icspres

While several of my employees travel a great deal, I don't tend to travel that much and when I do, I really don't care much whether I travel first or business. I'm usually traveling with the family and we take a whole row out of economy. What I'd like to see is all those miles add up to a nice vacation for us once in a while.

It does need to be a business card. I need individual numbers for each employee, flexibility to change cash allowances, strong and responsive security dept so we can address usage flags quickly and efficiently when they're traveling. So from what you said it doesn't sound like the Citi double cash program would work for us. I also wonder if my accountant might not say since it's liquid, cash back, that it shouldn't go back into the company coffers whereas points are more malleable.

So essentially the Aadvantage program, of which I'm a part, would seem to do what I want, but in practice their award redemption for hotels and cars is pretty bad, awful most times it seems. I might for instance go browse a 10 night stay in Orlando and it might say I need $1500 and 150,000 miles or something, just making that up, but when you go shop the same hotel through Orbitz or Expedia you find that the hotel stay should be little more than the $1500 without the points, so booking through aadvantage is a bit like flushing your points down the toilet. I'm sure they have exceptions, specials, but generally cashing in through their program seems like a losing proposition. Award travel seems to be getting more and more restrictive over time as well.

So I'm looking for a program like Aadvantage maybe used to be, or maybe a program that isn't airline specific but generally gives you good value for your miles.

icspres

And thanks for the assist

sdsearch

AAdvantage is not designed for hotels and rental cars. It is designed for flights on AA and its partners. The hotels and cars in afterthough, and I'm not sure if it's any better a value than redeeming for gift cards (which is always a bad value). Airlines miles tend to be only a good value for flights and hotel points tend to be only a good value for hotel stays because in those cases they're working off of "excess capacity". Airlines don't have access to "excess capacity" at hotels, so they have to "buy" the hotel night from hotel just like you would, and they tend to translate that to "miles" just like they would translate a gift card cost from dollars to miles.

If you want a single card that can give you good value on both airlines and hotels, that would be a flexible points card, such as one in the Amex Membership Rewards program, or one in the Chase Ultimate Rewards program or one in the City ThankYou points program.

None of those programs' points are exchangable for AA miles, though. To book AA flights, you'd have to transfer to one of AA's partners.

But now that I've said all, let me explain "good redemption". "Good redemption" to most people is when the flight or hotel is expensive on cash but available and inexpensive with miles or points. That only happens some of the time, so it's hard to use to cover any flight or any stay you want.

Most of those programs also have their own booking engine, where you can book flights or hotels (and maybe even cars?) with those same points (instead of transferring them somewhere). That gives them a different value, which is some fixed ratio between the number of points and the cash cost of the flight or hotel. It thus won't be as "good" a value as the best redemptions through real airline miles programs or real hotel points programs, but it will work for most any hotel (as long as their booking engine has it in their listings) and most any airline flights (again with any limitation being in the booking engine).

In my experience, these booking engines of card point programs work decently enough for hotels in significant cities, but they may not show every hotel in small towns and may not show any hotel in very small remote towns (even when there are hotels you could find through another booking engine). The other limitation is that if you have discount for a hotel (like AAA, for example), these booking engines generally can't factor that in for points bookings. Thus the "reference" prices for chain hotels I'm familiar with always seem a bit on the high side to me in these booking engines, because I'm used to using discounts for those hotels but those booking engines are showing non-discounted rates (and translating that to points).

I thus suggest you look into Amex's Business Gold Rewards card, the Chase Ink Plus card, and maybe the obscure Citi ThankYou Business card (but that one may be too obscure to be worth the bother?), see which if any of them has the business features you want, and then for those that do evaluate (or ask more questions about) their points program.

icspres

This is fantastic. Thank you. I'm not concerned with remote destinations, nor do I have any discount programs like AAA to apply. Since I'm already with Citi, I'm going to call them today about the ThankYou program and see if I can get a rundown. Just did a little googling on it and I see what you mean about obscure. But it seems to still exist and perhaps they can just migrate my existing cards/accounts over.

icspres

Spoke to Citi. Since I have two Aadvantage accounts, business and personal, I'm going to park the miles we have remaining, 205k, on the personal card and convert all the business cards to ThankYou, which is as easy as flipping a switch. If I ever cancel or convert the personal card, we have 60 days to use or lose the miles. Thanks for the help. Great forum.

mia

Citi does not hold miles. At the end of each billing cycle they are sent to your AAdvantage account at American Airlines. Cancelling the AA credit cards will have no effect whatsoever on the miles that are already in your account, only on miles earned in the current billing period. Be aware that AAdvantage miles expire if there is no activity in the AAdvantage account for 18 consecutive months. This is an AA rule, not a Citi rule. AAdvantage is AA's program, Citi is just one of scores of ways to earn miles.

sdsearch

Totally false. Citi told you hogwash!

