Easily Earn Points for Free Travel
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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, travel and reward credit cards are the key to unlocking free travel. You can earn a lot more frequent flyer miles and reward points from credit cards, than you can just from the trips you take.
Unless you have trouble with credit, we strongly recommend that you take advantage of one or both of our basic credit card strategies:
- Collect Credit Card Signup Bonuses. Collecting credit signup bonuses is the best way to earn really large quantities of points and enjoy a truly 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. It takes almost no effort to upgrade your current credit card, use it as frequently as possible, and slowly and surely build up your travel rewards over the course of the year. If you aren't going to be collecting signup bonuses, at should at least do this.
If you are willing to invest a little more time and effort, you can take advantage of more advanced strategies to boost the rewards you earn from your credit card spending.
- 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.
- Boost your rewards with "Pick Your Own Category", "Rotating Category" and Gift Cards. By taking advantage of specialized cards, you can earn 5-10% in credit card rewards over a wider range of purchases.
- Add on additional rewards and discounts. You can further boost your rewards and savings by taking advantage of shopping portals, dining programs, and other card-linked offers.
Dining Programs — Shopping Programs — Shopping Portals - Manufactured Spending (expert). 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, rather than essentially throwing the points away. You may not earn very many points for some trips, 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 earn airline miles from almost all of your flights. Rather than having them spread across lots of programs, you can usually consolidate them in 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 Points
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
