Do you use Chase points? I always just occasionally book something through their online portal which gets the 25% bonus but I know can do better transferring places, how many points we talking to get those sort flights?
We don’t do any international travel anyway as kids still too young for my preference but maybe in a few years so might have to learn more but don’t feel like getting a PhD in points optimization
I pay a guy to do it for me. For $200 he will search all the airlines within a date range and see which ones have points availability. We put everything on Amex, which has by far the best transfer partners. I’ve gotten round trip international business class tickets for 100k points on Singapore Airlines, KLM and Turkish Air that would have been $10k+ paying cash.
I thought the trope is that visiting Paris/Rome in the springtime is ridiculously expensive. Spending less than $200/night in season sounds really cheap, especially compared with NYC and DC.
the really good deals will mostly be using the airlines’ own currency. when you use card points you’re basically just going to be getting 1c/“mile” but in off-peak cases you can get upwards of 3-4c/mile. Some credit card points (amex membership rewards in particular) can be transferred to (some) airline programs and you occasionally will even get a bonus for that.
The really good redemptions are not easy to find and like riverman said they require some flexibility.
Guess I’ll have to look into Amex at some point. Their marketing team must have the precogs working for them as this came in mail today
ETA holy shit 700/yr seems steep, I’m used to the 90 dollar chase one
You get it all back, though.
$200 airline credit
$200 Uber credit
$200 hotel credit
$200 clear credit
Plus a bunch of other stuff
Can confirm we’re using Amex too and we recoup the cost pretty easily. We’re definitely spending some money on it, but I haven’t paid for a plane ticket anywhere but American in quite a while.
Am I missing something about earning the points on Amex platinum? The only thing it listing is 5x on flight and hotels?
My chase card (the cheaper one) is 3x dining, 3x groceries (if they ordered online for pickup), 2x normal travel and 5x if you buy the travel through chase. Is it just that the Amex redemption is so much better that makes up for it even if end up with less points at end of year?
The Chase card you’re using is the big competitor to the card we’re using, so my guess is that all in it ends up being kind of close. We use our costco credit card for all things costco and costco is basically our first choice for retail / groceries / gas.
The pro move is to get both gold and platinum. Gold is I think 5x points on groceries and restaurants. So you use platinum for travel and gold for everything else to get 5x points on close to everything.
All the premium cards are basically the same except for the “transfer points to airlines for international travel” component, which Amex crushes.
We mainly use the Amex card because my wife haunts their promotions and we end up getting a ton of free shit. As I sit here thinking about this we do end up using the costco cashback card in a lot of scenarios when we aren’t trying to burn off a retention bonus for Amex.
Ah gotcha. I may just need to look into the gold one then, I like the idea of getting travel rewards but don’t really travel all that much so the gold one would be way better for us
Can you elaborate on this? My fiancee would definitely enjoy being all over the promotions for free shit, so if it’s worthwhile, maybe I should look into it.
You can earn more points with the Amex gold for most stuff. The platinum card only gets bonuses on travel spend.
If you’re interested in this kind of thing you really wanna go hang out on r/churning. This isn’t an area of my household finances I actually manage at all.
I was on Amex platinum for a while, but getting a decent value for your points was like its own job. Chase Sapphire Reserve + Chase Freedom make it much easier to both accumulate and spend points at a good value.
I have the delta reserve from lots of travel of Delta and like the extra perks. Already earned a double bonus this year (30,000 mqms) from a couple of big purchases.
No clue if one of the others would get me more value or not.
Always was.jpg
Those boomers are mostly dead. It’s the privileged ones who are still alive.
