The best card combo for domestic travelers

We recently received an excellent question via the giant mailbag. I started outlining an answer for a “question of the week” podcast, but quickly realized that there was more to say than would fit in a couple of minutes of audio discussion. I decided it was worth a post to answer this question that came in from reader Casey:

I’m curious what you think the “ultimate” credit card setup would be for someone focused almost exclusively on domestic U.S. travel. Put another way: if international travel wasn’t an option, how would you maximize value from points and miles within the United States?

Casey went on to outline a medical situation that makes international travel impractical in their situation, but there are many reasons why someone might not want or be able to travel abroad, so this is a question that I imagine many people might have.

The truth is that there could be many “correct” answers to this question. In this post, I wanted to build my recommended wallet, but I recognize that the “best” answer will vary significantly. I hope readers will chime in with their own opinions in the comments.

Is cash back a better alternative?

My first reaction to the question was that cash back might be a better strategy for a domestic traveler. That’s because miles don’t always provide a terrific value for domestic travel. However, when I gave it more than a second or two of thought, I realized that there are still plenty of opportunities with miles, though the landscape has changed.

For many years, the conventional wisdom in award travel was that the best miles to use to fly on airline X were not airline X’s own miles. Instead, the most advantageous award pricing frequently came through partner awards. As an example, booking a flight on American Airlines was often a better value if booked with British Airways Avios than if booked with American Airlines miles. The same was long true for United in that it was possible for years to book a domestic United flight, including to far corners of the country like Hawaii and Alaska, for just 7,500 Turkish Airlines miles each way.

Unfortunately, foreign partner miles have become less useful in recent years. United releases far less availability to Star Alliance partners and has seemingly pushed partners to increase award pricing in many cases. We recently reported that American Airlines is restricting availability within 144 hours of departure so that close-in flights can no longer be booked with partner miles (forcing members to use American Airlines miles when booking close to departure). It’s a similar story with Delta, with partner availability being limited to 21 days or more advance of travel.

There are some exceptions where partner awards can still be a good value, but they have become exceptions rather than the rule. Through that lens, the best miles or points to have for domestic travel are not the same today as they would have been a few years ago. In the past, I might have said that maybe you want to have Amex Membership Rewards to transfer points to British Airways to book American Airlines, or to Air France or Virgin Atlantic to book Delta, I’m less bullish today on the ability to use those partner miles when you want to travel. That’s not to say that there aren’t any opportunities to book partner awards, and it can certainly be handy to have transferable currencies so you can take advantage of those opportunities when they present themselves, but it feels more important today to have miles within domestic programs or that are transferable to domestic programs.

Based on that, as things stand, I think the best domestic-travel-setup starts with Bilt.

Transferable points / everyday spend: Bilt Palladium

If you primarily want to travel domestically, you’re going to need some airline-specific miles or points that transfer to major domestic airline programs.

As I considered the best points in that type of situation, the clear leader in my mind is Bilt. That’s because Bilt has access to a few major domestic programs in Alaska Atmos Rewards, United MileagePlus, and Southwest Airlines. For those situations where you find award availability that exists through partner programs, you have access to some of the best partner award booking programs like Air Canada Aeroplan, Avianca Life Miles, the Avios programs, Air France KLM Flying Blue, Japan Airlines Mileage Bank, etc.

In short, that gives you access to both worlds:

• The ability to transfer to book awards directly with United, Alaska, or Southwest
• The ability to take advantage of great partner award deals like using Japan Airlines miles for multi-stop awards on American or Alaska, using Avios to fly American or Alaska in the right scenario, using Etihad Guest to fly JetBlue, using Air Canada Aeroplan or Avianca Lifemiles for select short-distance United flights, and more.

It also gives you access to the best value domestic hotel program in World of Hyatt. While we fully expect World of Hyatt points to become less valuable in the near future, our prediction has been that points will be worth around 1.5 cents per point. Assuming that holds and the median point value ends up around 1.5 cents, there should still be significant opportunities to get better than 1.5 cents per point, which could be an excellent use of Bilt points for lodging.

