Thanks everyone for generously sharing your thoughts and knowledge. Indeed a warm welcome!

I’ve been doing a lot of homework. I took the solid advice of starting with deciding where you want to go & how you want to get there in the next 1-2 years as BQ & MDtR suggested. Most of our family (of 4) vacations have been contiguous 48 w/ Carribean & HI. I haven’t had issues dealing with booking what I consider okay to good rates for direct flights on coach. We’re okay w/ coach. So cash back is probably more attractive.

I initially wanted to redeem points for DFW to Maui where I haven't been able to get deals and then another year a trip to Seattle/Vancouver. When I calculated on AA, it seems like it’s a push, meaning it could swing either way couple hundred per ticket ($900-1200 for Maui) depending on if I catch a good fare sale or not. (With school age children, we travel peak times but a lot of that was when the kids were younger and non peak times too.) It seems hard to predict what my actual cash outlay will be in the future since I rely heavily on fare sales and I don’t have a great feel for peak fares yet. Conclusion: go safer route & go for the cash back.

Then as suggested, I turned to international usage--flying on Korean Air to Korea. KE points were way too high compared to AA (though I hear the flight on KE is much nicer). So the question became if accruing points on AA was better than going with a cash back program. The problem with this is that I think this trip is in 3 years, maybe 4. How much is the average devaluation? I hear summer ticket to Korea is around 2k. sAAver peak is 32.5k/50k/62.5k. Conclusion: With signup bonuses, go for a 2 AA accruing CC for husband and me and try to spend to get 2 more tickets for the kids. Caveat – unless devaluation is severe enough.

As for the implicit assumption of having one card - Clearly I see that signing up is the very fastest way to accrue points. If we weren’t open to this, then the cash back option would be the clear winner. But we discussed, and we’re open to opening 2 more cards each. We had a minor experience with ID theft which was a big annoyance; we’ve preemptively locked credit (though it never hit/affected credit) and are a little weary of having too much going on where we can’t keep a close eye on it all. I guess you read into my hope of having one card, but I should have known better.

Point taken about the being too cheap, ffI. Thank you.

I was leaning toward putting all my efforts into accruing AAvantage points . Is this a bad idea?

Anyone think I should just go with the Fidelity Amex 2% and if the vendor doesn’t take Amex (could very well happen), then just use the Barclaycard Arrival World card (after hitting min for each of our Citi AA card) or stick w/ the Chase Freedom since we redeem for car rentals?

Thus order would be:
Husband - Citi AA until min - Fidelity Amex w/ wife authorized?
Me - Citi AA until min - Barclay Arrival World w/ husband authorized?

I’m blurring 2 questions:
1. Anyone think I should go for cash back b/c I’m leaning towards going for miles.
2. Anyone recommend the best way to get 2 CCs for husband and 2 CCs ?
or 3. there’s always option #3 – other – ex: assumptions are wrong, your plan needs work.



PTSJunkie – Why no hotel interest? Depending on the type of vacation, we do VRBO, hotwire/priceline if hotel needed-usually in urban area so many options of great hotels (don't mind not having perks for the prices we pay), or use timeshare (please, no flack; we enjoy it ). With hotels, no loyalty & not enough travel to justify a loyalty account.