Best Airline Cards

The best Airline credit cards at the moment are:

Chase Southwest: comes in two flavors, personal and business, and has 50,000 points sign up fairly frequently every year. On top of that, these points count towards the companion pass – a program by which you can tag along a companion for free when you buy or redeem a ticket with Southwest. Also, these points can be redeemed for gift cards at various places and also hotels, car rentals amongst others. You should be able to also change companion names about 3 times in any given year. The best time to apply for this is towards the end of the year.

Chase United: another good credit card if you use United frequently. Also, my opinion is that United gives the best redemption for the points. They also have significant international locations and tie ups via Star Alliance which means the points can be redeemed at a lot of avenues. There are quite a bit of non-stop flights from US locations to Asia and South America from United.

Chase British Airways: They frequently run the 100k sign up bonus. Keep an eye out. The main reason for this is the Avios can be redeemed at American Airlines which is a BA partner. The redemption is much better than even BA. You can get short-haul flights inside US for less than 10,000 points at times. Though there is a $95 annual fee, this is definitely one card which is worth it along with the United one.

Other mentions:

American Express Delta: Not much good redemption options. Delta is the worst when it comes to redemptions.

Citi American Airlines: Somewhere between Delta and United. If they run the 100k promotion like they ran in Spring 2014, go for it.. Otherwise, not worth it.

Barclay’s US Airways: Very similar to the Citi American Airlines one. Especially given the fact that these two are gonna merge soon in end 2014.

American Express JetBlue/Alaska Air and Hawaii from Bank of America/US Bank airlines cards/Chase cards and many other cards: are all more of less fine and should be able to get you one targeted return ticket but for day to accumulation of points, I would not count on any of these.

Honestly, in the long run, you are much better off categorising your spend and planning ahead. This would likely help in strategically putting your spend in specific cards like the Amex Costco card or the Chase Amazon card or one of the higher cash back earning cards. This would also give you the flexibility to choose the airline of your choice. However, if you travel frequently and have a bunch of cities and places to hit, I would start with researching the airports around and getting the list of airlines that fly nearby. Then apping them and getting some points for at least one decent ticket should be good enough.