Category: Travel Hacking

Simple Ways to Save Thousands on Flights to Europe with Avios

Posted on by David Cox

I’m a travel hacker. When I explain how I got a cheap trip somewhere, it sounds like a crazy conspiracy theorist explaining how the lizard people are controlling the world banks. For example, the first flight I booked on points was made with Citi Thank You Points transferred to the Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles program to book a United Airlines flight. It was complicated, it took some research and it’s probably something that someone with limited time doesn’t want to spend their mental energy on.

Travel Hacking is Complicated, but it Doesn’t Have to Be

If you want to maximize every dollar of personal spending to earn the most points and then maximize the value of those points when you redeem them, it takes effort, lots and lots of effort. When I explain what I’m doing, sometimes I get confused looks, because travel hacking can get really complex. I do it because it interests me, its a hobby, but for many people it sounds like a lot of work.

There is a much simpler way to save significant amounts of money without putting in a ton of effort. What I’m talking about is a one new credit card per year strategy that gives you simplicity but still allows you to take advantage of points and miles.

Why One Card Per Year?

One of the things that has become annoying for us is that because we have opened so many credit cards (to earn signup bonuses) that it means that whenever Jenn reconciles our budget, she has to log into a bunch of accounts to see our spending. I believe we had some spending on 8 different cards last month. That’s a lot to keep track of, especially when you consider different usernames and passwords for each website.

If you can keep it to one card per year, it’s literally just one account, one username and one password. You’ll only get the one signup bonus, but you’ll only have to deal with one account.

Working Backwards

If you are going to use just one card per year, it’s important that you pick the right card and that starts with knowing what you want. This usually means starting with where you are planning to go. The examples that I will be talking about in this post are from the US to Europe, specifically Spain, England and Ireland.

Why those three specific countries? Well, those are the home counties of Aer Lingus, British Airways and Iberia Airlines, three of the airlines that use Avios as their award currency. Concentrating on earning miles from an airline that has a hub where you want to visit is extremely helpful. Also, checking flightconnections.com to see direct routes is a great way to get a sense of airlines that might be useful for you to concentrate on.

In this case, Aer Lingus, British Airways and Iberia Airlines have co-branded cards that are issued by Chase. Each one of those are currently offering elevated bonuses of 125,000 Avios with a fairly large spend of $20,000 in a year. That may seem like a lot, but if it’s just a one card strategy, then it’s not really a lot to spend.

Assumptions for this Example

I’m going to assume for these following examples that we have a family of four that spends $3,500 per month on a credit card. You might be thinking that’s a of credit card spend for a family, but you can charge a lot on credit cards these days. We charge our phone bill, all our utility bills, insurance, groceries, shopping, dining, hell we even charged out taxes last year. If you think credit card first, it’s really not that hard to charge a big amount each month while staying within your existing budget.

Saving Over $4,500 on Flights to Ireland

Let’s assume that your family of four wants to go to Ireland during summer vacation (in 2025 – they need to earn the points before they can spend them).

They start January 1st by getting a shiny new Aer Lingus credit card from Chase with the 125,000 Avios sign up bonus. With this card, they will earn 75,000 bonus Avios after they spend $5,000 in the first 3 months and an additional 50,000 bonus Avios when they spend a total of $20,000 in a year. In addition, they will earn a companion pass when they reach $30,000 in spending on that card in a year. The card has a $95 annual fee.

This card earns 3 points per dollar on flights with Aer Lingus, Iberia Airlines and British Airways. It earns 2 points per dollar on hotels and 1 point per dollar spent on everything else. For this example, we will assume all spending is at 1 point per dollar.

In this case, the example family will spend $42,000 in the year, all on this credit card. They will earn all 125,000 bonus Avios after the $20,000 in spending, the companion certificate when they spend $30,000 and they will also earn 42,000 Avios through normal spending in a full year. That means they will earn a total of a companion certificate and 167,000 Avios.

