Originally Posted by sdsearch

It depends.

If you travel enough to make use of several free hotel nights a year, and don't limit yourself to "aspirational" hotels, then one card each in the three hotel programs might be the ones to keep, since the annual fee in years 2+ will be more than offset by the (capped) free night certificate in years 2+. (The first year you get the signup bonus points instead, and you may or may not get charged the annual fee, depending on time of year.) I call these cards "net negative" annual fee, since what you get from the card is more than the annual fee you pay (assuming you can use the free night cert every year). And why not keep a "net negative" annual fee card "forever"?

If you've not held a Marriott or SPG card "too recently", you might want to start with marriot business card since Chase business cards don't count toward 5/24, so it won't increase your 5/24 count. (There are no business cards for the other two hotel programs with "net negative" annual fee cards, IHG and Hyatt, but you may want to consider them anyway for the same reason. Though Hyatt has too small a "footprint" for some people.)

But you presumably have to be familiar with using hotel points to understand the concept of a free night capped at, say, 35000 Marriott points, and whether that would work for you.