All this ignores the fact that Bilt sometimes offers really good transfer bonuses to foreign partner programs, and in the right situation, you might be able to take advantage of the opportunity to stack a transfer bonus with a great partner award deal.

I think the Bilt Palladium makes a lot of sense as the ultra-premium card of choice in many households. It provides Priority Pass and offers a flat earning rate of two points per dollar spent on all purchases, with the ability to use Bilt Cash to accelerate to three points per dollar on up to a total of $25,000 in purchases per year. It also offers the ability to choose some statement credits with remaining Bilt cash. If you’re able to also make use of the twice annual $200 credits for hotel bookings of two nights or more, the card can feel less expensive than most other ultra-premium cards on the market.

The key gap that the Palladium card leaves is the lack of access to some sort of proprietary lounge network. Whereas if you get an ultra-premium card from Amex, Chase, or Capital One, you’ll gain access to a proprietary network of domestic airport lounges (on top of Priority Pass), Bilt does not compete on that front. The quality of those card-issuer lounge networks varies, and their utility will vary depending on your home airport. In other words, if your home airport and/or those airports to which you travel most often don’t have those proprietary lounges, they probably aren’t much use to you.

On the flip side, if your home airport does have one of those card-issuer lounges and it’s a particularly good one, then you may be more drawn to a different ultra-premium card for access to that specific lounge. However, on the whole, I find the Bilt Palladium to be a better fit in a wider selection of scenarios.

If domestic airport lounge access is of primary importance, I think the American Express Platinum Card® is probably the best option, given that it offers both Priority Pass and access to its superior Amex Centurion lounges, as well as Escape lounges, Plaza Premium lounges, and the occasional new lounge concept like the Amex Sidecar in Las Vegas. The Platinum card, while chock full of benefits, is not a card that is worth using for most purchases, so it wouldn’t accelerate your earnings of Membership Rewards points unless you’re spending a significant amount of money on flights or prepaid travel booked through Amex. But it can be a superior ultra-premium choice for those who live near an airport where it provides superior lounge access.

The Palladium card makes more sense for everyday spending. Furthermore, those who get the Palladium card will earn Bilt Gold status as part of the current welcome offer, and that will make it possible to convert Rakuten rewards to Bilt at a 1:1 ratio. Rakuten is probably the most highly regarded shopping portal by the widest number of people. Being able to earn points that can be transferred to valuable domestic programs as well as international partners through shopping portal use adds a significant advantage to Bilt. While Chase Ultimate Rewards does have a shopping portal and Capital One also has shopping offers, Rakuten is probably the most consistent of the bunch in terms of offering competitive rates and reliable tracking.

Bilt isn’t perfect, and it is the least-well-established of the major transferable currencies. Still, I think it would be hard to argue that there is a better fit for a domestic traveler right now.

Airline card: Southwest Rapid Rewards® Priority Credit Card

I know that many readers will disagree with this recommendation due to the plethora of non-stop options available on whichever major airline has a hub at their home airport, but hear me out. Southwest may not sound like a universal answer that will work for everyone. However, I think that if you’re going to have an airline card for domestic travel, there’s a strong case to be made for the Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority Credit Card. Here’s why….

Like most other major airline credit cards, this one gives you a free checked bag for you and some of your companions every time you travel and priority boarding. If that were the extent of things, there wouldn’t be much benefit to this card over similar airline cards from most of the other major U.S.-based airlines. Southwest takes things a bit further.

That’s because this card offers complimentary standard or preferred seating at the time of booking and extra legroom seating at 48 hours prior to travel, pending availability. In other words, at the time of booking, you can pick either standard seats at the back of the plane or “preferred” seats closer to the front of the plane for free on any Southwest fare, even when you’re booking a “Basic” fare. Other airlines don’t necessarily offer you a complimentary seat selection even if you have elite status when you book basic economy, but Southwest makes it possible to pick from the majority of the seats on the plane even when booking basic economy if you have this card.