The family wants to fly to Dublin from Chicago in June and according to the Aer Lingus award chart, that is “in peak.” That means 20,000 Avios each way per ticket and around $285 per round trip ticket for taxes and fuel service charges. The family uses 120,000 Avios, a companion ticket (no taxes or fuel surcharges on the companion certificate) and pays $854.40 for taxes and fees.

How much does that save, though? Well, the exact same flights from Chicago to Dublin in June cost $5,492.24, in economy – not business class, economy class.

If you account for the $95 annual fee, that is a savings of $4,542.84 on a trip for four to Ireland! The only thing that this family did was put all of their spending on the Aer Lingus card and then use their points and companion certificate to book those flights instead of cash. That’s a huge return for a very small amount of effort.

Saving Over $3,000 on Flights to London

The British Airways Visa Signature Card is very similar to the Aer Lingus card. It earns 75,000 bonus Avios earned after $5,000 in spending in the first 3 months, with an additional 50,000 bonus Avios after a total of $20,000 in 12 months. When the cardholder hits $30,000 in spending in 12 months, they will receive a 50% off travel together certificate for two people. I assume that means that two people will get an award flight for the number of Avios for one flight, but will have to pay the taxes and fees on both flights. It has a $95 annual fee.

British Airways also will cover up to $600 in taxes and fees per year, but what that really means is up to to 3 times per year they will pay $100 of the fees on economy flights and $200 of the fees in a business class taxes and fees. In the example we are using, I assume that means that the family of four may deduct $100 off of their taxes and fees for their flights.

With the same earning structure as the Aer Lingus card we can say that the hypothetical family of four will earn the travel together certificate, the 125,000 bonus Avios and 42,000 Avios in normal spending for a total of 167,000 Avios.

When they go to redeem those Avios for flights, a Sunday to Sunday spring break round trip flight for 4 comes up to 200,000 and $1,359 in taxes and fuel surcharges, however because of the travel together certificate, they can take 50% off two of the flights and because of the fee credits from the British Airways credit card, they would actually pay 150,000 Avios and $1,259.00.

The cash price for the same exact flights were $4,755.20. The amount that would be saved is $3,496.20. If you take into account the $95 annual fee for the card, you end up saving a grand total of $3,401.20 for a family of four to visit Big Ben over spring break – not too shabby.

Saving Over $3,500 on a Trip to Madrid

The Chase Iberia Visa Signature card offers the same 75,000 bonus Avios after $5,000 of spending in 3 months and an additional 50,000 bonus Avios after reaching a total of $20,000 in spending in 12 months. There is an additional benefit of a $1,000 discount voucher on two tickets booked on the same flight when you spend a total of $30,000 in a calendar year. This card also comes with a $95 annual fee.

As with the other two cards, it earns 3x on flights on Aer Lingus, British Airways, and Iberia as well as 2x on hotels. All other spending would be 1x and for this example I will assume all spending will be at the 1x level.

With this card, the spending would end up identical as the previous examples with the theoretical family of 4 spending $3,500 per month or a grand total of $42,000 over the course of the year. They would earn the 75,000 bonus Avios, the additional 50,000 bonus Avios and the $1,000 discount voucher. After a year, the cardholder would have 167,000 Avios and a $1,000 discount voucher which is only good for one year after issue.

The example I’m using is for a spring break trip to Madrid, it ended up being Saturday to Monday (because of availability, sorry the kids are going to have to miss an extra day of school). Iberia gives you a variety of ways to pay combinations of points and cash but since we have the 167,000 Avios I would go with the 136,000 Avios and $910.80.

The cash price for the exact same flights was $4,594. If you take into account the $95 annual fee and the $910.80 in taxes and fees you end up with a savings of $3,588.20.

Everyone Likes Leftovers!

In all of the examples above, the example family is left with Avios and/or certificates that they weren’t able to use. In the Aer Lingus example, the family used 120,000 of the 167,000 Avios they had and used their companion certificate. This left them with 47,000 leftover Avios. In the British Airways example, the family used 150,000 of their 167,000 Avios and the companion certificate leaving them with 17,000 leftover Avios. In the Iberia example, they kept the $1,000 discount voucher and used 136,000 of the 167,000 Avios they earned. That left them with a $1,000 discount voucher and 31,000 Avios.

