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Save money on your reservations
If you simply go to a popular travel booking site, like Expedia, to book your hotel reservations, you'll wind up paying more for your reservations, while missing out on extra benefits and reward points. To pay less and get more, check out our comprehensive guides to booking airfare, hotels, and rental cars.
Learn to take advantage of travel reward programs
Frequent flyer and hotel programs let you travel more often or more luxuriously. But, frequent flyer programs, in particular, can be difficult to take advantage of. Our Step-by-Step Guide to Booking Award Tickets can help you learn how to get the most value out of frequent flyer miles you earn from flying or credit cards. If you don't already understand the basics of frequent flyer miles and airline alliances, read the background information in our Award Tickets 101: The Basics guide first. And Make Sure to Earn Miles for Your Flight.
Taking advantage of hotel reward programs is a lot easier. Award Nights 101: Using Your Hotel Points provides all the details about getting free hotel nights.
Take advantage of travel and reward credit cards
The easiest way to get access to travel benefits that are usually reserved for "true frequent travelers" and to earn huge amounts of reward points that you can use for free airline tickets and hotel rooms is to take advantage of travel and reward credit cards.
Credit card benefits and reward are the core of many of our travel strategies. As long as you can handle credit, signing up for a bunch of new credit cards won't destroy your credit rating—it just may improve it. Credit Cards 101 provides the basic details on taking advantage of travel and reward credit cards.
While many of our travel strategies revolve around credit cards, the ones you should take advantage of, depend on how comfortable you are at singing up for new cards, and how much effort you want to make.
- Level 1: Get a good rewards card and use it whenever you can. The simplet place to start is to make sure you get a credit card that offers a good reward rate, and start using it, instead of cash or checks, whenever you can. By simply using a good general-purpose reward card, you'll slowly and surely earn enough points for free airplane tickets and hotel rooms. If you make an effort to use your card to pay for as many expenses as you can, you'll increase the amount of free travel you can earn each year. Get a Great General Purpose Reward Card and Use It for All of Your Spending.
- Level 2: Put together a credit card collection that works for you. Many credit cards provide valuable travel benefits. Most people should gradually build up a core collection of credit cards that provide worthwhile benefits, based on the ways you travel and spend your money. For example, based on your travel patterns, you might want to get a premium card that offers airport lounge access, the credit card for your favorite airline (in order to get free checked bags), and a card that provides free breakfast at Hilton hotels. Along with the ongoing benefits, you'll also get bonus points for signing up for each of these cards. Build Up a Core Credit Card Collection for Travel Benefits and Rewards.
- Level 3: Sign up for credit cards just to earn their signup bonuses. Rather than only signing up for the cards that have valuable ongoing benefits or reward rates, you can continue to sign up for new cards to earn their lucrative signup bonuses. It is surprising how many cards you can get before banks start staying no, or your credit rating starts going down. With very little effort you can enough points for dozens of free hotel rooms and multiple frequent flyer tickets.