Good question. I was able to look at Chase’s prices based on an existing card. I don’t think I was able to see Capital One or US Bank until I had the new card in hand.
In general, my take is flight prices don’t vary by much, if at all, between the portals and direct from the airline. It’s hotel & car rental prices where I noticed Chase’s prices were about 5% higher, before their 5x points offer. YMMV, based on different times & destinations.
I think every American card will work if you ask them to give you a PIN. But that’s a good point, there are terminals outside the US that just won’t work if you don’t have a PIN. I check that on new cards.
I spent just under 4 weeks in Europe last year, and the BofA travel card worked quite well contactless. However, even using the card contactless, it required signatures about 15-20% of the time. I didn’t see any rhyme or reason as to why, it seemed random to me, but perhaps the places that needed signatures used a card servicing company that required it.
However, BofA debit cards do charge a foreign transaction fee. I found that getting cash from ATMs was cheapest using my ALLY debit card which has no foreign transaction fee. Best to do a bit of checking before you travel.
For most cards, getting a PIN only allows you to get cash advances from an ATM. Only a few actually work with chin-and-pin point of sale.
Does anyone here use multiple cards for different purposes and move miles/points around as needed? I don’t know if I’m willing to invest that much time and effort; I’d really like to use a single card for everything but I know that’s not going to be as effective as some of the more complex strategies.
Huh. I guess i haven’t used that many cards, but I’ve never had a problem. I do make sure to get a pin. As a result, some gas stations ask me to type it, which i like.
The Costco visa gives back 4% for gasoline and 3% for restaurants and travel, as well as 2% for Costco purchases. So I use it for those things. For everything else I use a different rewards credit card.
How much do you care?
Somebody who spends $100K a year on travel might be able to squeeze an extra few thousand of value out of optimal play versus typical play. OTOH, somebody with that kind of money to spend may not give a shit about working that hard for so little reward.
At least that’s my POV. Pick one, stick with it, get into the upper status tiers where the multiples are better, and call it good enough.
Folks like The Points Guy aren’t pushing their advice so you can use it. They’re pushing their advice so lots of people click on his site. Folks love to think about optimizing stickin’ it to The Man. But they mostly don’t really do it, and it isn’t much of a sticking really.
Even if you use a single card, it’s good to have a second working card when you travel. Every so often, someone steals your number and it’s a huge pain to be caught without a working credit card in a foreign country.
I once got a call from my credit card company about fraudulent activity on my card less than 24 hours before flying to London. My second card is normally my husband’s, but he wasn’t traveling with me this time. I was traveling with my son, and we put a lot of money in his bank account so we could use his debit card, and my credit card company sent a temporary card to my hotel (thank you, USAA!) but it was all very stressful.
Anyway, it’s worth having two cards just to have a spare card.
I use a single card for everything; a Citi Costco card, and collect cash rewards. I can turn that cash into airplane flights or hotel nights, if necessary. I’ve looked at optimizing out to having other cards for certain purchases, but it really doesn’t make sense for our buying patterns. It probably wouldn’t even add up to $100 more per year. Not having to worry about what card to use does have value.
I could see a gas reward card not being too much of a burden, if I spent a lot on gas. If I traveled a lot, then a dedicated travel card with extra rewards would be worth looking into, but for spending less than $1000/year flying, I may as well just put it on the Costco card.
If I did have a card that gave special travel rewards, then I would probably just use that for everything, as long as it gave some kind of reward on miscellaneous purchases.
I do have backup cards.
Because gas pumps are such common targets for skimming thieves I have a dedicated credit card for just that. It’s a gasoline company affiliated card so I also get 10-15 cents per gallon off. When, not if, that gets compromised, none of the other ~40 vendors or standing charges I have on my primary card need to be updated.
Otherwise I endorse your attitude. Have 1 primary card, use the crap out of it, but have it deliver the thing you care about: be that dollars, miles, or hotel points.
