If you’re paying a lot to travel, you don’t have to anymore!
Our family has been traveling for several years now for nearly free. I took our family of 4 to NYC for Christmas free! Then the next year I took my wife to Charleston free! Then the following year we had trips to Chicago, London, Paris, and Seaside booked free (but COVID interfered). And we just booked a 2-week trip to Hawaii for our family of 4 free as well! We’ve done this over and over again. I know it seems too good to be true, but it really isn't - ha!
How do we do this? We use credit card rewards earned from welcome bonuses that we apply for in a strategic order.
Welcome bonuses are the key. An example of a welcome bonus is a card that advertises 50,000 free points if you spend $3,000 on the card in 3 months. Typically you'd have to put $50,000 in spend on that card to earn the 50,000 free points, but they are incentivizing you to apply for the card by giving you that many points with far less spend. Do this with enough cards & you can rack up a lot of points quickly.
The reason I said we travel “nearly free” is because sometimes there are taxes and fees charged when you use travel rewards. But it’s not much.
As an example, even if you fly free on Southwest Airlines, they still charge $11.20/person round-trip for taxes. Not bad, huh? So, our family of 4 flies round trip on Southwest for free besides the $11.20 x 4 = $44.80 in taxes. Pretty close to free!
The process of using credit card bonuses to earn free travel is often called Travel Hacking. The “hacking” part has to do with leveraging welcome bonuses & strategically earning points on certain cards that correspond to the places you want to go.
It’s really pretty easy.
- Determine where you want to go
- Figure out which airline/hotel chain is best to get you there
- Apply for cards that have partner programs with these airlines/hotels
- Earn the welcome bonuses and transfer the points to the travel partners
- Book your travel free
That’s it!
The only caveat to the steps above is that you want to make sure you apply for cards in the right order. Certain carriers are stricter than others and you want to get the cards from the stricter carriers first. More on that in a future post.
