mia

Ah, this does change the focus of the question. If you want a single V/MC which can transfer miles as required to your AA and UA accounts you could consider the Diners Club Mastercard Charge Card. The annual fee is $95, which is likely about the same as the combined AA+UA cards, but you can earn 12,000 bonus points in the first 12 months and in subsequent years you could pay the annual fee by redeeming points, currently 8,000. This means the first $8,000 of annual spending does not generate any miles, which probably isn't attractive if your charge volume is low, but there are other benefits such as $350,000 flight insurance, primary car rental insurance, and concierge service which may cause you to shift some spending away from the SPG card.

A variant on this idea is the forthcoming Diners Club Credit Card. Citibank is not yet accepting applications for this product, but they are offering it to holders of other discontinued cards which carried no annual fee. The assumption is that the credit card will also have no fee, and will offer a subset of the charge card benefits. In particular it will earn only 1 point for $2 spending, but this may compare favorably to spending 8,000 points to pay the fee if your annual Mastercard spending is under $16,000.

I have also read that Citibank offers, but does not advertise, an AAdvantage Bronze credit card with no annual fee. This reportedly earns 1 mile per $2 spending.

dennis