Balancing Flight Miles and Hotel Points
 

I have just started out on getting points and miles from credit cards, but I feel I have a pretty good grasp of how it all works after reading through the forum here and lots of various blogs. What I'm hoping to get is some advice on how to make sure I have enough hotel points to balance flight miles.

My husband and I both applied for the BA 100K Visa.

I applied for the CO Visa (before reading that you need to wait between Chase cards, but I'll call and contest my rejection when it comes) and will wait until closer to the end of the promo for my husband to apply.

I've been eyeing the AA 75K personal and business cards, but before I max out our credit pulls for this quarter, should I be applying for a hotel chain card instead? I've looked at the personal and business SPG Amex for starters. Would this be a more balanced approach, or are these AA cards ones to jump on now?

We are planning on using any miles and points accumulated in about a year, so we have time to spread out our applications, I just want to make sure we do things in the right order to maximize our benefits.

So how do you balance your flight miles and hotel points? Or do you just go for whatever bonus is best at the time? Thanks for any advice/help you can give!

It really is two separate questions - the first has to do with temporary bonuses and the second with what card works best for an individual situation.

I went for the BA bonus a year ago, the AA bonus recently, the Capital One recently too. But in terms of what card to pull out daily - that's a bit tougher!

Do you have elite status anywhere? Do you have enough air miles and need to accrue hotel points?

Clearly and for a lot of good reasons, people push the Starwood AMEX for many good reasons - great redemptions for hotels and great transfers to airlines (except for CO/United). Right now, I'm using the BA Visa to get to $30,000 this year for another 2-4-1 certificate. I have plenty of Starwood points and Hilton points so no need to pull them. Lots of AA from the credit card for me and my wife and lots of US Air from previous promotions. You get the idea. You need to inventory what you have, see where your status is, and figure out what's missing.

The amazing thing is that there are a large number of people who can never make it work and then there are the people on this board who help each other to have vacations we could only dream about years ago! Good luck.

One thing that I have found to be a little different with the hotel chains are that there are often hotel promos that give you free nights without credit cards. Sometimes they offer a 1 free night with 2 or 3 paid nights or various other offers. It does take time to learn about each chain and their promos (which also change every few months). So, it's good to think about which hotel chain(s) might meet your needs better and then concentrate on those.
Might first choice of info on hotel chains is:
http://boardingarea.com/blogs/loyaltytraveler/
because Ric's blog covers all the major chains.
Good luck!