Kathy is my kind of gal. You work that card and get the most out of it. I always have been that way with previous reward credit cards. I don't travel as much as I used to so I don't get as many points as I used to.

However, the Plat. card gives you 2 points for every dollar as opposed to 1 on Gold and Green. So it adds up faster. Also, you get the collision damage waiver on car rentals that I don't have on my Gold card, even though I usually use Visa for car rentals that has it.

Now if I could only get an airline to open seats so I could use some of these points for a trip. It's getting so hard to find rewards seats it's almost not worth collecting points if that's your goal. On our recent trip flying into Munich I was trying to upgrade just one way, found a date that would have worked but didn't lock it in, 2 days later it was gone, no seats ever were released again in May for rewards on U.S. Airways to Munich. This one date in May I found was back in early November and I was constantly checking to see if seats became available, never happened again. I could shoot myself for not taking the date when I had it but at that point I didn't know if the waitlist on Crystal would come through and didn't dare take the chance of getting the tickets and finding out Crystal wouldn't clear us. After Crystal cleared us I tried all kinds of combinations on other airlines and couldn't find anything that would work, very frustrating to say the least.

The media has been reporting that the airlines have cancelled a lot of flights which is causing planes to be filled. That was our experience on this trip. I think there was one seat not filled to Munich and 3 on the Venice return. I think it's going to be hard to find reward seats for a long time with fuel prices high. Also, it looks like everyone is going to have to plan further in advance than they had to before just to secure the seat on the airline, paying more than in previous years to boot.

Oh well, the adventure continues.

KarenM