Originally Posted by
Often1
If you fly WN a lot, whether the refund is to your CC or RR account is immaterial. Not so if you rarely fly WN and are simply borrowing money on your CC to keep a balance on RR.
When you cancel a WN ticket and create a credit for later use, you must still use your current cash to pay your CC bill (reducing your return on investments) or run a CC balance and pay the interest on your CC. If you do this on a 5% CC for 15 days on a $300 ticket, the cost is approximately $0.60. No big deal. If you keep a WN balance of $5,000 across a year and you have a high-interest card, let's say 10%, the cost of tying up funds is $500, which is a biggish deal.
If you rarely, if ever, fly WN, the value of having a credit to anything other than your original form of payment is $0.