Doing a Second Year?

None of these cards are really compelling to keep more than 1 year, and that’s because they all are basically 1x cards, which in the points and miles world is basically as bad as you can get.

Assuming that you want to continue traveling on points, the thing to do is to cancel this card (before the annual fee is charged) and open a new credit card with a new signup bonus.

If you get any of the other credit cards that earn Avios (you can’t get another signup bonus on the card you already had due the rule that Chase will not give you another bonus within 24 months of earning a bonus on that card), you will be able to earn a new bonus and you can transfer the leftover Avios to your new account (certificates and vouchers are not transferable).

Intermediate Strategies for More Points

The easiest strategy is the one outlined above, however there are a few basic things you could do to amp the point earnings up without overcomplicating things.

Player 1/Player 2

Since we are talking about a family of four, I’m assuming two are adults, although that’s not always the case, since there are lots of single parents out there. If there are two adults then there can be what is referred to as “Player 1/Player 2” in the points and miles world. This is basically where the two adults both have separate credit card accounts but work together to earn miles (this, by the way doesn’t have to be romantic in nature, it could just be someone you like to travel with, maybe a parent, sibling or best friend).

Two Players Open Accounts Near the Same Time

Let’s take the Aer Lingus card example here. Player 1 opens an account and starts the clock on the $5,000 minimum spending in 3 months. Once the account is set up, Player 1 refers Player 2 to the same Aer Lingus card.

In this example, not only does Player 1 get the opportunity to earn the 125,000 bonus Avios but also gets a 10,000 Avios referral bonus for referring Player 2. Player 2 then also has the opportunity to earn up to 125,000 bonus Avios as well, but they will have to decide how they want to split their $42,000 annual spending (from the example at the beginning of the post) on these cards.

Method 1 – split evenly

In this case, both players would barely earn the 125,000 bonus Avios since $20,000 spend is required and each would have around $21,000 in spend. This means they would have to be very careful to make sure they got the bonuses by the end of the year.

However, being diligent would pay off and they would each earn 125,000 bonus Avios for a total of 250,000 Avios as well as Player 1 earning a 10,000 Avios referral bonus. On top of that would be the 42,000 Avios for normal spending. That would equal a grand total of 302,000 Avios and since round trip from Chicago to Dublin during the summer is 40,000 Avios and $285, that’s 7 round trip transatlantic flights for $285 each. Not too shabby.

Method 2 – Go for the Companion Pass

In this example, Player 1 would do at least $30,000 of the $42,000 total spend and Player 2 would do at least $5,000 of the total spend (in the first 3 months to earn the 75,000 Avios bonus).

Player 1 would earn the 125,000 Avios for $20,000 spend, plus the companion ticket as well as a 10,000 Avios referral bonus. Player 2 would only earn a 75,000 Avios bonus. Together, they would also earn 42,000 Avios from normal spending for a grand total of 252,000 Avios and a companion certificate.

Method 3 – Only 1 player, Churn and Burn

Let’s say in this example, you are a single parent or your significant other has less than ideal credit and can’t get approved for cards.

In this case, I would probably sign up for the Aer Lingus card, spend until I got the companion certificate (at $30,000, which at a $3,500 per month spending rate should take about 9 months). Then sign up for the British Airways card and spend the $30,000 on it in 9 months and sign up for the Iberia card.

Each nine months period in this example would earn the cardholder 155,000 Avios and the big bonus that each card offers at $30,000 in spending. Interestingly, the basic rules that Chase has is that you cannot earn a bonus on the same card more than once in a 24 month period, meaning that after you get the last bonus, you should be able to cycle back to the beginning and get the Aer Lingus bonus for a second time.

