Questions and Answers

Hello everyone !

Pardon me, i`m new to the blog and would like to have your advice.

My question is the following, as I read your blog, each person has his/her own goal and mine is to plan a trip to France in March/April (off season yay !) and have already 35k miles with american. I have an income of 40k and credit score of 725. With that said there is 3 credit cards I was looking into and think might make sense to me :

[IMG]https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=b4ab1d3337&view=att&th=150a79a76b24d8da&attid=0.1&disp=safe&realattid=ii_ig8vzk8x0_150a79a776907611&zw[/IMG]
– The first one looks very appeal as you said even with it’s high annual fee. The issue I see here is that I don’t know the exact requirements (income, employment?) to get access to it as it seems to compete with very high end credit card such as visa black card, and I am a little worried

– The Thankyou premier sounds like a compromise, not a high annual fee, I can decide to stick with it on the long run and has good benefits

– The aa advantage seems like it will give me faster access to miles as AA is the only carrier going to France non stop.

I know i don’t have much time to decide, the offer for the first one expire on thursday and the others i’m not sure.

Would you mind giving me some advice here ?

Thanks 😉

Florian

[USER=1014]@Flo[/USER] It’s hard to tell because we’re not sure what the first card is (the picture did not come through). A few more details would be helpful. Are you aiming for premium cabins or economy? Where in the US will you be flying from?

If you are going to aim for AA be aware that of late availability on their own planes has been limited of late at least in premium cabins and the easiest alternative (BA) charges very high surcharges. Flying Iberia can lower these but there is still something. You can avoid them altogether by flying AirBerlin.

The Premier card is a very nice product with a great earning structure. However, TY points cannot be combined with AA miles thought they can be used to book cash AA tickets at 1.33cpm so you will need an alternate way to get the remaining miles you need to top up your AA account for a mileage account if you want to combine a paid and award ticket.

id go with AA

The first card was the prestige from citi. I was looking for economy as I will be flying with my girlfriend. Airport departure is from dfw.

I was thinking of booking a hotel since they offer 3000 miles free + miles depending on length of stay and hotel rate before the end of the year

Does that sound like a good strategy?

Thanks

[USER=1014]@Flo[/USER] Not sure which AA card you were referring (Executive or other) but I would consider that if it has at least a 50,000 sign up bonus. That will bring you up to 85,000 AA miles, enough to give you the 80k miles you need for an off peak AA economy redemption. A quick search on the AA website shows quite a bit of low level inventory but be careful to deselect BA as a partner so you don’t get hit with heavy fuel surcharges. That will reduce your options somewhat and it may not be non-stop. I noticed routes via JFK for some dates.

The Premier and Prestige seem to be ongoing offers so I wouldn’t worry about getting those right away. I’m not sure what the 3000 mile free offer is about. If you provide more details we can look more closely at it…

[USER=79]@Gaurav[/USER] I was talking about the premium select AA, it had 50k offered after $3000 i believe. How does it compare to the citi premier TY ? Also would the prestige citi TY make more sense even if it`s a higher cost ?

Ok thanks for the tip. the 3000 miles is offered through their partner [URL]https://www.rocketmiles.com[/URL] if you book a hotel room before december 31

[USER=1014]@Flo[/USER] I think you need to figure out how you value your miles and points and how you want to use them. As mentioned above TY points and AA miles are different products. You need to do the math to see which one is worth it to you. You could get enough AA miles to get two roundtrip tickets in economy. Most people like to save miles for premium cabin redemptions but in the end you have to use them to achieve your goals. The lowest price I see in March is about 960-1100 so you should get a redemption value of ~2.4cpm (rough calculation) and up which is decent.

If you go the TY point route, the cheapest AA fare was $1132 I think which would cost 85,000 points per person @ 1.33 cents per point.

I would also consider just buying a cash ticket and saving your miles for a premium redemption down the road. Ultimately only you can decide what is best for you.

Re: rocketmiles that’s fine if you are traveling anyway but I wouldn’t go out of my way to book a hotel through them just to earn miles. Remember that you don’t earn points or get benefits when using them to make your reservation.

Thank you very much [USER=79]@Gaurav[/USER] for your answer, I think it is much clearer now.

So just to make sure i`ve understood this, if I am missing 5000 miles or so, it would make more sense to purchase them directly instead of booking a room ? I feel like if I did the last option, at least I would have gotten some sort of benefit ..

If you just need a few thousand miles to top up an award, I’d just do the math you see which has option to add the most sense. If you need a hotel stay anyways, might be a no brainer to use rocketmiles or pointshound.