I am looking for a new credit card or cards for every day spend and wanted to get everyone's opinion.

Here is my situation. I fly between 75000 and 100000 miles per year mostly on Continental and also took advantage of the AA Citi bonuses so I am pretty set for airline miles. Because of the way my hotels are billed I get virtually no points for them despite spending about 15 days of the month on the road. Most of my travel is overseas so a card with no foreign transaction fees is very important.

My thought is to get the Chase Sapphire and use that for all food spending and overseas transactions. That way I will be able to transfer those points to Hyatt or Marriott, but also have the option to top off my Continental(United) account if needed. Then I will get the SPG Amex for everything else since everyone seems to think these points are the most valuable. Does that make sense, or is is it smarter to just put everything on the Sapphire Preferred and avoid paying two annual fees?

Thanks,

Texan6

How are your hotels billed? Through a corporate TA or through something like priceline?

If you are primarily looking for points/miles that are transferrable, I think Chase Sapphire is great option. You can transfer to a lot of partners like UA, CO, Hyatt and Marriott as noted in this post.

Further, my all time favorite card is Citi ThankYou Premier card as you can earn 2.66 cents per $ spent to be used towards airfares. This is for any purchase, anywhere. Plus it also comes with no forex fee. I no longer find SPG AMEX card to be as useful and prefer to accrue AMEX points instead.

I pretty much follow the strategy in this blog post.

AA_Expo9, that is correct. All the hotels are billed directly to a company account and all the points are usually negotiated out.

jeelele, thanks for the tip. I have not looked in to the Citi Premier Thank You Card.

If most of your spending is through travel purchases, the Chase Sapphire Preferred is a better option since you will earn double points on ALL travel. Since you're on the road you will also (presumably) have a lot of dining expenses which will also earn double points.

The AMEX SPG card is recommended because you earn an effective rate of 1.25 miles per $1 when you transfer in increments of 20,000 miles.

But in your situation,you'll earn 2 points $1 if you transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt, and the Chase Sapphire Preferred may be the better card.

Thanks Million Mile Secrets! That's pretty much what I was thinking. The only reason I was interested in adding the Starwood AMEX is for flexibility since Hyatt seems to have a fairly small number of properties overseas compared to Starwood.