There may be rewards programs that, technically, work out better than True Blue but I would imagine there are a lot of people who are in a similar situation to myself. That is, we're not business travelers so we don't have the chance to rack up a lot of miles and affinity cards are the only way to get miles.

Over the past 20 years, I've been on a few different affinity cards - had some changed right out from under me (like an old CitiMiles card that repeatedly changed). Every time I went to look at what an award cost, it was way out of my league. I went years on a particular MasterCard to find out that even one transatlantic ticket would cost 60,000 points. Never mind two. I finally ended up getting SOMETHING out of that card when I took a vacation in California this year and used those points for the rental car.

True Blue? Ok, it helps that I'm near Boston and they fly to places I want to go. My airline of choice USED to be Southwest. It also helps that they had an offer a couple years back for a total of 20,000 bonus miles when signing up if you hit a particular spending point (which was easy for me). I signed a lot of my auto-pay bills over to that card and FINALLY - that vacation I mentioned above? I paid for my BOS-LGB tickets with points - *2* round trip tickets for 44K points. For the first time, I actually GOT a 'free' flight.

Granted that Capitol One seems to be trying to get my business (and with their card being a Visa, it's taken in more places than AmEx) so I'm tempted but if JetBlue ever started transatlantic routes, I don't think anything could pull me away.