Easily Earn Points for Free Travel
The ultimate travel hack is "free travel". That starts with earning lots of frequent flyer miles, hotel points, and credit card rewards.
Everyone can easily earn enough reward points for free hotel nights and frequent flyer tickets. With a little bit of effort, you can easily earn enough reward points for multiple free nights and airplane tickets every year.
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From Credit Cards
Unless you travel frequently for work, travel and reward credit cards are the key to unlocking substantial amounts of 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:
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Collect Credit Card Signup Bonuses.. Collecting credit signup bonuses is the best way to earn really large quantities of points that you can use for free hotel nights, airplane tickets, and other travel expenses. While it might seem a little crazy, we strongly recommend that you give it a try. |
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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 collect signup bonuses, you should at least do this.</li> |
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.
| Lua error in Module:Link at line 366: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value). | Lua error in Module:Link at line 366: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).. Many credit cards offer bonus rewards on different categories of spending. If you are willing to make the extra effort, you can boost your rewards by using a different cards for grocery, restaurant, travel, and other spending categories. |
| Lua error in Module:Link at line 366: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value). | Lua error in Module:Link at line 366: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).. By putting in more effort, you can take advantage of specialized cards and earn 5-10% in credit card rewards over a wider range of purchases. |
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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. |
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Manufactured Spending (expert). Advanced reward points 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 Travel
Its always worth making the small amount of extra effort to earn points from your flights, hotel stays, and car rentals. If you don't, you are essentially throwing away free points. While you may not always earn very many points, they will gradually build up over time. And a tool called AwardWallet makes it easy to deal with large numbers of loyalty programs.
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Frequent Flyer Miles. It is easy to earn airline miles from almost all of your flights. And rather than having them spread across lots of programs, you can usually consolidate them in only a small number of frequent flyer accounts. |
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Hotel Points. You should always sign up for the hotel's loyalty program before your stay. You won't just earn some potentially valuable reward points, you'll usually gain access to lower "member" rates and a few extra benefits. It only takes a minute and you'll save time over the long run. |
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Manger Your Loyalty Accounts with AwardWallet.. AwardWallet is free service that 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
