Originally Posted by
bartman9
Thanks for your responses, this has been very helpful. Since this is pretty vague and there are so many options, I will give you a little more insight into my situation and hopefully that will help with some responses.
I currently have the following cards:
SPG Amex
SPG Business Amex
Citi Hilton Honors Visa
Chase Marriott Rewards Visa
I have my own company and charge everything I can for the business. So I am typically charging about $15k-$20k per month on my AMEX and just use the other ones when someone does not take AMEX. As a result, I have over 400,000 SPG points right now. I have just been stockpiling these without much of a plan over the last 1.5 years.
Now I want to start making the best use of my points and hope to travel to China, Hawaii and the Caribbean in the next 2 years.
I don't have any airline cards and really don't have many points in any airline program. I guess I should try and find a good one to get into so that I can get some miles.
I appreciate any other suggestions anyone has.
Dave
It depends on how much you travel. Most airline points vanish if you don't have any activity in 18 months. In your case you could transfer points from Amex to keep reseting the date. Delta and a couple others don't have expirations on there points. Also by flying mostly on one alliance you can gain status=upgrades. Again each airlines has different requirements and some roll over miles from year to year. But most important is who flies from your home town, you don't want to be driving 50-200 miles everytime just to use a certain airlines or Alliance. So you have to take everything into account. Good luck, we found Thailand more fun and better beaches than China so keep it open for future trip.