I'll start off by saying that I do not know everything about Chase, but in an effort to help you guys out, I would like to post what I do know and make my statement that I believe Chase is the way to go. I would also like to point out that while I do definitely agree that the AMEX Starwood Card is the best card to have, it is not always practical for everyone, whether it be because of a Financial Review, low credit score, or low income.
About a month ago I got a call that I was being F/R'd by AMEX. I currently have with them a Starwood Business, Starwood Personal, Simply Cash, and an old Blue card. The FR took a few weeks and during that time my world opened up to Chase. I looked through the many credit cards I own and noticed a Continental Chase card. Since my AMEX's weren't working during the FR, I started using my Continental Chase Credit Card.
I must say...I love Chase. Below I will outline why (some of the following items are big things, and some are very minor):
- Customer Service is rock solid. They are very helpful on the phone, and it is very easy to speak to a manager. In my experience, I've always spoken to an American.
- When you call customer service, they do not make you enter your full account number to access your account, rather they need just the last 4 digits and they can bring up the account since it matches your home telephone number (in my case, my cell phone).
- The Chase website is approximately 1,000 times easier to use than the AMEX site. In addition, it is about 1,000 times better than the AMEX site. It is also...you guessed it...1,000 times clearer than the AMEX site. (For the record, Citibank's Credit Card website is also very clear and easy to use.)
- Credit lines with Chase are much higher than with AMEX. I have very good credit and received relatively low credit lines with AMEX. After the FR, they lowered it even more. With Chase, I have more credit between my many Chase cards than the amount of income I reported to them. And with Chase you will never be subjected to a Financial Review.
- I think Chase allows you to easily transfer credit amongst cards.
- I applied for the Chase Freedom Plus card which gives you something like 3% cash back in the top 6 categories of your spending. The first year should be free and after that it is $30 per year, but if you have a Chase preferred checking account, it continues to be fee free.
- Chase has a very cool thing they do which is that they send you a consolidated statement every month. This statement allows you to see all of your credit cards, and your bank statements and their respective transactions. This can be very helpful if you use Chase exclusively to get a handle on your finances.
- Chase lets you very easily pay on their website directly from a Chase bank account to your Chase credit card. I know all crdit card websites let you do this, but I believe that with Chase when you do it, you get points on your checking account to whatever it's tied to. In my case it is tied to my Continental Account. I believe this means that if I spend $2,000 on my Chase Continental card, I will get 2,000 Continental points, and then if I pay my bill with my Chase checking account I would get another 2,000 points.
Now, there may be a few things that I wrote above which are wrong. If you know anything specific, feel free to let me know and I'll modify my post. I also realize that a lot of what I wrote above was really comparing Chase to AMEX, and yes, essentially that is what I was doing. I'm not very aware of which cards from Chase give you benefits of points that you can transfer into miles. It could be there is no such thing at all. So again, the AMEX cards that offer either Starwood points or Membership Rewards points are great cards, but if AMEX is giving you trouble, my opinion is that you should switch to Chase.