As mia explained, your miles get transferred to AA on every statement, and the only miles you can lose by cancelling are those that have not yet transferred to AA. That's the what the significance of 60 days really is (since purchases made in up to the last 60 days may not have had their miles post to AA yet).

There is no difference at all with cancelling (or converting) a Citi AA business card vs a Citi AA personal card in terms of keeping or losing AA miles.

There is a reason we have an abbreviation of HUCA for "hang up, call again" (and talk to someone else). Because so often phone agents at various banks and travel companies give you hogwash information, and the simplest way to tell that it's hogwash is to call back later and ask another agent the same question, and if you don't get the answer, obviously one agent or the other was wrong (if not both wrong !).

mia

I think this is simply a misunderstanding. The 60 day cancellation policy applies to Citi ThankYou points, but not to American Airlines AAdvantage miles.

leeflyer

I recently cancelled a Marriott Business applied with SSN. Will I get the sign-up bonus again if i apply by using my business TIN? Thank you.

sdsearch

Wrong question.

Whether you get the sign-up bonus again is not determined by timing relative to when you cancel (although you do need to also cancel). It has to be at least 2 years since you last got the bonus. See the wikipost at the top of this thread (view on a computer, does not work on mobile site):
See? Since you last got the bonus. If you are the person who is going to be betting the bonus this time, you are the person whose last bonus they'll be comparing. (Signup bonuses are earned by the individual, not by the company.)

Also, you apply for credit in your name. The business info is additional, not a replacement.

rover4618

I have been approved in the past for business cards claiming sole proprietor pending tax documentation which I could not provide.

Anyone have any experience recently with either Citi or Barclays claiming business is only 3 months old with zero income to nullify the requests for tax documents etc.

sdsearch

I haven't yet applied for any business cards from Barclays, but at Citi I just said I had 0 years in business (I can't remember if they asked for months, but I would have put 0 there too if they did), 0 business income to date, minimum employees (they don't accept 0 so I put 1), my name as the business name, my address as the business address, my phone number as the business number, and of course sole proprietorship.

Ie, I don't have a real business, but I've been approved for business cards from Citi, Amex, and BofA with no questions about the business ever asked (except on one BofA call they did ask the name of the business and I just said it was the same as my name, and that was it). I'm always ready to say that my business is some consulting that I'm thinking about starting any time now (but haven't actually started yet), since it could lead to all the answers I just gave, but of course no one has ever asked me that.

So even if you have a real business, you could use the techniques people without a real business use, if you think that'll lessen the likelihood that they ask for documents which you can't provide.

And, obviously, if you don't have a real business, don't make one up just for a business card application, because that's what seems to get people in trouble, because if they provide a fake business name or fake business address or fake business income, then the bank may for documentation of same. Whereas if they ask for a utility statement for the business and the business name is your name and the business address is your address and the business phone number is your phone number, you can give them a personal utility statement and they can't tell that it's not for your business.

And with Chase (but only Chase AFAIK), don't call them about a business card application if you can possibly avoid it. They tend to grill way more than all other banks combined about business card applications. So it's best to wait to see if they'll approve it despite you not returning their call, and only call them for recon if you're denied (for some reason that merits recon). With others banks it doesn't seem to be a problem to call about a business card application.

rover4618

Thank you for the very detailed and useful post. Much appreciated.

yugi

I recently registered a new business. Can I use my old business cards which are under another business name for a new business, or I need a new cards? Can I also use personal cards for some of the business needs?

sdsearch

It's up to you.

Ie, the bank itself doesn't care much.

For some people, it may be their own accounting of different expenses which will get messed up if they do that. But if it doesn't mess up your accounting, then there's no problem with it there.

Another question is do you present the card in person to suppliers, and if so will they be confused to see a different business name on the card? If not, then that wouldn't be an issue either.

Another possible issue is mailing confusion. Ie, if you use a third-party mailbox service, and you tell them you're no longer "business A", only "business B", but the bank keeps sending correspondence addressed to "business A", make sure those don't get lost.

Finally, make sure there's not phone confusion either. That's the one place where the bank might confused, if the bank is trying to call about "business A", doesn't know that you're now "business B", and you answer the phone only with "business B" and not with your name, then the bank may think that the phone number they have for you is incorrect. But if your contact number for the card is your own personal phone, that shouldn't be an issue.

And while banks may "prefer" that you use business cards for business purchases, in practice they don't seem to care if you use business cards on personal expenses, or personal cards on business expenses. The one thing to keep in mind is that most business cards (other than Capital One) don't report to credit bureaus, so if you get to high utilization on a business card, it shouldn't affect your credit the same way high utilization on a personal card might. So that's one reason to sometimes use a business card over a personal card on larger purchases.