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Originally Posted by theonlywhiteout
hey chris im sure you've been asked this a dozen times but...
im changing banks and looking at a different credit card possibly... what would you recommend for a rewards card with primary interest in flights and not rewards, and flexibility in booking and using existing sales? thanks in advance you do great work
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Only asked once in this thread though! Here's a copy/paste of my reply:
What's the best travel rewards card?
The best card around *used* to be the Starwood Preferred Guest from Mastercard. There was no annual fee, and it was incredible how quickly you could accumulate points on it. You could also transfer your points to virtually ANY rewards program. Even with modest usage we used to get 2 trips a year out of it.
There's people that research and scrutinize the cards to death, the best info is likely on RFD. Here's the
82 page thread regarding the Starwood card.
Unfortunately Starwood decided to terminate their relationship with Mastercard. When they did that, they allowed people that already had the card to switch over to a
new one, forgoing the $89 annual fee for the first year. The new one isn't as good, but still the one I use.
Here's a chart that compares all of the current ones available:
http://www.rewardscanada.ca/cccompare.html
and here's an article written in July 2010 from the same website with their picks for 'best travel card':
http://www.rewardscanada.ca/topcreditcard2010.html
There's so many cards and quite a few factors that come into play when deciding which is the best card for each person.
Here's a good article...
The Best Travel Rewards Cards in Canada
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Choosing which credit card is the absolute best is a very difficult task because everyone has a different opinion on what makes something “the best”. Most people would agree that the value of the rewards you get in proportion to the amount of money you spend on the card is a good measurement of what is best, but determining that value isn’t always possible. We have taken a very systematic approach to determining what the best credit cards in Canada are by assigning each credit card a score based on four distinct categories: Typical Return, Maximum Return, Flexibility, and Insurance & Perks.
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They list the Amex Starwood Preferred Guest as being the best travel card. The folks on RFD usually seem to agree on that one as well, but *only* if you shop at a lot of places where Amex is accepted.
For an overall card, I know the RFD crowd is really high on the MBNA Smart Cash Platinum.
In that article they do a nice job of explaining why it's tough to determine reward value for each individual purchase. And they also explain what values and assumptions they used to determine the 'best' card for most people.