For the past 4+ years, I haven’t spent cash on any of the international flights I’ve taken (some hotels too)! Instead, I’ve used credit card points to cover the cost, along with amazing benefits like lounge access, travel credit, and insurance. Tune in to learn how this whole process works so you can do the same! I share the exact list of credit cards I currently use, ways you can get tens of thousands of points in the next few months, as well as pro tips to find the best deals and perks!
HOW TO TRAVEL FOR FREE
Today is the perfect day to talk about something I get a lot of questions on, which is how do you travel so much? How do you travel for free?
And I really want to give you guys behind the scenes of how I travel for free using credit card points. Personally, I have not paid for an international flight in the past four, maybe five years. So every single international flight, including this one, including some of my husband’s, I’m able to use points to cover and it saves me a chunk of cash. And of course it gives me the option to reinvest that chunk of cash that I would’ve used on flights back into my business.
I’m really excited to show you guys how it’s done.
POINTS HACKING OVERVIEW
Every single purchase I make in my life is done on a credit card, either one of my personal credit cards or one of my business credit cards. I hardly ever, ever use a debit card. Sometimes I’ll use Transferwise, but 95% of the time I’ll always have my spending on a credit card.
With the credit cards that I have applied for and signed up for, with every purchase I automatically get either points or miles that I can then redeem for anything travel related like free flights or hotels or car rentals. And they can be business class flights or first class flights too.
There’s no limitation as to what I can redeem them for, but every time I spend on something I would’ve purchased anyway, I’m automatically getting credit card points for travel on the backend and those accumulate over time.
What’s even better is I’ve optimized my strategies so that for certain credit cards, I use them for certain categories of spending to give me even more points.
HOW TO USE CREDIT CARDS FOR FLIGHTS
Now that you have the points, let’s go through how to use points to travel.
As an example, with Chase, every point with their transfer partners are usually transferred on a 1:1 basis. If you redeem them as cash towards travel, they then use a 1.5 multiplier, which means instead of one point equaling 1 cent, every point is then 1.5 cents.
If you had 10,000 points, you can use that towards $150 of travel. And if you have 100,000 points, you can use that towards $1,500 worth of travel. And so you can see how over time, as you are accumulating more and more points, you can basically redeem and travel on points!
FLIGHT PRICES WITH MILES AND POINTS
The prices of flights available with points and miles varies depending on the time of year and flight route, but I have bought business class flights for as low as 35,000 American Airline points!
With many other airlines, 60,000 points will usually get you round trip flights from like New York to Europe. And this is simply by receiving ONE sign on bonus!
They are so worth it if you know how to play the credit card game, right?
Of course, you don’t want to just be mindless about signing up for so many and then forgetting to cancel or not be on top of your payments, right? You really want to make sure you have an understanding and a grasp of this so you can manage this well and use the points and miles to your advantage.
Signing up for rewards credit cards has been one of the best decision of my travel career, and I know you won’t regret diving in. I hope this episode was enlightening and it helps you find your next award mileage flight and get started on free travel!
Who can complain about that, right? How much better can it honestly get?
