What is the best credit card for acquiring and using points for hotel rooms?
If this is not the appropriate forum for this post, please excuse and inform me of the correct forum. Thanks.
[email protected]

It depends a lot on which hotels you prefer to use. But one of the FlyerTalk favorites is the Starwood AMEX card. Do some searches in the AMEX and the Starwood forums for more info on this particular card.

Howard: Welcome to Flyertalk! We love the Starwood AMX. It is our primary card. Nice things about it: low annual fee, ocassional bonus promos, points transfer to airline miles = 20,000 gets 25,000 (not that I would trade points for miles!) and Starwood is very easy to redeem hotel rooms.

Before this card the Marriott Visa was our hotel earning card. We have really done well with both cards, but the Starwood one is the hands down winner.

Welcome to Flyertalk Howard.

In addition to the Starwood Amex, which empirically has the best point/mile return for dollar spent, you might also consider the Hilton Amex and the Hilton Visa card. Although the point return per dollar spent with each is marginally less than the Starwood Amex, the Hilton cards do not charge an annual fee, the Starwood card does. The Hilton Amex gives you 7,500 points for signing up, 5 points per dollar spent at Hilton Hotels, 3 points per dollar for all other purchases. The Hilton Visa comes with a 10,000 point sign up bonus, 3 points per dollar spent at Hilton hotels, 2 points per dollar spent everywhere else. Your overall return might be better at Starwood though, even with the annual fee. However, you should consider getting the Hilton cards anyway, they're free, and just for signing up you can rack up a sizeable amount of points. Hilton points can be transferred to airline miles too, but they're probably most valuable being used on hotel rooms. Hope that helps a bit.

Another reason you may want to consider owning the Hilton cards.... every few months or so, they offer double point promotions and you can really rack up some points. You can't take advantage of those promos if you don't have the card(s).

[This message has been edited by hhonorman (edited Jan 22, 2004).]

Are you sure?

There certainly wasn't any such promo for the couple years that I had my HHonors Visa (which I ended up never using after getting the 10000 bonus points for signup). All the Visa promotions have been if you use ANY Visa. (I already had a Visa that earned me miles of much greater value much faster than the points that the HHonors Visa would have earned me, and thus I used that other Visa for all those HHonors Visa promotions.)

And all the Amex promotions I remember have been for using any Amex, but as I didn't try to particpate in them (as I didn't have an Amex until very recently) I can't swear to that one.

It depends, among other things, in part on where you want to use points for hotel rooms.

For example, some chains only have big city locations. It doesn't matter how much you might like Hyatt, for example, it's SO big city oriented that there's not even a single one in Portland OR for example, let alone many decent-sized cities even smaller than that.

As another example, if you're interested in international awards, some chains have much better availability in some countries while other chains in others, and still others have availability only in the US.

So no one can say which one is the best for you until you narrow it down to the chains that would work for you (locaitonwise, etc) IF you could earn awards at a good rate and redeem them easily enough.

Hilton Amex