I am been reading this forum for a few days and have been pretty cc savy in the past but what would be the best credit card for this situation?

I spend about 150k a year for my business on cc's.

I do travel but rarely stay in hotels.

Located in New York and prefer using JFk. Would like to go to Hawaii, Australlia, New Zealand in the fall.

I have a delta sky miles account but am a basic member.

I have an old amex plantinum card which gets me in to airport lounges but would be nice to be offical. Because of the this I prefer delta for the free drinks.

CC would probably be a personal card as corporation does not have credit.

I have a discover card and a chase card that gets me 3% in my biggest three categories.

I would like %5 at gas stations.

I have $8k owing on a cancelled citi card with payments of $140 a month (interest free).

When I first got the citi card I got 3 months at %5 on everything. Managed to make about $4500 on that.

thanks for your help

My favorite for this is the Pentagon Federal Credit union card. This is complicated, and requires joining the credit union. See details at:

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/689181

bd

Aside from gas stations and grocery stores:

Schwab Invest First Visa (2% cash back everywhere, nice bill pay feature)

Starwood Preferred Guest Amex (highly versatile travel rewards)

The latter might be less useful in your case since
The starpoints are very good value when redeemed for hotel stays.

I would agree with the starwood card. Very flexible, since you can transfer the points to many different airlines and also use them for hotel stays.

I believe you can get an invitation to the starwood program and be given gold status and 1,000 points before you sign up for the card. It also has a low fee. When you transfer 20k points to an airline they will give you a bonus 5k in miles. The only downside is there are no spending bonuses that I am aware of, so if you want to just use your points for hotel stays you do not get any bonus for spending a lot. Though you do get a very good value when you redeem them for hotel stays.

thanks for the advice so far.

Travel perks are great. But straight cash would be preferred as I can travel cheap with that money. I just switched my discover to 2 miles/points per $ instead of 1% towards gcs which I would strectch from $20 to a $25 gift card.

If I recall correctly the Discover 2% is not a true 2%, you are tiered. Starts below 2%, eventually reaches 2% for (lets say) the purchases between $5k to $15k, then falls to 1% or 0.5% for additional purchases.

I'm not certain if this is still available, but my Capital One Small Business Rewards has no annual fee and provides 2% "cash back". I receive 2 points per dollar spent on all purchases. If you purchase travel related items (air, car, hotel, parking, timeshare maintenance, etc) you can later request a credit on your statement by redeeming 100 points per dollar you want credit for. So I buy $12,500 of product and get 25,000 points which I can then use to get $250 statement credit on a $250 travel item.

You can redeem points for other items, but non travel credits and cash back work out to a 1% redemption.


One card I liked a lot was the Citi Premier Pass Card Elite which was $75/yr. I got 1pt per $ spent + 1 bonus pt/$ for supermarket, drugstore, gas, communter trans, parking and also 1pt per mile flown for all tickets bought. If you fly a lot, this is the card for you. My favorite purchase went as so:
- Buy a $500 ticket LAX-OGG R/T. Get 500 pts for the purchase and 5,400 pts for the miles flown. the card is not related to the airline I fly on so I also get the 5,400 Airline Miles. Thus, a $500 purchase yields 5,900 pts, if I made this flight 5 times I'll have spent $2,500 for 29,500 pts, 25,000 pts gets me a 48 state domestic ticket worth $250-$500 (let's say $375) so $375 / $2,500 = 15%!

OK, the $75/yr cuts into the 15% and you will not always get 5,900 points on a $500 ticket. But if you charge everyone's tickets to your card (it doesn't matter if you fly or not) and / or you fly frequently, the $75/yr becomes a very small deterent and even on shorter routes you'll be getting 6-10% on the amount of your purchase.

The points you accumulate are added to your Thank You Rewards account (setup when you get this card, or you might alraedy have one) and you have 5 yrs to use the points. In my experience it is best to use the points for air tickets where you still accumulate air miles with your airline! The redemption is fairly standard at 100 pts per $ spent on a ticket with a few cases where highly booked flights might cost more points.

I was even able to (with a bit of perseverence) get the call center to book specific fare classes so I could later use upgrade vouchers to upgrade into First Class. Sometimes those tickets required a little more points as well, but not always.

So it's essentially double dipping... interesting. Thanks for the detailed descriptions. It sounds great especially since I purchase a number of tickets for others.

No, you dont get 5900 ThankYou pts on your $500 spending - Those are Flight Points. Your "Fight Pts" have to be matched with Spending pts before they can be turned into TYPs for use.

In other words, your $500 ticket purchase earn you 500 spending pts, AND release 500 flight pts due to the matching. The remaining 5400 flight pts are sitting in your flight pt account, waiting to be matched by spending pts which are earned by spending (any spending).

