Easily Earn Points for Free Travel
Intro Paragraph TBD. With a little bit of effort, you can easily earn enough reward points for multiple free nights and airplane tickets each year.
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From Credit Cards
Unless you travel frequently for work, most of the points you can earn from free travel are likely to come from credit cards. For most people, travel and reward credit cards are the key to unlocking free travel. One or more of these strategies are likely to be your main source of reward points that can be used for free flights, free hotel rooms, or simply cash to offset your travel purchases.
- Collect Credit Card Signup Bonuses. For most people, collecting credit signup bonuses is the best way to earn really large quantities of points and enjoy a substantial amount of free travel. While it might seem a little crazy, we strongly recommend that you give it a try.
- Use a Really Good Rewards Credit Card for All Your Purchases. Unless you have a problem with credit, it takes almost no effort to upgrade your current credit card, use it as frequently as possible, and slowly and surely build up rewards over the course of the year. If you aren't going to be collecting signup bonuses, at least do this.
- (advanced) Optimize Rewards by Using Different cards for Different Purchases. Different credit cards offer bonus rewards on different categories of spending. If you are willing to make the extra effort, you can boost the rewards you earn by using cards that offer good bonus reward rates.
- (advanced) Advanced Bonus Category Options. With more effort you can optimize your rewards even further by taking advantage of "Pick Your Own Category", "Rotating Category", and gift cards.
- (advanced) Add on additional rewards and discounts. You can further boost your rewards and savings by taking advantage of shopping portals, dining programs, card-linked offers, discounted gift cards, and promotion codes.
Dining Programs — Shopping Programs — Shopping Portals — Discounted Gift Cards. - (expert) Manufactured Spending. Advanced reward point enthusiasts generate large amounts of extra points by taking advantage of opportunities to generate additional credit card spending, without really spending any "real" money (other than some fees). Most of these approaches require lots of research and effort, are only for advanced travel hackers, and aren't covered in depth on this site.
From Your Actual Travel
Its always worth making the small amount of extra effort to earn points from your flights, hotel stays, and car rentals. You may not earn very many points for each trip, but they will gradually build up over time. And tools like AwardWallet make it easy for you to remember and manage your loyalty accounts.
- Earn Miles for Every Flight (In as Few Accounts as Possible). You should be earning airline miles on all your flights with only a small-number of frequent flyer accounts.
- Always Signup for Hotel Loyalty Programs Before You Stay. You won't just earn points, you'll usually gain access to lower "member" rates and a few special benefits.
- Use AwardWallet to Easily Manage Your Loyalty Program Information. It eliminates most of the effort of remembering and managing your loyalty program accounts
Buying the Points You Need
If you only need a small amount of additional points to book award travel or you find a particularly lucrative award opportunity, it can make sense to simply buy the points you need for a free trip. If you buy most of the points, you aren't really earning free travel, but you are potentially getting a substantial discount on the normal price.
Reference
Signup Bonuses
Best Reward Earning Rates
Guides to Credit Card Point Programs