And seconding @puzzlegal’s sound advice to never travel without multiple cards. There’s the risk of theft, there’s the card vendor locking your card for unfamiliar purchase patterns in strange places, and simple loss of the physical card while you’re operating in unfamiliar surroundings constantly on the move. Plus of course malfunction where the chip simply dies.
It’s useful to keep the second card somewhere else on your person or in your luggage. Having them side by side in your wallet doesn’t help when your wallet is the thing lost or stolen.
Yeah, traveling with my husband, with a different card on each of us, is ideal. 
Likewise, while traveling as a couple, each of your should bring your car keys and keep them in your separate suitcases. It would suck to have e.g. his luggage not arrive back home with you and there you sit at your home airport looking forlornly at your car with his keys in limbo and yours at home. Cheap insurance.
We’re close enough to the airport that we typically Uber/taxi in, so car keys aren’t an issue. And if we lose our house key there’s a combo lock to enter via the basement door.
I do have a rarely used 2nd card that I carry when traveling since all our current cards are with one bank. I’ve always liked the security of having another option.
A friend has one or the other of these, and finds it worthwhile, all in all.
My understanding of that sort of card is that it’s provider-agnostic, in that you can use the points for travel by almost any means. I know there are a lot of incentives to book travel through their agency, however.
How do you (OP) think you’re likely to travel? Car? Air? Train? If you will fly a lot, a card associated to the airline that provides the best service to your area might be worth considering. And you can switch up,every couple of years, as your needs change. We got an Amtrak-linked card a couple years back when we were planning a big train trip - and wound up getting 2 out of the 3 legs of the trip with points, which saved us 2-3 thousand bucks overall. Decades ago, we concentrated on an airline card where we had a lot of frequent flier points already, and took the family cross-country in first class.
I use Chase Sapphire Preferred for travel and like it a lot. Is it the best for you or others? I can’t say. But it is not a bad choice.
That might be a reason to choose a provider-agnostic card over one specific to a particular airline. My understanding is that the millions of us with airline frequent flyer miles have, collectively, trillions of miles among us and that there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to use all of them. The airlines regularly make it harder to use frequent flyer miles to fly for free, like by increasing the number of miles needed for a free flight and limiting the number of seats per flight that are available for free. (And of course many people have only a small number of miles in their account, not enough for a free ticket anyhow.)
And note that the airlines make money by selling their frequent flyer miles to the banks that issue the affiliated credit cards. I believe for some airlines, this is a substantial revenue source, especially given how difficult and expensive their core business of flying people is.
What most of them seem to be doing now is tying the “price” of a free flight using miles to the actual fare for that seat, at a rate of something like 1 cent per mile, rather than some fixed number of miles. Eg. if the fare for a particular flight is $400, then you need 40,000 miles to book it for “free”, but if the fare goes up to $600 during the pear holiday travel season, now you need 60,000 miles the same flight.
A few airlines do allow you to combine “miles + cash”, so you can effectively use your miles to get a discount on a flight if you don’t have enough to get it for completely free. I did that using my JetBlue miles for my holiday flights last month. Normally their nonstop flights to JFK from the west coast sell for over $700 during the holidays. But I only had to pay ~$300 (plus 40,000 miles).
Yeah - I fly so infrequently that I almost never get to use points. That trip to California was 22 years ago. I’ve never actually gotten any free flights just on flier miles without also using a branded credit card to top them off.
When we did our cross-country train trip, we had to do something like that. We paid for the outbound trip - which bumped us up enough that the return trip was covered. We also did a daytime trip up the west coast, and did not have enough miles for that - so I bought enough points to cover it. I likely paid 80 bucks or so for the points - definitely cheaper than the fare would have been.
For anyone considering the Chase Preferred or whatever, see if there’s a way to noodle around their travel website and see what flights etc cost in terms of points. That may give you an idea as to whether it’s really worth any fees.
From what I have been reading, some of the best options are to transfer your CC points to a specific airline rewards program and use those to buy the flights. You find the flight you want independent of the CC travel portal and you might even get a multiplier when you convert your points to miles.