The fact that the sign up bonus is counted as Spending pts, may give you the wrong perception that your $500 spending earn you 5900 pt - in essence, the flight pts are matching up with your initial bonus until all your bonus and spending pts are used up - then you will see how the real mechanism works.

Trust me, what you describe is NOT accurate about how $500 earn you 5900 ThankYou pts.

The 5 year term is also NO LONGER TRUE. Effective Jan 10, 2010, TYP earned from PPE has a life span of 18 months from the last activity on your PPE card. You should have received the notice on your last statement - it is not a separate notice, but part of the statement.

The double dipping part is definitely the advantage, especially if you have lots of spending to match the flight points.

However, what the OP describes about buying a $500 ticket to earn the 5900 ThankYou Pts being the distance flown) is ABSOLUTELY NOT CORRECT. He earns 5900 Flight Pts which must be matched with Spending Pts before it can turn into TYPs which can then be used at 1 TYP = 1 cent ratio to book flights and hotels thru TYN (run by Expedia booking engine), or redeem GCs.

He probably still not has enough flight pts to deplete the sign up bonus which at one point was 25K. Bonuses are considered spending pts, therefore can be used to match flight pts just like actual spending.

However, flight pts will NOT turn into the useful TYPs until they are matched with the spending pts at 1:1 ratio.

PPE at this stage is nothing more than a 2% maximum rebate card after the final devaluation in March this year, with the ThankYou pts are redeemed at 1 TYP = 1 cent ratio. The program has gone thru 2 major devaluations, one in Jul 2007 and one in Mar 2009 - with the last devaluation brought the redemption value from a 1 pt to 3 cent down to 1 pt to 1 cent. We even have a still running STICKY in the Other Credit Card forum devoting to the redemption mad dash before the final devaluation in Mar 2009.

However if you can get retention offer at a 3x to 5x earning rate on the spending pts, it would turn into a 6% to 10% rebate card when matching with flight points. (8% to 12% on spending made on gas station, grocery store and drug store.)

I really miss the pre Jul 2007 days when there was no cap on the value of airline ticket redemption... A measly 20K TYPs can fetch $2500 value on a domestic coach ticket and a 60K TYPs can fetch $12000 value on an International coach ticket... Some of us still use the residual vouchers from the July 2007 mad dash of redemption.

Let it be cash, points or miles, I don't think Discover is the best card in your situation.

I used to use Discover for cashback. As far as I know, Discover doesn't offer "strong" customer support nor good card holder extended warranty as other big cc companies (Amex...etc). They also raised the point redemption threshold recently (maybe mid-year?). Not the best cashback reward card in my book. I didn't use their miles program but I assume it's similar to Capital One, which is NOT as easily redeemable/ticketable as regular airline miles programs. If you have Amex SPG, that will give you more flexibility to transfer points into different FFPs with 25% bonus per 20K transfer.

You may want to check out these threads and sort out what's best for you:

Frequent Flier Credit Cards versus Cash Rebate Cards

Consolidated Best Rewards Credit Card Discussion, Hugely Comprehensive

The "What Credit Card Should I Choose?" Master Thread

Business Owners

Welcome to FT!

ps. If you decide to get Amex SPG card, lots of folks will be glad to refer you so both parties can get referral bonuses (just go to our S.P.A.M. Forum to ask someone to refer you).

ETA:
pps. See Happy's posts about ThankYou points. The return value isn't as good as it used to be. You should also visit our Other Credit Card Programs Forum to read more about Citi ThankYou Points in depth.

Happy, I'm going through the T&Cs for Citi PPE. They don't phrase it as simply as you have, but it's exactly as you say. Not so nice of them to bury it the way they did, though:

So yeah, it's really like a 2% card, but capped.

The mechanism of flight points has been this way from Day One. The redemption value though was a huge bonanza before July 2007, then still very decent before Mar 2009. Now as you see it, is a basic 2% card.

HOWEVER, there is still potential in the retention offer. A friend just obtained the 5x, the second time since March this year. Each promo lasts for 6 months. So it is still a worthwhile card.

for the SPG card what is the best use of points? if used for hotel stays what are the additional taxes and fees? Lots of blackout dates? What is the referral bonus?

Is there anyway to achieve lifetime status for a reputable program? That may be best to do now then switch to another.

Travelling is usually a write off for me so paying cash is fine but it is nice to get good perks if the % back is still good.

Schwab says they no longer provide miles on their credit card, although other features such as 2% back, no foreign transaction fee, no annual fee, and no ATM fees.

What is the closest other credit card to Schwab that offers miles?

One good use of SPG points is Cash + Points bookings for hotel stays. Another is transferring 20K points to a FF program, which will be credited as 25K miles (some exceptions to this rule). The latter is especially good if you can redeem for premium cabin awards.

As for lifetime status, I think only AA counts CC spend (or transfers into the program, like through SPG points) towards lifetime status. In fact, they count all sources (CC bonuses, rental car, e-shopping, hotels, etc.)