20 K in free travel? Are you serious? Over the last five years we have saved over 20 K dollars in free travel and stay. We love free travel and we use a primary airline credit card to build up free miles. Currently we have enough miles banked for at least another year worth of free travel for four members. Let me explain. Below are my travel bookings for 12 months March 2017 to March 2018 Travel 1 – Southwest Chicago to LA No. of Passengers – 4Total cost – $ 11.2 per passenger (Taxes and other fee)Points banked – 135 K ( 4th passenger did not even pay miles due to companion pass). Read full article to know How we saved $15000 in free travel and stay
Travel 2 – Southwest Chicago to Orlando No. of Passengers – 4Total cost – $ 11.2 per passenger (Taxes and other fee)Points banked – 95 K ( 4th passenger did not even pay miles due to companion pass)
Travel 3 – International – Chicago to Costa Rica No. of Passengers – 4Total cost – $ 60 per passenger (Taxes and other fee)Points banked – 68 K ( 4th passenger did not even pay miles due to companion pass) 
Actually I had one more free travel for four passengers, but you get the idea.
Just in one year- 4 return tickets to LA, 4 return tickets to Orlando, 4 return tickets to Nashville and 4 return tickets to Costa Rica. Very conservatively this would have costed me $ 5000 for the four of us. Multiply that for the last five years and I am not even adding the free hotel rooms. Sweet!
We love credit cards. Using them has provided us with all of these free trips and with more to come. This is also known in the travel world as Travel hacking.
What is travel hacking?
Travel hacking is broad term used for cutting the cost of travel but originally came from gaining airline and hotel mileage points through signing and usage of credit cards. If you live in the US there are infinite opportunities to acquire miles by signing on to a myriad of credit cards. Word of caution – This has to be planned and you have to be disciplined so that the card balances are paid on full every month. Check Our All Travel Tips And Guidelines Here
Over the years, we have targeted travel rewards programs based on where we wanted to travel next. We used a airline credit card as our main spender and then we added a bunch of hotel and other cards.
Or the last five years we have encashed over 650,000 mileage points for free travel. Currently we have six active cards with points balance as below:
Chase Ultimate Saphire – 80,000 points
2 Southwest cards – 270,000 points
2 IHG cards – 140,000 points
Hilton Amex card – 90,000 points
This should pretty much give us free hotel and travel at least for the next two years.
Credit Card promotions
By far the most efficient way to get a ton of miles points quickly is through credit card promotions. Banks wants you to sign up for their credit cards and they incentivitise you to sign up through various offers. Once you sign up they mandate a minimum spend during the first few months in order to make you eligible for the freebies.
Essentially they are hoping that at a percentage of subscribers will not be disciplined and pay the bank a lot of money in interest and late fee over the next few years. Be aware of this trap and do not sign up if you cannot be disciplined.
If credit card hacking is sometimes you want to take advantage of , I request you to start slowly , add up a few cards before you expand your collection. There is a lot of information available on the web on travel hacking, so I will spare the details here.
Happy free travels, Happy free Meandering