The Fine Print

This all sounds great, I mean who doesn’t want to save a huge amount of money on a trip to Europe? But there are a few things to keep in mind.

The 125,000 Avios Offer is Probably Temporary

If you are counting on this offer to be around indefinitely, it’s probably not. There almost always are offers on the three Avios cards, but the typical amount is 75,000 Avios when you spend $5,000 in the first 3 months. There have also been extended periods where the offer was a 100,000 Avios bonus after spending $5,000 in 3 months. Keep these previous offers in mind when you time out your applications for Avios cards. The big spend bonuses (ie. the companion certificates are features of the cards, not bonuses, so those should always be available after $30,000 spend in a year).

Those Avios Prices for Flights are not Guaranteed

The examples I included in this post are typical, but not guaranteed. At any time, the airlines can change the cost of those flights, including points needed, without warning. It is fairly common in the points and miles world to have your points devalued and its frustrating if you were counting on them for an important trip, so keep that in mind. Also, there is no guarantee about availability and often you might find yourself flying on less than ideal days, such as a Tuesday instead of a Saturday. If you are going to fly on points you will need to be little flexible.

You Will Need a Decent Credit Score to Get Travel Credit Cards

Travel reward credit cards, especially the ones with big bonuses, typically require higher credit scores to get than other credit cards. From what I’ve read, people seem to think that a 700 credit score is the floor for travel hacking in general, but you can definitely get some co-branded cards with a lower score than that and other cards such the Chase Sapphire Preferred card probably require higher scores than that. If you want to do any travel hacking, you’re probably going to want to keep a good handle on your credit score, and I would recommend Credit Karma for that.

Do Not Carry a Balance on these Cards!

Most cards that give travel rewards have ridiculous interest rates. Typically when I look at mine, they are always between 20%-30%. I honestly don’t care what the interest rate is because I always autopay for the full amount and I never pay that interest rate. If you carry any balance on a travel reward card, you will regret it, because it’s incredibly high.

Do Not Make Player 2 an Authorized User

We made this mistake on the first travel rewards card we applied for. By signing up your player 2 as an authorized user, it shows up as a new credit card account for the authorized user and counts on their Chase 5/24 status. This could, potentially, keep you from getting a new credit card later. That being said, if you are going to always follow a one new card per year strategy, this isn’t really an issue.

Beware of the 5/24 Rule

This is a rule that Chase has implemented to prevent travel hackers from getting too many bonuses from them. The rule is essentially this – Chase will not consider your application for a new credit card if you have opened 5 new credit card accounts in the last 24 months. One of the nice things about the strategy that I wrote about in this post, is that it should comfortably keep you under that 5/24 number.

It matters how you Apply

Depending on what links you click on, the signup bonus amounts may vary. Yes, I realize that sounds stupid, and it is, but depending on what website you start from can make a huge difference between how big your bonus actually is. That being said, Frequent Miler always has the current best offers on their website. You should always start there to check if you’re getting the best deal.

Saving with Simplicity

Having a simpler strategy for earning points and miles will not earn you the greatest possible points, but it will allow you to save significant amounts of money with a lot less effort. It’s not just about saving money, though. A lot of families, mine included, would not take a trip to Europe if the airfare was between $4,000 to $6,000. It’s just too much to spend. By saving thousands of dollars on airfare, it opens up vacations that we wouldn’t have considered before.

Keep in mind, if you could afford to drive to Florida, rent an Airbnb, and eat in restaurants while you’re there, those things are probably about the same price as they would be in Europe. The difference between the cost on those two vacations, primarily is the difference between gas and airfare. By dramatically reducing the cost of those flights, it equalizes those two destinations. This is unless, of course, you were planning to go to Disneyworld while in Florida, because then Europe is way cheaper.

Girls’ Trip booked to Playa Del Carmen (I Guess I’ll Stay Home With The Kids)

Posted on by David Cox

Sometime this last winter, Jenn was talking about wanting to take a Girls’ trip (with her Mom and her Sister) to celebrate a milestone birthday for her Sister. We had basically just completed booking our European vacation just a couple of months earlier and we had learned a valuable lesson from that booking that we didn’t want to repeat – don’t be dependent on one way to book.