Furthermore, the ability to get an extra legroom seat is typically a benefit reserved for those with elite status on most airlines, but with Southwest, you just need to be a Priority (or Performance Business) cardholder, and you have the opportunity to select an extra legroom seat 48 hours prior to departure. Admittedly, my success rate getting extra legroom seating at the 48-hour mark has decreased significantly since Southwest began selling seat selection, but I have seen at least some extra legroom seating available at the 48-hour mark more often than not.  You surely won’t always get extra legroom seating, but you position yourself to get it when possible.

Regardless, there just isn’t another airline credit card that’s going to give you the same type of seating benefit that you’ll get with the Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority card. Add on top of that the card’s annual discount coupon, and I think you have a pretty compelling value for the price tag for a domestic traveler.

All of that is to say nothing about the fact that Southwest has a pretty good domestic route network. You won’t have limitless nonstop options unless you live in a Southwest hub city. However, if you’re willing to put up with one-stop itineraries, there’s a decent chance that you’ve got one-stop options for much of the United States from most major U.S. airports. You’ll have the added benefit of always being on a 737, so with your group 5 boarding, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever have to worry about gate-checking a rollaboard bag the way you might when traveling on a regional jet with other domestic airlines.

I don’t love the Southwest in-flight experience. In fact, I would admit that it is subpar compared to some of the other domestic U.S. airlines. However, I think the benefits here are the right combination for an all-domestic traveler who isn’t going to travel enough to naturally earn elite status with another program. When you additionally consider the value of the Southwest Companion Pass if you travel with another person all the time, then I think Southwest becomes significantly harder to beat. The key drawback is the relative inability to get a good value with points for last-minute travel, since Southwest offers primarily dynamic award pricing (that is closely tied to the cash price). Note that if you want the Companion Pass, you’ll either want one consumer and one business credit card, or perhaps you can bridge the gap with the Southwest debit card.

Finally worth a mention is the fact that you can sometimes get Southwest gift cards on sale from warehouse clubs like Costco or Sam’s Club. Several times a year, we see the opportunity to buy a $500 Southwest gift card for $450 (or sometimes as low as $430). If you’re able to stack that with the Companion Pass and the benefits of the Southwest Priority card, I think it’s a pretty good setup for many domestic travelers. No, you won’t get the Delta in-flight experience, but if you’re primarily flying two, three, four, or maybe even five hours a couple of times a year, I think the Priority card is hard to beat.

Hotel card: Free agent?

If you really pressed me to pick a single hotel credit card for the primarily domestic traveler, I might have to pick the easy hotel card answer, the Hilton Honors Aspire card.

Let me clarify that I am not a big fan of earning Hilton points through credit card spend. That’s especially true after Tim’s most recent analysis of the reasonable redemption value of Hilton points, with the median point value at 0.35 cents per point. The 3X base earning rate of this card barely beats earning 1% cash back. If you want to earn rewards to pay for hotel stays, you’re better off getting any no-annual-fee 2% cash back card.

Still, the Hilton Aspire card offers what can be quite a compelling value for domestic travelers. That’s because the card comes with up to $200 per year in airline credits ($50 per quarter). Unlike the Platinum cards, these are not airline incidental fee credits but rather flat airline credits that can be used for any airline purchase on any airline. If you’re a Southwest person, you could use that $50 towards airfare on Southwest a few times a year. Keep in mind that it is relatively easy to turn your flight credits into credits that don’t expire. Note that while United Travel Bank no longer works for triggering airline incidental credits on Platinum cards, it does work for the Aspire card’s airline credits. The Aspire card’s airline credit is handy for free agents since it can be used for booking a ticket on any airline, even a discount carrier.

