Stretch Your Travel Budget With Points and Miles

Like most of us, do you wish that you could travel more? You can stretch your travel budget with points and miles.  If you’re not familiar with points and miles, almost every major airline in the world has loyalty programs which are free to join.  By accumulating miles, you can earn award flights (free tickets).  Unless you’re a business traveler, you will probably never earn enough miles to travel frequently by flying alone.  Fortunately, there are several other ways to collect miles. 

The fastest way to rack up miles is with a branded credit card.  All the major domestic airlines offer credit cards which usually offer large welcome bonuses after meeting a minimum spending threshold.   For example, I have seen offers as high as 85,000 SkyMiles after spending $4000 on purchases during the first six months with the Delta SkyMiles Platinum American Express Card.  They also offer Gold and Reserve cards with different benefits for each card and also different annual fees.

A word of caution, credit cards are serious business and if you aren’t careful, you can easily find yourself in debt.  Your “free trips” quickly become expensive if you are paying interest every month.

You will earn additional miles every time you use the card to make a purchase.  Usually, you will get a different number of miles per dollar spent depending on the category.  Keeping with our SkyMiles Platinum Card example, you will earn 3 miles per dollar on Delta purchases and 1 mile per dollar on all other purchases.  To bump your miles total, you should also link your SkyMiles loyalty account with Delta’s partners like Lyft and Starbucks.  Use your SkyMiles card to buy your morning Latte and you will receive one mile from the card and one mile from buying Starbucks.

You can also compound your miles by using a shopping portal when shopping online.  Delta and American Airlines both have shopping portals.  You log in through the portal and shop at hundreds of major stores and earn additional miles with each purchase.  Shop at lululemon or Levi’s and earn an additional 1.5 miles per dollar by using Delta’s SkyMiles Shopping.  I have found that you usually get more miles through American’s AAdvantageeshopping portal.  Both American and Delta have Chrome plug-ins which will alert you whenever you visit a partner site.  If you have both plug-ins, you will get a pop up from each and you can choose the better offer.

The downside to racking up a lot of airline miles is that you can only use them on that airline.  Having 196,000 Delta SkyMiles won’t help if Aer Lingus is having a great deal to Ireland.  This is where points come into play.  American Express, Chase and Capital One all offer credit cards which earn points instead of miles.  The points can then be transferred to partner airlines and hotels or spent through their own booking sites.  American Express has seventeen airline partners and three hotel brands that allow you to transfer your points into their loyalty programs.  Chase has eleven airlines and three hotels while Capital One has sixteen airlines and two hotels.  There is an overlap between them.  For instance, both Chase and Amex are partnered with Aer Lingus.  The caution here is that if you transfer points to a partner, you can’t transfer them back.  Make sure that seats are available on an award flight before you transfer the points.  Usually, transfers are instantaneous.

If you are just getting started with travel cards, I would suggest looking at the Chase Sapphire Preferred and the American Express Gold cards.  I am not saying that these are the best cards for you, but these are a good place to begin your research.  If you are a loyal customer of a certain airline, look into their cards as well since you get benefits like priority boarding and your first checked bag free.

Each company offers multiple cards with different benefits and annual fees.  Look at how you intend to use your card and if you will use the benefits when you travel.  Sometimes the card with the higher fee will be the better card for you.  Recently, I upgraded from the American Express Gold card, $250 annual fee, to the Platinum card with its $695 fee.  I am able to use the additional benefits like a $240 annual streaming credit for Hulu, a Walmart+ membership credit and an additional $80 per year in Uber cash. Those are in addition to getting one of the best airport lounge networks of any card.  The additional benefits more than covered the increased fee.

I will not pretend to be an expert on all of the ways to maximize the points and miles that you can earn.  I don’t have the time to devote to studying all of the intricacies of every card.  There are some great websites that specialize in that like Thrifty Traveler, The Points Guy and the 10x Travel group on Facebook. 

I’m on a quest to see a game in every major league baseball stadium.  We’ve been able to use points and miles to stretch our travel budget by getting free flights to several cities. This allows us to catch a game that would have been cost prohibitive if we had to buy plane tickets.