Originally Posted by
DjRocket
...whether earning AMEX MR points can be more rewarding for occasional travel purposes within North America than other alternatives, such as Venture card or its equivalents. I haven't seen an affirmative answer yet with a concrete example.
Of course it
can be, see
this example of a domestic economy class routing where transferring to Delta saved $0.021 per point, which is slightly better than $0.02 from a 2% cashback or points card. However, this is very dependent of your home airport and frequent destinations. If you live near, or travel to, airports that are serviced by commuter airlines you are likely to realize a better than 2% return, but if you generally fly to/from hub airports in economy class you will probably not because the fares are lower.
However, when evaluating a credit card, don't look only at the points/miles per dollar. Also factor in:
- New account bonus
- Foreign transaction fees
- Category bonuses (for transactions with certain types of merchants)
- Threshold bonuses (for reaching an annual target)
- Temporary bonuses
- Retention bonuses (for renewing the card)
Cash back cards tend to lag behind miles when looking at the full lifecycle of the card. (Ventures "miles" are actually restricted-cash which can only be used for travel. They are not convertible to airline miles.)
To get the full value from Chase Ultimate Rewards you need to have more than one Chase card. Sapphire Preferred alone won't do much in terms of rewards. You also need Freedom to earn 5 point per dollar on revolving quarterly categories, and an Ink business card to earn 5 points per dollar on several fixed categories, including office supply stores where you can buy gift cards issued by various merchants where you would otherwise earn only one or two points.