Scammed-Do all credit cards with points make you book through their agency?

the latter, it seems.

I have never encountered this. You might see if they have a redemption website where you can get more use out of those miles.

I just recently found out my WF card had miles that expire and some had just expired. There are definitely some redemption deals that are better than others. They happened to have one for 80K points to get $875 cash back. I got the check today.

USAA is one of the most respected of the cards. I would call their home office, or send an email on their site. I'd be surprised if they didn't help you. People really sing their praises as a customer friendly organization.

Hello, julies, I too have a USAA credit card but I don't bother with the FF miles. US Bank that was affiliated with Northwest Airlines that has been purchased by Delta sent me a new credit card and I noticed that they too require their customers to use a certain agency..I can't remember which one at the moment. So at least for now I use my Amex/Delta card. I can't take a trip right now so not sure how pleased or not I will be however. The Amex/Delta card is the one I am basically using for the FF miles but I do use the others just to keep them active. I get credits with the USAA credit card but haven't bothered to call or check online to see if the credit will be applied to my next statement. Other than that I have always liked USAA's insurance company and their credit card division.

We too have a USAA credit card. We have a cash back rewards program, so can't help with the points thing as we use Amex for that. But I would definitely call USAA as their customer service just cannot be beat. We have USAA for everything,and I have actually had them my entire life, between my dad and my husband both serving. So far they have never disappointed.

I think you just picked a bad deal. We use airline miles all the time and they do limit dates etc - but you can use extra miles to get out of that. As for hotels we have two credit cards and they allow us to move "miles" to almost any airline or hotel chain we wish - for complete freebies for free upgrades. Also we have bought a bunch of stuff - for AmEx miles - equivalent granted to regular retail prices - but certainly not at a premium.

I think it's unfair to say "SCAMMED" esp on two different posts in two forums. You weren't scammed, almost all cc that offer points like this have a travel agency and it's OFTEN more expensive to go through them. You just didn;t read the fine print.

My children have a credit card tied to an airline, probably United, but I'm not 100% sure. What I am sure about - they make their own air and hotel reservations, doesn't matter which company they fly, when they pay with the credit card, the points go to that airline.

And I know they use this same credit card for purchases to rack up points for free flights.

You are not "scammed" if nobody's using your credit card without your authorization. You either mis-read the rules, or got a credit card from a bad company.

L'Italy, this is awful! Can you get at least cash back, or gift certificates, or anything back?

Hi Dayenu, I need to check out the US Bank situation as well as the USAA situation. Two items on my mental "to do list". All my frequent flyers that I had with Northwest via my old US Bank credit card have been transfered to Delta so I didn't lose them.

I don't think reading the fine print about having to use their agency is the issue because I'd assume any travel agency would have a search engine that would pull up the same fares as others. It was when actually trying to find tickets through the agency's website that I first discovered that the fares they have are higher.

We'll be looking into something different after we figure out how to get the best rewards on this card for the points we've already accumulated. After I thought about this for a while I wondered if I'd inadvertently looked at the fares for 2 people rather than the fare for one person. But, the travel awards site was down when I had the time to get back on it, so I couldn't check. Last night I was finally able to try again and while I didn't find fares that were nearly double (on the couple samples I tried) as I had before, they still didn't list the low fares I could find on Kayak so there was about a $150 difference from the $525 I could find elsewhere and this site's $675.

I think the issue is that they don't always pick up the lowest fares and don't include all airlines in their search engines. And, I don't know how I would have known this ahead of time since one has to input personal information tied to the CC prior to being able to use the travel search engine.

We've used USAA for years for all of our insurance needs and have been happy with them for the most part, but this card is not a winner as far as we are concerned. And, their policy about redeeming points is changing to become even more rigid in the spring.

Thanks again.