Best Points To Accumulate?
 

Prompted by the WSJ article, let me ask this question: What are the best points to accumulate for international premium cabin travel?

I travel domestically very little, and spend about $40K a year on credit cards. I have good credit and churn my cards somewhat.

I need a large supply of Air Canada miles, as my wife lives in Toronto, and I get them by converting Amex points. I get those from spending (Amex PRG is my primary credit card) and I also am able to buy both Amex and Chase points from co-workers, usually at 1.25 cents per.

Right now I have about 350K Delta miles, as well at 90K in a USAir account that will be 100K after the Grand Slam promotion. My wife goes to Europe every summer, with some flexibility in dates, and doesn't mind traveling coach.

What I want to do is have enough miles for two overseas premium cabin tickets every 2-3 years. If availability were equal on all carriers, I would keep earning all the Amex points I could, giving me maximum flexibility to convert to Air Canada for her regular trips or DL for the overseas trips. But all airlines are not created equal. What's my best long-term strategy? Opinions most welcome from those with experience in overseas redemptions.

No one can tell you with any certainty what any of these programs will be doing in 6 months, much less 2-3 years. For example, right now there's ongoing talk of a US/AA merger, and if it happens, that would change many things in terms of alliances and redemptions.

Amex points are good...less so than they used to be maybe, due to fewer partners, but still flexible. Chase UR points are a pretty good option these days, lots of transfer partners. If you're willing to commit most of your spending to one card, you can find one that has a companion pass deal (I think the BA card does that after $30k?).

Sorry this isn't more of a direct answer, but unless you have one specific destination/goal in mind, it's hard to say that one choice is better than another.

Ideally I would like to be able to get, in the next 5-6 years, two business class tickets to Europe, two first-class tickets around the world, and in the other years, one ticket to Europe in coach or business.

That should be doable, with some judicious apps (assuming bonuses continue). You already have enough Delta miles to get your two Europe biz tickets, and the US Air miles would take care of the single ticket.

For the RTW awards, I'm not sure what program is best. If you were to do it via United (*A), that's currently 350k per ticket. So for the sake of argument, 40k/year spending * 5 years = 200k miles. Some of that can probably be done through a rewards mall, so let's say...50k additional??? So 250k earned. You need another 450k for two RTW J tickets. A few credit card apps, some good purchase opportunities, and that seems possible. Especially if your wife is willing to apply for cards as well? Chase points can be transferred to others. Also, a biz class RTW would save 180k points and make it a lot easier. Plus, save some UR points for the hotels :)

AA is the best for RTW, IMHO. I think it's something like 140-170k miles for RTW in business class, depending on how far you go plus you can get upto 16 stops. Ask on the AA forum and they'll be able to help. I havent seen anything that is even close to this.

Good call, I hadn't looked at that. Their award listing is at http://www.aa.com/i18n/disclaimers/oneworld_awards.jsp, and it would definitely be fewer miles. The problem I see with that is that neither Amex or Chase UR transfer to AA, so you're limited in earning options. Of course, that can change and probably would if this merger happens.

It really depends on your international destinations...you are well on the way to meeting your goals with DL, but those points are challenging to use. I like AA for RTW, but as others have pointed out, MR/UR don't transfer in.

Have you considered the AmEx Starwood card? I think a lot of folks of FT hold that card, as SPG points transfer 1:1 to over 30 airlines, including DL, AC, and AA. Plus, if you transfer 20,000 points to miles at a single time, you get a bonus 5,000 points (so even though the SPG AmEx earns at 1 point/$, judicious transferring gets you a 25% bonus). With your current spending, that would earn you 50,000 points/year on almost any airline you want, plus no excise tax (IIRC, MR still charges excise tax) on the transfer, and you may find it beats the gas/grocery spend bonus on AmEx PRG.

Still, to meet your goals, you may need to hit a few good signup bonuses as they come around.

Part of my strategy is to buy points. The company I work for has 5,000 professionals on the main campus, and a bulletin board where I can advertise. While free stuff is nice, if you told me I could get a RTW F ticket for 350K points, or about $4700, I would say that's a darn good deal considering that if you paid cash for it, it would probably be $20K or more. Buying Chase points is far and away better than Amex, because I can actually put them in my account, while Amex have to be transferred directly to a partner. (So far as I know there are no prohibitions on buying/selling points in Amex/UR, just on buying/selling rewards in the loyalty programs themselves.) So it sounds like trying to accumulate Chase points as the opportunity arises isn't a bad idea. At the absolute worst, I could eventually redeem them for a penny each, and more likely would be able to use them for other types of travel expenses at the 1.25 cents I paid for them.

^ I think this is the best way to redeem for a RTW.

If I were you, I'd sign up for the Citi Visa/Amex for 50k points each. Ideally you'd do this for you and your wife, and you'd each have 100k points. If you each also signed up for the SPG Amex, you'd be sitting at 130k AA points each. You'd easily accumulate the balance through spending.

Edited to add: the SPG Amex comes with a 25k signup bonus, and if you transfer more than 20k points you get a 5k bonus. So 25k SPG points --> 30k AA. (Just wanted to show my work.)

Delta's around the world business product is 280K. You only get six cities so the AA product is far superior but six cities is plenty for me so redeeming with Delta for RTW is not something I would regret:)

If I'm going to do the RTW thing, I want to go in F. It's something I'm only going to do once in my life, y'know.

Why only do it once in your life? I got canned a while back and figured it was a great time to take a 3month RTW...now I plan on doing it every time I get canned!

Well then you'd need 230k miles/person to do the trip in F. According to FT reports, you can churn the Citi/AA cards every 18 months or so, which should leave you enough time to get enough miles to do it in F.

I've actually been idly considering a "RTW" that's cobbled together from other awards. Not all of it is in F, but it is interesting in that it's not a huge sum of miles.

One-way West Coast USA-Hawaii: 12.5K BA miles in Y on AS or AA.
SEA/PDX/SJC/OAK/SAN/LAX-HNL/OGG/KOA/LIH

(optional: intra-HI flights for 5K US/UA/AA miles)

One-way Hawaii-SE Asia in F: 50K UA miles
HNL-NRT(UA)-BKK(TG)

Open-jaw US SE Asia redemption in C: 30K US miles:

BKK-DPS(destination)-SIN-BLR

One-way AA India/Middle East-Europe redemption in F: 40K AA miles

BLR-LHR in BA F or BLR-AUH-LHR/CDG/FCO in EY F

One way BA redemption in on EC (OpenSkies) Premium Economy (which is really a very nice recliner, used to be Biz Seat, is now Prem Plus): 30K BA miles

ORY-EWR in EC Y+

And to finish it off, one NYC->West Coast on AA/BA/AS/DL, 12.5K miles in Y.

175K miles total (but spread out over a variety of sources), stops in Hawaii, SE Asia, India, Europe and NYC. And all easily done with some credit card churning...

Wow, that's pretty fantastic. I need to write this down! ^