Hello and thank you in advance for all the sage wisdom and advice. A relative put me out to her neighbor as an expert in credit cards/FF miles. Oh well, bad for me.

The neighbor would like to travel non-stop to Tel Aviv. We live in Baltimore, so the only options are PHL (USAir), EWR (El Al, United), JFK (El Al, Delta). From what I can tell from an itasoftware search, El Al doesn't fly on certain days (guessing Shabbat).

The neighbors have no points and are willing to get a credit card. They are husband and wife and he has a business. I'm guessing they could each get a personal card and he could get a business card as well.

It seems to be very difficult to manage because I don't think they'll have enough points for everyone to fly for free (I'm verifying the # of passengers, but I think it is 5), so while you can get a free ticket or two on Airline A, if their flight is more expensive in terms of dollars, that may offset the free ticket. What I mean is that you don't necessarily want to get a free ticket if the rest of the family has to pay double just to fly on the same plane. I hope this makes sense.

From my recent experience, Chase points are easy to get (Sapphire Preferred and Ink Bold). You can combine those with even a United Card. I don't know about El Al. I know that Delta has a reasonable flight out of JFK, but I think the only way to book on Delta using Ultimate Rewards points is to transfer them to Korean Air and then don't you run into the problem of booking award travel on a partner airline? I would hate to go through with this whole exercise then find out there is no partner availability.

Does anyone have any thoughts/recommendations or questions that need to be answered?

Thanks again for reading through all this. This goes under the category of no good deed goes unpunished!