as has been said several times, different options work better/worse for different individuals...we realized a few years ago that it worked out much better for us to use airline points for travel to europe rather than for travel to the caribbean....although it does require more miles for a ticket, the $ value of a FC/BF ticket to europe is much more than a FC/BF ticket to the caribbean, with better inflight service and usually a much nicer aircraft for longer flights

we usually take advantage of airline credit card "new customer" promotions to earn bonus points, and then after we reach the minimum spend to earn the bonus points, we go back to using the CapOne Venture for daily use <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/Thumbsup.gif" alt="" />

p.s. for earning airline points, the Chase Sapphire is a pretty good card, it allows points earned to be transferred to several airline reward programs (ie. United)