Hey all,
I am pretty disciplined when it comes to spending and have no debt, but I really would like to start using a credit card that, instead of my debit card, if the rewards are there.
I do not spend much yearly in terms of gas, food, and other expenses, and I was wondering if the airline or some other credit card types would be wise?
Thank you 
Probably not, as frequent flyer miles are harder to use nowadays and many (all?) such cards charge an annual fee. So any benefit from the first few thousand miles earned is offset by the cost of the annual fee. Instead, look for a card that offers cash back, especially if you can find one without an annual fee.
I assume you are US. Do you have Air Miles down there (I am referring to the specific company, not travel rewards in general) or wherever you happen to be? Both my Mastercard and my American Express give me Air Miles points, and neither have an annual fee. I can’t be bothered accumulating points for a trip; I just keep turning the points into gift cards which I then spend (yes, I could get them to send me merchandise directly, but the gift cards are nice because they just show up in my mailbox and I then have a lot more choice what to spend them on).
Airline credit cards are not a good deal.
I had a Citi American Airlines Mastercard and it doesn’t make financial sense.
You pay $85 annual fee and to add insult t injury, American, Delta and other airlines routinely raise the mileage requirements to qualify for free flights.
A 1st-class trip to Europe used to be 125k miles and now it is 200k miles. The paltry miles you accumulate with credit-card purchases is not going to keep up with the airlines’ frequent-flyer mileage inflation games. Maybe if you charge more than $100,000 a year the numbers would work in your favor.
I have a Citibank Mastercard for American Airline miles and mine is free. Perhaps you have a lower interest rate
Citibank CAN be useful but be careful. Here’s how I use mine.
First of all my Citibank MC has a 29% interest rate on it, so if you don’t pay it off at the end of the month, it just isn’t worth it.
What I do is this. I get it, I charge enough to get the miles, (ALWAYS and with a 29% interest rate, make sure you do this, ALWAYS) paying the card off totally each month.
Then I get the miles usually 25,000 which is a free trip.
Then I don’t use it and at the end of the year I cut the card up and send it back to them saying “Please cancel my account and make note on my credit report the account has been cancelled.” I of course, do this in writing.
In six months I get a letter from Citibank, “Please come back, if you charge $500 in the next six months, we’ll give you 25,000 miles FREE!!!”
So I sign back up and you can easily charge $500 in six months so I get the miles. And I repeat the cycle.
Again the trick is, to make it worth it you MUST pay off the bill at the end of the month. If you don’t that 29% interest is gonna kill any airline mile benefit.
When I worked for a hotel we used to give away airline miles to guest. The hotel paid 1.8¢ (just under two pennies) for each airline miles we gave away (That was AA, United, Delta, NW and Continental).
So 25,000 airline miles is worth $450.00 using those estimates (25,000 X .018)
Here’s how my Citibank MC works with American Airlines
Generally when you redeem the miles the airline has four types. Black out dates, close in dates (less than a week), further out (1 week to 19 days) and over 20 days.
That means if you book a flight with your miles, and the departure is less than a week from booking time you need to add $100 fee or double your points. So a flight that costs 25,000 points booked less than 5 days in advance, will cost you 50,000 points or 25,000 + a hundred dollar fee.
Those flights leaving 11 to 19 days will cost you 25,000 + $50.00.
Those flights departing more than 20 days from booking are no additonal charge.
Note in all cases if you use your miles your still paying taxes and any surcharges. For instance on my “free” flights with airline miles I usually pay between $5.00 and $10.00 in taxes and surcharges for each flight (round trip)
Like anything as long as you CAREFULLY read and know how to use it you can get good deals. But the catch with airline miles credit cards is the interest rates. Unless you pay the balance off each month, the higher interest rates cancel any benefit of the miles
I’m looking at the website for the Citibank American Airlines Mastercard, and it looks like it’s free for the first year and then they charge either $50 or $85 subsequently. So if you are canceling the card after twelve months, you are avoiding the annual fee, but not through the normal process.
I had a Delta AmEx and got fed up with the difficulty of booking flights I actually wanted to take. I canceled it and got an AmEx Blue Cash instead. This gives a cash rebate - actually paid into your credit card account, so you never actually see the cash. There are no blackout dates for cash.
