#170 | Travel Hacking – Now, what do I do with all these points?

October 10, 2022

Episode Summary:

 

In this week’s episode, we talk about travel hacking and focus on how you can best use and maximize all the points you’ve earned through travel hacking. Travel hacking is a fun and lucrative activity if you know learn how to do it right. We discuss our personal strategies and experiences for redeeming points and miles and share advice on how to search and make decisions for using your own points to book travel. We also share an update on our 2022 goal to earn 1 million hotel and airline points through credit card travel hacking.  

Episode Notes:

 

We start off by sharing an update on our 1 million point goal in 2022. We have both beat our goal and have earned 1.3M+ points across 9 cards and our two families. We provide a refresher on travel hacking and how to do it and then dig into how to start maximizing the use of your points.  

Travel hacking redemption general reminders:

  • The value comes from bonuses, not from normal spending. So if you want to play the game, you need to churn.
  • You apply for a card, meet the minimum requirements (for example, spend $3,000 in the first 3 months), and then the points are deposited into your account.
  • Hotel points are generally worth about $0.005 apiece. Airline miles are around $0.02 apiece. So on normal credit card spending, that’s .5% and 2% back.
  • When you’re looking for ways to use your points and miles, always do the math. If a hotel room costs $50 or 50,000 points, pay with cash! Because those 50,000 points can likely be used to get $250 or more in value later.
  • Think of your miles and points as cash, and do your due diligence.
  • Using the valuation of $0.02 per mile, 1,000,000 airline miles are worth about $20K, more or less, depending on what you use them for.

 

What’s your earning strategy?

  • Pick 1-3 hotels and 1-3 airlines and focus your earnings on those. 
  • It’s better to have 200K miles with three airlines and 100K with six because you need to be able to cover the whole cost with miles or pay an unreasonable cost to buy miles.
  • For airlines, get coverage across the major alliances: Skyteam, Oneworld, Star Alliance. We’ll get into why later. For hotels: Choice, Marriott, Hilton, IHG
  • EARN! EARN! EARN! Don’t mess around. Don’t dabble. If you’re serious about free travel, you need a lot of points to give you the most options.
  • Don’t keep the cards past a year. The perks might be nice, but if you want to be eligible for the card again in the future, you’ll need to cancel it. 100K miles in 2 years is better than Group 1 boarding.

 

How do you redeem these?

  • Understand the value. Hotels are roughly a half a cent a piece, airlines roughly 2 cents a piece. Don’t give up your points for a bad redemption.
  • Hotels are easy so let’s start there. Pricing is dynamic, so regularly check for changes in price and rebook. Use credit cards for free nights or like IHG’s card, 4th night free.
  • On to airlines. Search every program you have points with and see what’s available. 
  • Be flexible. Points and miles are dynamic. More popular times of the day or of the year are more expensive. So check the calendars to see if leaving on a different day or time is a better deal.
  • Check Alliance partners. As you build up your portfolio or get transfer points like AMEX or Chase, you can tackle level 2 of searching, which is with International carriers. 
  • Booking Internationally can be overwhelming, so the key is the volume of searches. 
  • What if you don’t know where you want to go?! Follow travel blogs for flash sales and promotions. Consider paying for flight deal notification services. Once you get some options, you have to go through the searches. There’s no easy way around this. Once you find a deal, book it and enjoy the trip.

     

    Top 3 takeaways:

    1. Know the value of your points and treat them mostly like cash.
    2. Dedicate some time to thorough searching. It’s the only way to find the best deal.
    3. This approach to earning points and then using them takes extra time, so realize this is a tradeoff in your time versus your money.  And it can be a fun tradeoff!  

     

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