problem. I know Continental especially is well known for being very stingy with free tickets. Now, this is at the "Saver" level. For twice the miles, you can get a regular award ticket anytime, including most blackout dates, but who wants to use twice the miles??

The generic travel cards like Citi Thank You and Capital One No Hassle card are supposed to get you tickets on any airline, but you really need to read the fine print as there are *many* restrictions on said tickets. Also, I'm not positive, but I believe these cards do not provide international tickets. Read the fine print!

Another possibility is to use hotel credit cards to accumulate hotel points and then transfer said points to the airline of your choice when you're ready to fly. The Starwood Preferred Guest American Express card is widely used for this b/c there is a 25% bonus when doing so. 20,000 Starwood points gets you 25,000 airline miles on many airlines. So you could accumulate Starwood points, find a time when your airline of choice has available tickets, then transfer the points and book the ticket. It's not as easy as I make it sound, but that is the gist of it.

Yet another possibility is to just get a cash rebate card and use the rebate to save up and buy your own ticket. :) If you're going to buy your own international ticket, I would suggest using a consolidator to get cheaper tickets. No, they're not $50 to get to Thailand, but they are often 10-25% cheaper than the airlines. Here is a link to a list of United Airlines consolidators. They may work for airlines other than United, but I've never tried.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=113379&page=3

Check out post #34 for my account with saving about $400 from one consolidator.

So I hope this helps you out. You need to research this thoroughly before making a decision. One other thing to keep in mind is that the airline industry is in tremendous financial trouble. I highly doubt US Air will be around 5 years from now, if not sooner. So let that factor into your decision as to which credit card to get.

[dking]

I wouldn't be surprised if the affiliate links are owned by the orginal poster; I consider this thread spam.

Mods?

[Marcie]

I don't think these are the kinds of links that the poster would get money from, I *think* creditcards.com, etc. pays $ to the credit card companies that advertise on their site, so, I think it's ok...

[zhongguohua88]

I wouldn't be surprised if the affiliate links are owned by the orginal poster; I consider this thread spam.

Mods?

I doubt the original poster owns the domain creditcards.com/

[sbones]

Those sites you posted are just affiliate sites with links to many different cards. They get a referral fee if you apply thru them. They do not actually provide the cards, banks do that.

When looking for an airline credit card, there are many different things to consider. If you go to flyertalk.com/forum, there is a discussion forum there solely about using cards to get miles/hotel points I suggest you study a lot, but I'll try to summarize my feelings here:

First, you have to remember that using miles for free tickets, especially International tickets, is becoming more difficult to do as airlines are reducing award availability all the time. So you have to decide if you want an airline-specific card or just a generic one.

The airline-specific cards rack up miles on that particular airline and you have to hope you can get an award ticket in the timeframe you want to travel. Fortunately, most people interested in 4HWW will probably have very flexible timeframes, so this might not be a problem. I know Continental especially is well known for being very stingy with free tickets. Now, this is at the "Saver" level. For twice the miles, you can get a regular award ticket anytime, including most blackout dates, but who wants to use twice the miles??

The generic travel cards like Citi Thank You and Capital One No Hassle card are supposed to get you tickets on any airline, but you really need to read the fine print as there are *many* restrictions on said tickets. Also, I'm not positive, but I believe these cards do not provide international tickets. Read the fine print!

Another possibility is to use hotel credit cards to accumulate hotel points and then transfer said points to the airline of your choice when you're ready to fly. The Starwood Preferred Guest American Express card is widely used for this b/c there is a 25% bonus when doing so. 20,000 Starwood points gets you 25,000 airline miles on many airlines. So you could accumulate Starwood points, find a time when your airline of choice has available tickets, then transfer the points and book the ticket. It's not as easy as I make it sound, but that is the gist of it.

Yet another possibility is to just get a cash rebate card and use the rebate to save up and buy your own ticket. :) If you're going to buy your own international ticket, I would suggest using a consolidator to get cheaper tickets. No, they're not $50 to get to Thailand, but they are often 10-25% cheaper than the airlines. Here is a link to a list of United Airlines consolidators. They may work for airlines other than United, but I've never tried.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=113379&page=3

Check out post #34 for my account with saving about $400 from one consolidator.

So I hope this helps you out. You need to research this thoroughly before making a decision. One other thing to keep in mind is that the airline industry is in tremendous financial trouble. I highly doubt US Air will be around 5 years from now, if not sooner. So let that factor into your decision as to which credit card to get.

Wow, thanks for all the great info! It seems like if you're disiplined enough you could use your CC to live on while racking up all kinds of awards for travel and cash back? You sure would pay the price if you didn't pay your balance on that 25th day though. I saw a documentry on Credit where Ben Stine said something simular to this. Thoughts?


I wouldn't be surprised if the affiliate links are owned by the orginal poster; I consider this thread spam.

Mods?


I'm certanly not a spammer, just a noob. :)

[frekwentflier]

Wow, thanks for all the great info! It seems like if you're disiplined enough you could use your CC to live on while racking up all kinds of awards for travel and cash back? You sure would pay the price if you didn't pay your balance on that 25th day though. I saw a documentry on Credit where Ben Stine said something simular to this. Thoughts?

Discipline to pay it off every month is definitely the key. If you cannot pay your cards every month, you should forget about miles, etc. and concentrate solely on getting the lowest interest rates and playing the balance xfer game until you're debt is gone.

What's really nice is if you have a job that requires you to spend a lot of $ but then reimburses you. You can really rack up some serious miles/points/rebates this way!! But I would pick remote work over racking up points if I had to choose.

[Revv23]

IMO it's best to get the card of your carrier. Personally I use a US Bank Worldperks VISA. It is a Northwest airlines card, I chose it because they are the hub in my hometown.

The advantage of an airline specific card is that you are a customer of the airline when you call them, not a customer of the credit card, this gives you preferential treatment. Remember when booking rewards tickets to always check ticket availability online and then CALL! for it.

Several times you will catch a representative mis-qoute you, catching one in this error puts them on the defensive and makes them feel like they need to make it up to you somehow, I've been upgraded to first class several times through this. Remember that the booking agents are given alot of freedom, so if you catch one being rude or telling you that "they can't just do it" hang up and try again.

You really get better service from happier people and thus more stuff for less miles, I recently got a five stop trip through China/malaysia/korea/tokyo/newyork and then back to michigan for 60,000 award miles, the same price as a round trip ticket to las vegas at the time. I did this by booking an initial round trip to hong kong, then calling and asking for stopovers at nearby cities. I did a lot of it while abroad, several 20 minute phone calls is more effective then booking a huge trip with one operator and you are likely to get at least one favor out of each operator so if you call five times thats 5 favors. You can get operators to bend the rules but they have to start out friendly. If someone gives you a rude sounding hello or something dont waste your time negotiating, hang up and call again.

I know this was supposed to be about which card you get and not about how to book award flights but I went off on a tangent haha - sorry.

Good luck to you and you travels!