Three Ways to Work My Favorite Credit Card Strategy

Many of you have written to me about this program lately, so let’s drill down deeper to get at the finer points.

The Basic Problem: Using your miles for upgrades and free tickets is very limiting if you stick to one airline’s loyalty program, because you have to take what the single carrier is willing to give you.

How Starpoints Solves It: By giving you access to 30 different mileage programs—theoretically 30 times the options.

The Catch: Unlike Amex’s Membership Rewards points program, which offers instant transfers (while you’re on the phone) for some carriers (24 to 48 hours for others), Starwood can take up to 30 days to move points into a mileage account—and most airlines won’t hold a reservation that long. Your seat may disappear by the time Starwood gets around to depositing the miles.

A Solution: No one really flies 30 different carriers or needs that many mileage program memberships.  However, you may easily alternate among three or four—and their partners—so just keep those accounts topped off with miles transferred from your Starpoints account.

A Better Solution: Join a program that will hold a reservation long enough to get Starpoints transferred into that program. We’ve organized them here by alliance.

Oneworld: Good Best options are with British Airways and Cathay Pacific. BA will hold a reservation three weeks, Cathay a month, which is usually enough time to move Starpoints over. American allows a 14-day hold, which is risky—but you can get around that by making the reservation through American’s partner, Cathay Pacific, which will hold a reservation twice as long. (See Nov. 2006 issue for the many other reasons that we like Asia Miles, most of them having nothing to do with travel to Asia.)

Star Alliance: Good Your best option is Thai Airways, which will hold a reservation for one month for travel with all its partners. Asiana will hold a confirmed reservation until points transfer (21 days with some partners). Thai Airways partners with Air New Zealand, Austrian, Lufthansa, South African Airways, SWISS, and United to name a few. Going with Thai is also a way of getting around the lousy exchange rate United imposes on Starpoints transfers: 2 Starpoints to get 1 United mile.

SkyTeam: Not Good Oneworld and Star Alliance each have at least one carrier that will hold your reservation until points are transferred. SkyTeam does not. The best option is Alitalia with a five-day hold, too short for Starpoints transfers.

THREE OVERALL APPROACHES

Conservative: Take your 25% and run. That’s the bonus you get for transferring 20,000 Starpoints to partners, except Continental and United, which offer points on a 2:1 exchange rate. In other words, you can earn 25% more miles through the Starwood Amex Card just by having the transfer done automatically every month. (This alone makes the card more lucrative than most other cards since it can often net Business for close to the cost of economy, and First for the cost of Business when played carefully.)

Aggressive: Don’t put all your eggs into the Starwood basket. If your favorite carrier is United, use one of its co-branded credit cards half the time and the Starwood Amex card the other half for other, non-United options.

Ambitious: Here’s what I do: Keep enough miles in the accounts I use most often (American, United, and Cathay Pacific) to go anywhere anytime. When I redeem miles on one carrier, I replenish the account. By heavily investing in Starwood, I have access to the five carriers that hold a reservation, along with their 23 partners.

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