Both the airline and hotel industries are teeming with rewards programs, including credit cards that allow you to accumulate points for free flights and hotel stays. Because the idea of a free vacation is appealing, my husband and I have tried a couple of these credit cards. We had an American Express for Delta SkyMiles, then we switched that out for a Hilton HHonors card. Between the two, we managed to accrue a pile of points. The problem, we found, is it isn’t all that easy to redeem the points for a vacation you actually want to take.

For one thing, Hilton doesn’t have hotels in many of the resort locales that appeal to us, including the Cayman Islands, where we honeymooned and wanted to celebrate our fifth anniversary. During the past year, we have investigated a handful of trips to places that do have Hiltons, but couldn’t make the vacations work, either because we couldn’t get a Hilton HHonors room during the dates we wanted to travel or because we couldn’t get frequent-flier tickets for that time. It is not impossible, of course, and we are getting ready to take a weekend getaway to Florida using rewards. We’ll fly Delta and stay at the Hilton Longboat Key Beachfront Resort.

Though we are looking forward to our mini-vacation, we ultimately decided such credit cards are not for us. We recently signed up for an American Express card that gives us the best kind of reward possible – cash. We got $50 or signing up, and then we are paid 1 percent of all our charges. We can put that money toward a vacation anywhere we want to go any time we feel like traveling. Or we can buy shoes or go out to dinner or pay the water bill. It is up to us.