Is it harder to reedeem miles from a non airline credit card?

Question

I noticed the captial one credit card gives you 2 miles per dollar at half the annual fee. Where as an airlines card like Northwest is 1 dollar per mile and double the annual fee. Is it harder to reedem the miles from a non airline credit card?

Answer 1

If you believe those commercials it is....

Hey kids we are going to visit some distant relatives!

Answer 2

This is a complicated question. The first thing you need to remember here is that you are earning "points" with the credit card company, not "miles" with an airline. There are some important distinctions.

The points based credit card programs may not have blackout dates, however they will have caps on the value of the ticket you can purchase with a set amount of points. Therefore, if you are looking to get a ticket at the last minute or for an expensive travel season, you may not be able to get that ticket with the number of points you anticipated paying. They never mention that in the commercials, eh?

Also you may wish to consider that the points based credit cards make sense if you only want to by cheap economy tickets. With frequent flyer miles you can use your miles for first class upgrades - something that the points programs will not be able to offer. Ditto for first class tickets. While you may be able to trade in 120,000 miles for a $12,000 first class ticket to Sydney, your points programs will just laugh at you if you try this.

Finally, if you are accruing miles with a particular carrier already, consider that you may achieve greater flexibility by having all of your miles in one account. Having half the miles you need in one account with an airline and half with your credit card won't help you at all.

You may wish to look at additional mile earning credit cards. Many offer double or even triple miles for many everyday purchases, such as gas, restaraunts, groceries, automotive repair, utility bills, and more.

If you really want to know more than you ever wanted, the real place to look is the MilesBuzz forum on Flyertalk. The credit card questions have been asked a million times, so you may want to start with the search feature before you bother submitting a new thread on the subject. Good luck!