I'm going to apologize in advance for the naive nature of my questions and thank everyone in advance for their input and wisdom. My wife and I use the American Airlines Advantage Mastercard and Continental OnePass Visa and have accumulated about 400,000 miles. We also have about 125,000 miles on Delta and United cards, but no longer use those 2 credit cards. We are interested in using more of a rifle approach instead of this shotgun approach to accumulating rewards. We are interested in using a rewards credit card that allows us to accumulate mileage or hotel points that are easily converted from one to the other, e.g. from air miles to hotel points or vice-versa. My wife is interested in the Starwood Preferred Guest Program, but I'm not very happy with American Express, preferring instead to use a Visa or Mastercard and hook-up with the Marriott Rewards program or another that you may recommend.

What is the best credit card with which to acquire points or miles easily converted?

Do you have an opinion of Starwood vs. Marriott?

What program would you recommend if I don't want an American Express card but would like to earn points toward Starwood?

Am I forced to convert points from another card to Starwood and don't I get a bit screwed in the conversion, or is there a way to actually acquire more points elsewhere and convert them more advantageously to Starwood or Marriott?

What programs and credit cards would you recommend, based on the above?

Thank You

IMO, the Marriott Rewards program isn't a very efficient way to get airline miles unless/until you reach the levels of the travel package awards (approximately 185,000 points). That's a lot of credit card use (at 1 point per $) if you're not also going to be doing hotel stays. It does have a nice sign-up bonus (15,000 points plus a free night certificate) right now and also a referral bonus promotion going right now (if you have a friend who already has one, you might check into it).

I can't speak for the Starwood card, but I've seen many others on FT rave about it and especially its transferability; it may be a better bet for transferring into airline miles. I would recommend doing a search in the Starwood forum for more info on that program because I'm sure the merits have been discussed enough that you could be chastised for starting a new thread on the subject.

MR Visa is excellent for stays at Marriott Properties as it gives you 3 points per $ spent. It also immediately gives you Silver Elite status which is an additional 20% bonus on points eanr on a Hotel stay. In the case of FS properties that is like an additional 2 points per dollar spent. I only use my MR Visa for Marriott charges.

I use my UA MP Visa for all other charges as the MR Visa only gives me 1 point per $ spent which is not very good IMO.

At a very high level, Visa and MC cannot offer the same types of rewards that Amex can. Amex charges a much higher "juice" to merchants, so they have more room to kick a piece of that back to the cardholder. You will never find an SPG Visa that offers one Starpoint for US$1 in spending. The bank would be spending all of its revenues from your purchases buying your Starpoints. So if you want max rewards, you gotta go Amex.

Hotel-stay wise, I'm a big fan of Marriott above the other two major programs. I consider HH second and SPG a distant third in terms of garnering rewards during paid stays.

But credit-card wise, the Starwood Amex is my primary card and I'm of the opinion that it's the best rewards card available for general usage. It trumps all of the airline cards by far, it noses out the HH Amex because of its flexibility with many airline partners, and - as long as you actually have use for the rewards - it provides bigger bang-for-buck than a rebate card.

The only three credit cards in my wallet are the three hotel cards. SPG is primary, MR Visa is used at Marriott properties (where I stay a lot), and HH Amex is used at Hiltons or when Amex decides to run a juicy promo with it, which they do about once a year. (Last year, they doubled all points for 2 months.) Also, if my HH Gold status ever is in jeopardy of expiring, I'll just roll a couple months' spending to the HH Amex to requal, then go back to SPG Amex.

A side bonus of doing this is the fact that, although I never stay at Starwoods, I effectively diversify my earnings in the three programs. I fly AA, stay at Marriotts, and use the SPG Amex. So no matter where I go, I can consider all the available hotel chains for award possibilities. That's nice, given how finicky they can be for award availability.

Since you don't like Amex. Maybe you can qualify for Canadian SPG card
https://wwwa.applyonlinenow.com/CANa...CV_language=en
It gives you 5000 SPG points on first purchase, another 5000 SPG points on your first stay as well as 5,000 for each CDN$10,000, $20,000 and $30,000 in Net Spending every year.

The card however gives you only 1 SPG point for every $2 CAD spent, but if you spend $30K CAD in the first year you will effectively earn 40,000 SPG points.