Based on what I see so far, I think the SPG route is the way to go for now... Although this could still evolve. I am going to consider handing my friend the following one page Word printout (in person not email lol) that hopefully explains it without making her head fall off. What do you all think? Does it do a good job or does it need more/less? I can tell you that they have no current flight plans so nothing is immediate...

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Ok so you have gotten the Delta Gold Amex and you are on your way to earning miles.
The way this card will work is, once you spend the $500 and it posts to your Amex account and is paid, they will deposit 30k miles into your Delta account 6-8 weeks later.

Assuming you have other Delta miles, that’s not bad. I think your husband should get this card too for his DL account. The more miles you all have the better. It’s not that one can combine miles, but if everyone has a lot of their own, much can be done. More on that later.

Now you need more – and even if you could get just 1-2 mileage award tickets to Holland, that would save a lot for a family of 5. You could still buy the other tickets and have the airline do the seating so you are all together later on.

There are many alternative ways to earn miles but some of the easiest ways these days are to get credit card sign up bonuses like you just have done. But now you need even more cards.

Assuming your family’s credit is good (scores of 720 or greater) you should be able to get more with relative ease. And it will not have any negative impact so long as you, like me, just pay your bills in full on time all the time. (BTW, never pay for a credit score. There are ways to obtain it free but that’s for later).

What you need to do is to get cards that have points that can be transferred into miles, like the Starwood Amex personal and business card (SPG). An example of how this works with most major airlines is: Spend $2,247 on the card, get 2,247 SPG points. You can transfer them to DL and get 2,247 DL miles!

Not all cards work this way or this easily, but the SPG ones do. But wait, there’s more!

If one has 20,000 SPG points and transfers them to an airline, SPG sends over 5k more points!

When you sign up for the SPG card, the current sign up bonus is 25,000 points! You need to do a more robust spend. I have to look it up but I think it’s $5,000 in the first 4 months or something. However, this can easily be done (in both alternative ways and realistic ones – more on that later).

You guessed it: Your husband should get the SPG cards as well!
• So in the end, you both would have the DL card = 30k Dl miles each
• You both would have the SPG personal card = 25k SPG points each converts to 30k DL each
• Right there you both have 60k DL each minimum JUST for using new credit cards to spend in your life as you already do! (remember, everything you spend = a mile too)
• You both would have the SPG Business cards = 25k SPG points each converts to 30k DL each

The cool part is that if either my wife (or I) refer either of you/both of you to join SPG, we also get a bonus from Amex as well, so you’d be helping your fellow Dutch X-Pat lol.

SPG is a great card even if you don’t convert its points to DL miles. SPG is Sheraton, Westin and other great hotels. An example of how good it is: Westin Times Square, NY can be up to $400 a nite. But they want 12,000 points to stay there. That’s not bad! I can go into that later but it’s a better redemption rate than all the other chains like Hilton, etc, and SPG has no black outs! If you call and there’s a room, you can do it with points or cash or sometimes a combination of both. That trip to the Westin Maui we are considering is all on points. 12k per night, 12 nights. Only incidentals for costs. That’s it! So having this card—even if not for airline use—is a good move over all. We use ours to charge up EVERYTHING we do when Amex is accepted.