I have come to the conclusion that accumulating airline frequent flyer miles by using a credit card is almost a waste of time.  Why?  Airlines have cheapened the value of miles and make it extremely difficult to redeem miles.

Here is an example why you want a points card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve over a card where you accumulate miles:

On American Airlines, I tried to redeem with miles, a "MileSAAver" award for a R/T between DFW (Dallas) and Hartford (Bradley).  Now a MileSAAver award ticket should cost 25,000 miles but due to availability, it wound up costing 50,000 miles.  By the way, I was looking to redeem my miles 4 months in advance, not last minute.  So in essence, I needed to spend $50,000 on my Citibank AAdvantage credit card to accumulate the 50,000 miles to get a flight that is priced at $400 R/T.

The Sapphire Card allows you to accumulate 3x points for every dollar spent on travel.  On top of that, when redeeming points for travel, you get 1.5x rewards.   So, to buy $400 in travel, you need 26,667 points.   That's a lot less than what my Citibank AAdvantage card requires.   But wait, when you purchase travel related items (hotels, flights, tour services, trains, etc.) and meals, you get 3x points.   So, you can get 26,667 points by only spending $8,889 (8889 x 3 = 26,667) on the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card.

On top of that, when purchasing airline tickets with my Chase points, I still get the airline frequent flyer miles.  There are few restrictions on the type of coach ticket that can be purchased

Does this all make sense to you?  It should!