Featured image: Credit Cards by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

In this series of points I’m shedding some light on how I go about strategizing around credit cards. This will be a series of posts, rather than one long one. The reason is that there is a fair bit of information to cover, and some are better digested in chunks. In this post, I wanted to start with describing the overall process that will lead you to decide the goal for which you want to get a credit card.

Primary consideration: what’s your aspiration?

Deciding on a new credit card may seem daunting. There are tons of credit cards out there from many banks and issuers, all with different welcome bonuses, reward structures, benefits and perks. How do you decide which one to get? Well, the biggest determining factor is your priority, which will be the result of your situation and your aspirations. Simply said, the card that is perfect for a young family is unlikely to be the best card for an avid traveler. Picking a card that plays to the strength of your daily routines and vacation patterns will get you the most bang for your back (literally).

For example, my husband and I enjoy traveling, though we do not travel a ton. Typically two 1-2 week vacations a year, and perhaps a long weekend or two. Most of our expenditures are on daily essentials and the occasional higher-end purchase. And restaurant meals. We really enjoy eating out… However, even though we don’t travel that much, when we do, we want to make it count. As such, our aspirations are to redeem our credit card points for premium (business class) flight opportunities.

This is where credit card rewards can shine, since the points that one can collect through mundane, daily purchases, can really add up. If you do your homework you can find great redemption opportunities. Ever see those Instagram videos advertising business class flights for economy prices? They used points. For example, with some luck you may land a flight from New York to Tokyo on Japan Airlines for 75.000 points through Alaska MileagePlan. That is equivalent to about 700$ for a flight that otherwise would set you back $4000. Not bad, right?

On the other hand, if you are a young family with kids, the truth is that you may not be in a position to go on such travels, and so credit cards that earn points that are primarily useful for this purpose may not be suitable. In this case, perhaps you want to maximize your cash return on spending instead. hence, your situation and aspirations matter, and getting your goals straight should be your first priority.

My process, in a nutshell

In a nutshell, the steps of the process are:

1. Decide on the destination for which I want to redeem points.
2. Do research on the market: what are the airlines I can choose from, and how much would they cost in cash?
3. What are the rewards redemption opportunities for those flights, and how does this stack against the cash price? Also, is the availability somewhat predictable, or is it a needle in a haystack?
4. How can I get the points I need to ‘pay’ for the redemption? What are the credit cards that would allow me to get those points?
5. If multiple cards fit the bill, which ones have special welcome bonuses or time-limited perks that are worthwhile acquiring? (covered in a future post)

And now, for an example:

The process in practice: African safari

So, my goal is to redeem for premium travel opportunities. That generally means business class flights. As such, having figured out my primary goal for credit card rewards redemptions, my next step is to decide on a flight goal: to what destination do I want to redeem points?

First, what are our vacation plans? We are planning for an African safari in South Africa in May 2026. That sounds like it is very far away, but the truth is that the best redemption opportunities are either a year out from booking, or last minute. And I’m not a last minute planner, majorly because I do need to ask for time off, and typically cannot do this at a moment’s notice.

But I digress. To fly to South Africa, the main gateways are Johannesburg and Cape Town, so we would need to look for flights to those two cities: we need to explore the market, and this is best done with Google Flights. Simply searching for the city pair NYC-JNB, or NYC-CPT will get you all flights scheduled out to about 10-11 months into the future. Often you can’t plan for the exact date that you want to fly, in which case try to use a matching date such as May 2025.

Doing this, it appears United is essentially the only one flying direct from EWR to either JNB or CPT. We can also fly Kenya Airways, Ethiopian, Turkish Airlines and the gulf airlines, Qatar, Emirates and Etihad. There is also of course British Airways, Lufthansa, KLM… a large market, but the cheaper end is with e.g. Ethiopian and Kenya, though that strikes me as an outlier at ~2000$ for a return business class flight (as of the time of writing, this disappeared). The average is more towards 3500$, with Qatar Airways at 4000-5000$.

The next step is to see what redemption opportunities are like. There are special search engines that will assist you in locating award availability. My favorite is Seats.Aero, but others are PointsYeah, AwardTool, points.me and some others. Searching for the city pairs brings up many options from a variety of frequent flyer programs. The one that caught my eye personally with a redemption through United MileagePlus: Ethiopian Airlines for 88.000 points each way. If you liken that to 880$, that means a return flight for about 1800$, which is at half the cash cost of 3500$. While not the best opportunity, it’s not bad at all! Importantly, the award availability appears to be consistent, so I can reasonably assume that when it’s time to book, the flight would be available.

Having now done some homework, I want to make sure Ethiopian is a worthwhile redemption opportunity, and so I read some review on website such as Points to Seats. If I’m convinced about it, the next step is to assess how I will get the points. Well, this redemption is through United, and so you either get the points through flying United, by using United’s shopping portal and dining opportunities, you can geta United credit card, or you transfer from a bank’s rewards currency to United. For United, you can only transfer from Chase and from Bilt. So in terms of credit cards, the three choices really are a United partner credit card, a Chase card, or a Bilt card.

With that we have narrows down our rewards goal, and that is an important step! Having a goal in the miles and points game is critical and will really help you to figure out what it is that you need to do to get to your redemption aspirations.

Summary

In this post I described in broad strokes my approach to goal setting for premium flight award redemptions. There is a lot of detail to cover, and importantly I didn’t go into any detail yet how to actually then choose the credit card. That I will cover in subsequent posts. In a nutshell, the steps I go through are: (0) decide on your overall aspirations (travel? cash back? hotel stays? etc); (1) specific redemption goal (flights to South Africa in business class); (2) explore the market; (3) explore redemption opportunities within that market; (4) decide the specific flight and figure out where the points could come from (credit cards, flying etc); (5) figure out if there are special perks of cards that are time-limited.

In a future post (perhaps not the next one necessarily) I will go into more detail as to how to select the specific credit card.