Does anyone know of a credit card affiliated with United that has no mileage caps?

The First Card M+ Visa may not, for high status flyers. AA's Citibank Visa is not supposed to have a cap for Plats and EXPs. Move this to United forum??

[This message has been edited by Warrenlm (edited 01-14-2002).]

Airlines can only have one issuer, which for United is First USA. As all issuers do they put caps on the card unless you are a premier member, due to the fact that they lose money if people charge very high amounts.

The only thing out there other than the First USA card is of course diners for which you can get 12K miles for signing up.

A clarification: I don't think there is any legal reason why an airline can only have a single issuer of affiliated credit card. The reason that is true is a competitive issue: a credit card issuer wants the exclusive rights for marketing reasons and probably won't sign a deal with a frequent flier program until the contract between them specifies exclusive rights.

Premiers and above do not have earnings caps on the First USA card. As noted, Diners points can also be transferred to United miles. I don't know if they have caps. Couple of other off-topic comments:

1. Not clear that exclusivity is really driven by the issuer. Obviously, all things equal, an issuer would prefer to have an exclusive. But it's the airline that really has control over the unique assets--the relationship with their flyers and the ability to offer miles. I don't know that the issuer is terribly important. If a mileage card switched issuers, I think most cardholders would stay with the airline. But not if the card switched airlines.

2. It's not entirely obvious to me that issuers lose money on individuals with high charge volume. They certainly try to stimulate card usage, which would not make sense if they were losing money on additional charge volume. (This is not to say that, on an annual basis, the annual fee isn't needed to be profitable, but a lot of costs do not vary with additional charge volume.) It may be more that the airlines want to limit the ability to rack up a lot of miles to their elites. But that's just speculation.

There are several other cards that allow point accumulation that can then be transferred to UA.

1) MBNA has an Amtrak-affiliated Mastercard that allows point accumulation at the rate of 1 point/$ to the new Amtrak program and a 1:1 transfer to UA.

2) The Starwood AMEX card allows point accumulation into the Starwood program at a rate of 1 point/$ and then a 1:1 transfer to UA. Even has a 25% bonus if you transfer 20,000 points/miles at one time.

I agree that much of the loyalty of an airline-FFP-branded card customer is with the airline FFP, and not with the card issuer. Hence, IMO, an interest by the card issuer that they have exclusive rights. If they are the ones spending much of the money to market the card (granted, some of the publicity is being done through low-cost co-marketing agreements, like including advertisements in frequent flier program statements), then they are the ones with something to lose if the airline isn't commited to them as the issuer.

A bit off topic, but the above is not entirely true. See NWA's card:

"Exemptions: Northwest WorldPerks Platinum Elite/Gold Elite/Silver Elite members and WorldPerks Visa AutoPay customers who select the full payment option within 6 days of their statement date are exempt from all award level limitations."

http://www.usbank.com/cgi_w/cfm/cred...&pac=AG&cat=40