Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
Originally posted by: zoiks
I have a Alaska Airlines card. I think I got 10,000 points when I signed up. The great thing about that card is that I was able to book a flight to Europe during the peak season for 50,000 points on Continental (partner airline). The card gives you 1 point for every dollar spent. Annual fee is $39.
I looked into the CapitalOne no hassles rewards where you get 2points for every dollar. The problem there was that there are no bonus points awarded when you sign up and their award rate is very high. A trip to Europe during the summer would be like 130000 points which would probably take forever to accumulate for me. I looked into other cards as well but the reward redemption rate for travel is pretty high with those too.
Yeah, but is an annual fee of 55$ a bit much?
?
I think thats probably the average annual fee for most cards. What you might want to ask yourself is this.
1. How many points will it take to redeem rewards. If it takes a lot of points then you might be accumulating points for a very long time for a single trip.
2. If you do not travel or use the points, they may expire. Some cards are like that.
3. If you do not travel and the points have not expired, then finally getting an airline ticket might not be saving much as you could be. For example, a trip from SFO - NY might be say $250. If it took you 2 years to accumulate the points for the travel then at that point you already paid them $110 in annual fees so that kind of offsets the perk.
If you spend a lot, you might accumulate points quickly then the annual fee might not be an issue.
For me, I did a lot of research before I got my card. There are most certainly other cards out there that are better but I haven't found one to my liking yet.