If you do not spend much on your credit card, it will take you forever to accumulate enough miles to get a free flight - typically 25,000 miles are needed (and often more if you want to travel at a sensible time or without changing planes), which equates to spending about $25,000 on your card. I spend a little over twice that in a year on my AmEx. I got over $1,300 back from AmEx Blue Cash last year - much better than the free one or two flights, and I can spend it on anything I like (that can be paid for with a credit card).
And my Blue Cash has no annual fee, whereas the Delta one had a fee of $85, I think.
My experience is old (about 15-20 years old)…so things have changed.
Or maybe they haven’t 
I was young and stupid. I picked up an airline card. Paid something like $50 per year. I accumulated miles but it was a struggle.
First of all, getting them to recognise the miles. I still remember a conversation with someone where I received miles from a trip to there, but not back. I thought this would be a slam dunk for them to fix but the challenged me on it (maybe you DROVE back huh?) I had escalate several times before I ground them down. This happened about 1 out of three trips.
FINALLY, I accumulated enough miles! ALRIGHT! Vegas baby!
Well…guess what? Try to get to Vegas? Well, you can go December 20th at midnight. All other times blacked out. Ok, I exaggerate…but seriously it would have been easier for them to provide a list of times and dates that I could use it for as that list was 1/100 of the actual flights.
I was on the phone for half an hour thinking up destinations where she would check and say…nope. It was very frustrating.
FINALLY I found a town in bodumpfunk Nebraska…(I can’t remember where) where I could GO! WOW! After it was done there was a IIRC $99 booking ‘fee’. The flight only cost IIRC $186 if I had bought it straight out. I declined and cancelled the card.
Big, frickin waste of time and a scam. Haven’t looked at em since.
I’m sure they are better now…but just take the yearly fees, put em in a vacation account and buy the ticket.
Until very recently, I traveled way too much. Even using my miles and points for vacations, I still have a balance of about 600,000 US Airways miles and 700,000 Hilton Honors points. So, with this much travel, I feel qualified to advise that you absolutely don’t even consider an airline affinity card.
There are many problems with the airline cards:
There are way too many miles being given away and the law of supply and demand (or maybe Gresham’s law) means that the miles are constantly being devalued. It seems that every year, the airlines increase the number of miles required or add a fee to use them. Three years ago, I paid less than $100 in fees and taxes to use miles for a trip for two to London. This year, it cost over $400.
Availability is way down. People are flying less, but the airlines are cutting flights and going to smaller aircraft even faster. Go to any airline site and just do a dummy award booking and you’ll see that almost nothing is available in the summer o any time you might actually want to fly.
Sooner or later, the industry will have to consolidate and your miles could completely disappear. It hasn’t happened yet since most consolidations up to now have been mergers, but one of the big carriers could go into liquidation very easily.
Flights are still fairly cheap. You may be better off using points for hotels rather than flights. Which brings me to my suggestion:
For me, and probably most people, hotel points are a much better deal than airline miles. Not only do I get free nights just about anywhere I want, I almost always get upgraded to a better room, free breakfast, etc, because of the number of points I accumulate each year. I have a HHonors (Hilton) American Express card with no annual fee. There is also a HHonors Visa available. I might upgrade to the Surpass card which gets you more points, but has a fee. Also, the AmEx green card gets Membership Reward points that can be converted to miles with no annual fee.
For way too much information, the best source about points, miles, credit cards, mileage runs (don’t ask), TSA stupidity, and any other travel topic you can think of, is www.flyertalk.com
Go there and poke around. You don’t have to join (except to use the search function). Very similar format to SDMB but even bigger.
It may take a few years before you’ve saved up enough miles to go anywhere good. A lot of airlines have their miles “go away” after 3 years. So if you can’t save up enough in 3 years, you’re out of luck. We had a card with USAir, for 5-6 years, and added to the miles we earned by actually flying, got quite a pile of miles saved up - more than enough to make up for the 50.00 annual fee. I don’t know if the airline does that any more (the miles not expiring that is).
We blew all our miles on a trip to the west coast, first class. This was when a first-class ticket was “only” 40 or 50 thousand miles.
Another issue is, there may be a limit to how many miles you can earn this way in a year - say, 50,000 miles.