I own a business in NYC. I am researching the best method of payment for company expenses to use to acquire the most frequent flyer miles. I will be flying to China mostly. Does anyone own their own business that could offer me some ideas?

Yes. Ask for a x% discount from your suppliers and purchase your tickets.

If your vendors accept credit card payments and you choose to use that method of payment rather than a cash discount, go with the SPG AMEX card, and you can transfer miles into many different FF programs.

Go with the travelocity card with the annual fee. Each dollar spent earns you two points. At 20,000 points ($10k spend) you get a $400 credit against travelocity purchases (airfare, hotel, car rental, etc). This means you are getting about 4% back. Better than any card I know of.

The no-annual fee card earns half as much. Definately worth the annual fee if you have significant spending.

I had not heard about a card from the Gnome. I don't see anything about the expiration of points. This would be great with the coin deal from the mint, and I wonder from your experience if you can use it multiple times as in 1 for each party on the trip, or if it has to be just yourself or can you use say 40000 points and get $800 of a trip for 2?

Thanks for any info, it has 10K for opening and balance transfer for the $69 fee.
Barclay bank

Funny that the preferred card of Travelocity is Amex, yet they have their own M/C!

JudyJFLA

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9630/4.7.1.40 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

I'm pretty sure that the travelocity card has two tiers of earning, one for spend on their site and another for other transactions. That makes using it for dollar coins less appealing.

It has a couple of other quirks, too. Just like every other CC out there. Earning 4% is nice but many can do similarly well if not better with an AmEx MR or SPG card, depending on how one chooses to redeem, how big the monthly spend is and what types of redemptions you are looking for.

I assume you can charge most, if not all, company expenses to credit cards. Read these master thread and see if you can find some good pointers:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...rehensive.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ate-cards.html

I am not sure how this applies to OP's question.

The 4% is on all purchases, not just travelocity (or gas, groceries,etc). No spending tiers to meet either. I have had an SPG card for years and the travelocity card blows it away. It's hard to imagine a situation where an Amex or SPG earnings and redemption is better.

You are vastly over-simplifying the way the Travelocity card works. You only get the credit towards a flight or towards a flight+hotel booking. You must book on their site to redeem. You have to get to 20,000 points for redemption to get that max value; lower redemption levels get you a worse return rate. You do not get "change" on the value of a redemption. So if you have a $425 ticket it is not clear if you can redeem the $400 reward and pay the $25 in cash or if you must redeem the $500 reward. The latter would be a significant devaluation of the points. No ability to cancel/change/refund a reward. That is a HUGE liability to me.

More discussion here as well: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...locity-mc.html.

Got to go with RedSox. SPG all the way. We try and put all our business expenses on it and it's worked out quite nicely. Enjoying the final day of our most recent vacation in Hawaii compliments of SPG right now. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but from what I read in another thread the Travelocity card hardly blows it away. As sbm12 points out, it's hardly a great deal. But to each his own.

Agree with previous posters, the SPG card appears to provide best in general air travel and hotel redemption value for most people. OP can consider applying for both personal and business versions of the SPG card.

Since OP mentioned that s/he is in NYC and would mostly be using his points/miles for travel to China, I think OP needs to consider which airline would be best to redeem points/miles on for award travel. CO has the most non-stop flight routes to a number of major cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong), therefore I believe CO may have an edge over other US carriers if OP values the benefit of non-stop air travel. The conversion rate from SPG to CO (or UA) is rather poor. I myself have not used SPG for a while so I'm not familiar with whether there is other *A carrier that has favorable SPG conversion rate. If there is then OP is in luck as he can funnel SPG points -> other *A carrier -> redeem award travel on CO for non-stop flights; otherwise it might be better for him to have a CO card to charge at least a portion of his business expense to earn enough miles on CO for award travel to China.

[edit to add] Just took a quick look at SPG program for airline conversion. Yes, SPG would be best since there are a number of *A carriers with 1:1 ratio. OP needs to study which carrier (of US Air, Air Canada, ANA and Asiana) would be best for him to redeem award flights to China

Don't forget airline business programs like aaextra.

If I spend $10,000 on the Travelocity card I get a $400 statement credit against any flight, hotel, car rental, or package on Travelocity. I can choose any airline, hotel, etc. on Travelocity.

I still don't see how spending $10k with an SPG or Amex MR card beats that. Please post an example. Show me what $10k spent on the other cards will get you. Been there, done that, didn't like it. Ok, actually I did like the SPG card until this came out.

Plus I can potentially earn miles and hotel points when I book my "free" travel.

I myself don't have large amounts of spending to put on credit cards so I'm not speaking from personal experience -- but I'll give it a try. Suppose your annual spend is $100K (very modest for a business), with the SPG card, you get 125K AA miles, enough to redeem a saver RT biz award ticket to China for OP (or +/- some miles for first class tickets to Japan); such a ticket is often priced significantly higher than the $ credit (is it $4k?) that you get from travelocity card for the same spend.

Admittedly I don't know a great deal about the Travelocity card. Can you stack multiple $400 credits towards the same package? I don't want to sound like a snob, but really, how far is $400 going to go towards a vacation? I mean 1 night at a nice resort can cost that much. A week long vacation at a mid tier hotel and even a couple of coach tickets would leave you coming out of pock for most of the cost. Now if you can put 5 or 10 of these $400 credits together and apply that towards a trip I could see the value there. But for me I prefer SPG because I can convert 60k points to a first class ticket to Hawaii on AA from NYC (that costs upwards of $3,000.) Or I can redeem 60k points for a 5th night free award at any number of SPG Cat 5 properties around the world (which could easily cost $400/night.) I guess the Travelocity card's $400 credit is fine for a weekend getaway...but I can't see how it can compete with SPG for higher end hotel stays or premium air travel.