What I mean by that is that when we booked our flights to Europe, all we had was United miles, and that was our only option. If the flights weren’t cheap enough on United, we weren’t going or we were paying cash. So the solution to this issue was to find multiple ways of booking flights on points and make sure that we stockpile points in multiple areas.

The Power of Stockpiling Points

Jenn had already begun to accumulate Ultimate Reward points by taking advantage of two 90k bonuses for Chase Ink cards as well as a 60k Chase Sapphire bonus. Since they were thinking Mexico or the Caribbean, Chase Ultimate Reward points, having the ability to transfer to Southwest Airlines or United Airlines, might make sense.

We also added over 80k points by meeting the the minimum spend on a Capital One Venture card. That’s intriguing because Capital One miles transfers to the Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles program where booking round trip United Airlines saver flights to Mexico and the Caribbean often costs only 20k points .

Jenn also jumped on a 75k point bonus offer on the Delta Business Gold Card. When she did it, I scoffed a little because a lot of people joke about Delta Skymiles as being “Sky Pesos”. It’s a bit of a joke because Delta is notoriously expensive to fly to Europe or in business class on points. That being said, I think people might find that Skymiles could be particularly valuable for domestic and North American international economy award tickets and Jenn found that out.

In this case, Jenn received an email from Delta about a flash sale, and went on to Delta’s website, where she was surprised to find a round trip flight out of Moline Airport to Cancun in January for 26k Skymiles each. Because of the 15% award discount afforded to Delta Gold Card holders, she was able to book it for 22k Skymiles and $116 in taxes each for a total of 66K and $348. Those flights were priced at that time at $631 each, which means that this redemption was more than 2.3 cents per point which is a really good value for airline miles and definitely not worthy of being derided as “Sky Pesos”. This is particularly great, because good award rates out of the Moline Airport are usually hard to find, and typically we fly out of Chicago because of it, which usually means booking a hotel and paying for pretty expensive parking.

Because of the fact that we had significant amounts of Chase Ultimate Rewards points, Capital One Venture miles and Delta Skymiles, we were able to keep our eyes open for special rates with Delta, United, and Southwest Airlines, as well as being able to book Sky Alliance flights through Turkish Miles and Smiles or Avianca Lifemiles. I’m sure that we could get more creative than that, but honestly, it wasn’t needed in this case. Having flexibility in multiple programs allowed Jenn to be patient and wait for a great deal, and then jump on it when she had the opportunity.

The nice thing about a vacation rental is having a working kitchen, and this one looks pretty nice.

Flexibility on Booking Lodging

We had some flexibility built into our points for lodging as well. We had accumulated a decent amount of Wyndham points, and a respectable but not huge amount of Marriott Bonvoy points. However, with Jenn having a nice stockpile of Chase Ultimate Reward points, which transfers 1:1 to World of Hyatt points, that also made Hyatt a good possibility as well. Because of a status match made possible by Jenn’s Wyndham Business Earner card to Ceasars Rewards (visit Upgraded Points for more details), we also had a 4 night “free” stay available at Atlantis in Nassau in the Bahamas. The Atlantis stay would have had a bunch of extra resort fees that would have added up to over $200 a night and was quickly eliminated. Chase and Marriott were definitely possibilities, but the Wyndham-Vacasa partnership is just too good to pass up. We booked a Vacasa with Wyndham points before and got great value for that redemption.

The rental is in a complex with a pool on the beach.

