Airline Miles Credit Cards
If you travel a lot, you might want to look into an airline miles credit card. These cards will allow you to earn a certain amount of “airline miles” or points for every dollar you spend on the card. When you accumulate enough of these miles or points you can then redeem them for free airline tickets, hotel rooms and other great travel related rewards.
If you are looking to apply for an airline miles credit card you first want to find out which airlines have the most flights in and out of the airports that you frequently use. For example: I live in Philadelphia which is a major hub for US Airways, there for it would make the most sense for me to get a card that has points that can be redeemed US Airways tickets. This way you will be able to get the most bang for your buck when you go to redeem your points, and will be less likely to encounter problems.
If you live near a major airport this isn’t a huge deal because you will find that most major carriers fly into just about every major airport. There are also general airline miles cards that like the American Express Preferred Rewards Green Card that allow you to redeem your points with multiple different airline carriers.
Here are our top choices for Airline Miles Credit Cards:
| 1. Platinum Delta SkyMiles Credit Card from American Express | |
 The Platinum Delta SkyMiles® Credit Card is the best way to earn Delta airline miles currently out there. This card allows you to earn miles on every dollar you spent. You are also given a free coach ticket each year that you can redeem if you travel with a business partner or companion. For every 10,000 miles you redeem you get $100 your next Delta flight. |
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Comments:
July 13th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
[...] past, Americans used to accumulate and stock pile their points and turn them in all at once for grand get-aways and vacations to Europe and top U.S. destinations; the recession has changed this habit for the time being, [...]
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I have been denied for 2 credit cards now. I used to have perfect flawless credit. I had an amex for 3 years, never paid a dime of interest because I was always on time. I had a student loan go unoticed and unpaid. Amex dropped my account and now I don’t know what to do. The loan has been fully paid off but I still have a negative mark on my credit report. Please advise what I can do and how. Ive looked into filing with the credit credit bureaus but I’m not sure if that will help.
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Chris,
You may want to try to apply for a card from Chase like the Chase Freedom, any AMEX out there is going to be hard to get approved for if you have a credit score under 700, even though I’ve heard of people getting approved with a FICO as low as 670.
The bad news is that regardless of if you repair your credit or not, because AMEX dropped you, you probably aren’t going to be able to get approved with them any time soon. If I was you I would start looking at your other options while you work on repairing your credit.
The good news is that we don’t recommend many of the AMEX cards here any more because they really cut back their rewards programs during the credit crunch, so you might be better off with the Chase Freedom Card, or the Discover More Card both of which have similar rewards programs.
July 4th, 2010 at 12:37 am
I just got approved for the Starwood Preferred Amex card. But now I’ve been reading that the Capitol One Venture and Discover Escape are better rewards/travel cards. What’s your take?
I’ve had a hard time really seeing how the different rewards programs work in comparison to each other. For example, I know Discover is known for their cash back rewards, but how good are they in the travel (airline/hotel) department? I’ve checked out the spg.com site quite a bit and one thing (outside of their hotel rewards) that’s nice is you can either book flights directly through their site with no blackout dates or restrictions OR you can transfer the points to 30 different airlines. Each time you transfer at least 20k points to the airlines, Starwood will deposit an additional 5k.
Should I have chosen a different card?