Traveling on Points (Another Introduction)

A while back (ok, over a year ago), I wrote a very brief summary on what flexible credit card points are and some examples of how I started accruing points for travel. I meant into more detail about this, but life, work and travel got in the way and it never happened. Since a lot of people have been asking about traveling on points in more detail, I'm hoping to make my way through my thought process, as well as post some of the resources that have been helpful as I've learned the basics (and more).

As I mentioned before, there are 2 parts to traveling on points.

Earning Points and Redeeming Points

Earning points

You can earn credit card points through various credit card sign up bonuses, actual spend (and learning how to maximize the number of points when you are spending), and other avenues such as cash back portals like Rakuten.

Not all points are equal. There are transferable points, which include Chase Ultimate Reward (UR) Points (Freedom, Sapphire Preferred/Reserved), American Express Membership (MR) Points (Blue, Green, Gold, Platinum), Citi Thank You Points (Double Cash and Strata Premier) and Capital One (Venture/Venture X) Points. Each company has a family of cards that earns their version of transferable points, both on the personal card level and the business card level. These cards earn points that can be transferred to specific travel partners, and it is often a better deal to redeem these points by transferring directly to these partners rather than using them in the credit card travel portal (which is what most people do).

Each credit card company may also have a line of other co-branded airline, hotel and store cards. For example, Chase has the Southwest card, World of Hyatt Card, and Amazon Card. American Express has the Marriott Bonvoy card, Hilton card, etc. These cards earn those specific airline/hotel/store points, and these are not transferable points that can be redeemed to transfer partners. Rather, they have to stay in the Loyalty program that they were earned (Chase Southwest card earns Southwest Rapid Rewards points that can be redeemed only through Southwest Airlines).

It's generally thought that it's better to focus on earning transferable points, because it gives you more flexibility on the redemption side. Would you rather have $100 in cash, or $100 worth of Staples gift cards? The cash would give you the most flexibility with how you spend, it, while you'd be stuck trying to redeem $100 of gift cards at Staples. While $100 at Staples may not be a bad thing if you are back to school shopping and have a specific use to purchase things you need there, most people would pick the $100 in cash because you could buy school supplies, or you could buy new clothes!

Redeeming Points

Once you have earned some points through sign up bonuses and purchases, you'll start to have a little pool that you can start redeeming! One of the main things that hindered me from using credit card points for major travel was that I thought I'd never earn enough points actually book a ticket, because I'd often see that airline tickets would cost 100k points or more for a one way ticket through the credit card travel portals, and for a family of 4, that's just a lot of points. However, I wasn't aware that I could actually transfer those points directly through the airline themselves, and there are definitely spots where there are very affordable redemptions at saver rates, especially when booking a year out. I know not everyone has the luxury of booking that far out, and there can be deals to be had if you can't, but since we primarily travel during school breaks because of our schedule, it has worked well for us.

My general strategy for booking is:

(1) Search on google flights for airlines/carriers that go to your destination, around the time that you're looking for. Find airlines that your points will transfer to (or if it is an airline partner of any of the transfer partners- more on this later, cause this is a bit more advanced)

(2) Search directly on that airline carrier website to see what award flights (flights you can book on points) are available. This will probably require you to sign up for the frequent flyer program. I have frequent flyer accounts to all the transfer partners that I have access to, and just document all my logins so I always have them on hand.

(3) You'll start to get a sense of what is considered a lower rate or their "saver" rates. I always try to book these. (Hotels are generally a bit different, but that will be for a future post)

(4) Different airlines may have different rates to the same destination, or even for the exact same flight if they are partner airlines! so if both Delta and Virgin both fly to London, and your points can transfer to both, do your research to see which one will give you the better deal.

(5) There are points search aggregators out there, like point.me, pointsyeah.com, and Roame, that will search dates/locations/airlines for you and spit out a list of all your options, and they can be really useful tools. However, the free versions have their limitations, and can often be pretty slow. I've found a lot of value in my learning process to figure out how to do the searches myself so I can see specific trends and get to know what are reasonable prices for tickets and where each airline may fly to.

I know it sounds super confusing, but I promise, when you start actually doing your own searches and learning the process, it's really not bad. I started doing this when I had COVID and was isolated for 10 days, so it was really a good time to learn this :) For the trips I've booked so far, I've been able to get the saver rate, or close to it, and even though I booked 3 international trips in 2024 with a few random local hotel stays, I didn't break my points bank!

Ultimately, you want to try to get the best bang for your points!

I know there's a ton of detail I didn't add in this post, but there's just so much information. There are literally whole (paid) courses about this. In future posts I'll look at how I earned points as efficiently as possible (i.e. getting the most points for as little spend, or at least with spending what you would have spent on anyway), how I chose what cards to sign up for, explaining transfer partners in more detail, more about hotel points, how to get 2 flights in one (booking stopovers), and more. But since I've had a lot of questions lately about just the basics, I wanted to make sure I put this out there.

In the meantime, if you wanted to get started with the card that I think everyone should have, here's my referral link to the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card.

Happy Travels!!!

Without points, I would have never considered trying to get tickets for the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in Vancouver, the flights and hotels would have been totally cost prohibitive for us. But because I had access to the points, I threw my hat in the crazy Ticketmaster pool and was able to score $100 tickets, which made me the best mom ever (at least for that weekend) :)