Next, the card comes with up to $400 per year in Hilton statement credits for Hilton resorts. Qualifying properties are identified on an official list of resorts. Not all hotels that have resort in their name count as resorts, and not all properties on the resorts list feel like resorts. There is a decent chance that if you are primarily a US leisure traveler, you’ll probably find yourself in a market with a qualifying Hilton resort a few times a year. If that’s likely to be the case for you, it could be pretty easy to use these $400 in credits. Just booking a hotel that charges a deposit at the time of booking can be a great way to use a credit now, even for a stay that occurs sometime in the future.

If you’ll make use of the airline credits and Hilton resort credits, the card has some additional benefits that will also be highlights. The annual free night certificate that can be used for a standard room at almost any Hilton property in the world can, in some cases, pay for the card by itself (partiucarly in domestic resort hot spots, where hotel prices have soared in recent years), so if you’ll get decent value out of the airline credits and Hilton resort credits, this card can be a pretty easy keeper.

Further, the Hilton Aspire card offers up to $209 in statement credit per calendar year for the Clear+ fee. Clear+ can certainly come in very handy in the right airport situations, which is another compelling reason to consider the Hilton Aspire card if you’re a domestic traveler.

Not yet mentioned is the fact that this card also comes with top-tier Hilton Diamond status. That’s not wildly useful, but it will get you food & beverage credits at Hilton properties and lounge access, when available.

Again, I’m not much of a fan of spending on this card after the introductory offer, but I think the Aspire card can be a great value for its benefits.

However, the title of this section was not “Hilton Honors Aspire” for the best hotel card choice. Instead, I think the best answer is to be a hotel card “free agent”. That’s because while the Hilton Aspire card would be my pick if you forced me to pick a single hotel credit card, I think a wiser approach for a primarily domestic traveler, or likely for many travelers, is to be a free agent in the sense that you might want to consider picking up a different hotel credit card every year. I think it can be worth either planning which card to get based on your upcoming travels or planning your upcoming travels based on which card you’re going to get. Use the introductory offer and any other related card benefits to your advantage, then move on to a different hotel credit card the next year. Given the number of hotel credit cards on the market, you would have the ability to switch around for quite a few years from one hotel chain to another.

I’m not sure it’s worth being highly loyal to one hotel chain. While there are certainly some great hotels in the United States, I think it is less likely that most will find outsized value in hotel elite status for domestic travel. That said, I think most domestic travelers will continue to get excellent value out of Hyatt points. I certainly expect the value of Hyatt points to decrease from where it has been for many years, but even if the value of Hyatt points dips a bit further yet to something like 1.2 or 1.3 cents per point, earning Bilt points through the Bilt Palladium card and transferring to Hyatt will likely continue to be a solid play. If you’re searching for an award program to which to dedicate your loyalty, you may be more interested in the World of Hyatt credit cards in order to have an option for spending toward an additional free night certificate and elite status with Hyatt, and pairing that with the Bilt Palladium card and Rakuten. I still think I would rather be a hotel free agent, but I think that could be a sound strategy.

Bonus categories

Absent from this discussion is any mention of bonus categories. You may wonder which card is the best choice for gas or grocery or dining if you’re primarily interested in domestic travel. I think that is significantly harder to answer than the advice I’ve given so far.

If you’re willing to pay for the Palladium card and you’re going to use your Bilt cash for accelerators in order to earn 3X on up to $25K spend each year, then you may not feel compelled to get cards specific to gas, grocery, or other categories. If your expenses are likely to exceed $25,000 by a significant sum, then you’ll want to focus unbonused purchases on the Palladium card and find a bonus category-specific companion or two that fits in with your setup.

The best choice for most will likely be the Citi Strata Premier Card for its excellent mix of 3X categories.

The Strata Premier gives you bonus earnings on groceries, gas, dining, flights, hotels, and travel agencies. It offers a number of overlapping foreign airline partners with the Bilt program and additionally gives you access to American Airlines as a transfer partner, which is oftentimes going to be useful as a domestic traveler. For $95 per year, I’d be pretty happy with the Strata Premier Card as a companion to a domestic travel strategy.

I think that if Wells Fargo improves its transfer partners, then a case could certainly be made for a Wells Fargo setup that instead includes the Autograph Journey card and an Attune card. The Autograph Journey card offers an excellent return on paid travel (particularly with 5X transferable points on hotels!), and the Attune card offers the opportunity to potentially earn 4X on an incredibly wide range of purchases, including some that may be major spending categories for some. Given Wells Fargo’s weak roster of transfer partners at the time of writing, it’s hard for me to seriously consider Wells Fargo as a key part of a card strategy yet. If Wells Fargo does expand, having access to transfers to Choice Privileges and Wyndham at 1:2, along with a good stable of airline programs, could become compelling.

A case could be made for other cards for specific bonus categories, like perhaps a Costco card for 4% cash back on gas or the Wyndham Earner business card for 8x points on gas (which is what I personally use), but I think the Citi Strata Premier is likely the best answer for the widest number of people.

Welcome bonus free agent

If we’re keeping score, my ultimate domestic traveler wallet is going to include:

• a Bilt Palladium card for most otherwise unbonused purchases
• a Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority card for benefits when traveling on Southwest
• A Citi Strata Premier for useful bonus categories in the travel, dining, grocery, and gas spaces
• Perhaps a Hilton Aspire card (though a hotel free agent might be a better choice, particularly given the cumulative expense of other cards listed above)

However, while I like that combination, I think a key component of this entire answer is that the best strategy is always going to be going after the best welcome offers. There are many interesting cards with big welcome offers that don’t even get a mention in this post, and I would absolutely still be considering all of the major credit cards when they launch a really compelling welcome offer.

While I didn’t consider American Express Membership Rewards points to be an integral part of a primarily domestic traveler’s points arsenal, there’s no doubt that Membership Rewards points can still be valuable in some instances. A Business Platinum card could be a great fit for its pay-with-points rebate on your chosen (domestic) airline. Similarly, I think there are cases that can be made for opening all of the major rewards credit cards when they offer a great introductory offer.

While I think the above wallet could be compelling, it would still be wisest to consider opening a new card or two or three (or more, based on your comfort level) each year to add those introductory offers to your collection of points that can be used to plan your trips. I don’t think you need to completely close your mind to any of the major transferable currencies or any of the major rewards cards in the United States. I probably wouldn’t spend time going after airline-specific credit cards for foreign airline programs if you’re a domestic-only traveler, but I would consider all of the major transferable currency cards.

Since any recommendation here is only as good as the sliver of time in which it is given, I don’t think it’s worth detailing which welcome offers I would recommend right now. Instead, I would always recommend checking out Greg’s picks if you want a subjective analysis of the best introductory offers on the market right now.

Otherwise, you can head straight to our best offers page and check out the sections at the top for the best consumer and business credit card offers to see card offers sorted by first-year value. Note that we don’t manually sort those offers, but rather they are sorted based on the first-year value, after accounting for the value of the welcome offer points or certificates, ongoing card benefits, and subtracting the annual fee and the cost of putting spend on the card to meet the welcome offer. I always start there to look for a bonus when I have an imminent large purchase.

Your thoughts?

I’ve given my answer, but I bet that many readers will disagree with one pick or another. Share your opinions in the comments! What would be your ultimate domestic travel collection? Should I have included an American Airlines Globe card in this recommendation for its annual companion certificate? Do you think I really missed out on recommending a Delta Platinum card for its annual companion certificate, Delta Stays credit, and 15% discount on award pricing? Should I have recommended a United card in order to get expanded cardholder availability to saver fares? What would you recommend as the ultimate card combination for someone who is exclusively a domestic traveler?

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.