Jenn decided to book a 1 bedroom Vacasa in Playa Del Carmen for 54,000 Wyndham points total for a 4 night stay. That particular Vacasa typically would rent for $1,325 for a 4 night stay in January meaning that those points were redeemed at 2.4 cents per point. This is another ridiculous value considering Wyndham points are generally valued at 1.1 cents per point. Booking a Vacasa rental with Wyndham points is a little weird because you have to call a special line to do it, but the rules are simple. Vacasa rentals cost $15k points per night per bedroom and is bookable with points as long as the cash price is under $500 per night per bedroom. For example, a one bedroom is bookable for 15K points per night as long as it costs under $500 and a 2 bedroom is bookable for 30k points per night as long as the cash rate is under $1000. Having a Wyndham Business Earner card gives you a 10% point discount on those rates. (Update – the ability to book Vacasa vacation rentals with Wyndham points has ended as of December 2025)

Obviously we’ll have to wait until they get there to find out if the Vacasa rental is as nice as the photos, but it looks gorgeous. It looks like Jenn did a great job booking this trip and I really hope they all have a great time (I’m sure she’ll feel sorry for me shoveling mounds of snow out of our driveway while she’s sipping a Bohemia Oscura cerveza on the beach). In the end, this was made possible because Jenn had the ability to be flexible with dates, locations and points programs. It allowed them to book what looks like a great vacation for not a lot of points and cash.

I may Have Created a Monster

When we got started with points and miles, it was pretty much me doing all of the research, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, and doing as much internet research as I could. As we started to have some success, with booking trips to Cabo San Lucas as well as our trip to Europe this summer, Jenn really started to not only get interested in points and miles, but she actually really gets it now. I expected to have to guide her on planning this trip, but for the most part, other than a couple of suggestions, she did this on her own and it was undoubtedly the best trip in terms of redemption value that we’ve made. Going forward, I think with both of us having a solid understanding of points and miles, we should have some great trips ahead, as long as she decides to come back from Mexico, of course.

The Passport Office Will Drive you Insane

Posted on by David Cox

We recently had to get passports for our kids and the process was, as my daughter would put it, batshit bananas. We probably waited a touch too long, but with the kids in extracurricular activities and school, it was difficult to set up a time at the post office where all four of us could be together to sit for a passport application appointment. We all had to be there because with Alex being only 14, that meant that both parents had to be present at the appointment. That’s apparently to keep one parent from leaving the country with a child without the other parent knowing about it. Emma was close enough to 18 where they didn’t care if a parent ran off with her.

Our appointment was set 15 1/2 weeks before we were to leave, and at the time, they were saying that normal processing was taking 8 to 11 weeks. When asked if we wanted to pay for expedited service for $60 extra each or have normal processing, we thought that we had plenty of time, why spend the extra money? That turned out to be a mistake. In the time between when we sent the application to the time that it arrived, they changed the processing time to 10 to 13 weeks. If you figure in a week on both ends for shipping, all of a sudden, we were cutting it super close.

We filed the applications and were given a website to check on the progress of those applications. After a couple of weeks, I checked the website and Alex’s passport was showing up on the site as having arrived at the office one week after it was sent but we couldn’t find Emma’s application. I thought, oh, that’s weird, but I was sure it was nothing.

Incorrect Data Hides the Application

We waited a while longer, and I checked every once in a while, but I still couldn’t find Emma’s application and with about 7 weeks before we were to leave, I was starting to get nervous. I decided to call the passport office so that we could locate her application. The passport office told me that there was no other way to look for it other than how the lookup works on the website. The website looks up applications based on the last 4 digits of the social security number, last name and birthdate. I suspected that one of those things were entered into the system incorrectly and that’s why we couldn’t locate it.

Lets back up a second. When Jenn filled out Emma’s application, she wrote down the wrong birthdate. This is unlike Jenn, she’s actually really detailed and she absolutely knows when Emma was born, but she did, in fact, write the date down wrong. That being said, the representative at the post office was extremely thorough, caught the mistake and made the correction on the form by putting a correct date above the original date with the correction initialed.

At this point, my only option was to either wait and pray, or contact my Representative’s office. Of course, I contacted our Representative. A staffer at the office emailed me back for information that they could use to contact the State Department. The staffer then called me later to ask when her birthdate was, and I told him the correct date, and as suspected, the issue was that they entered the incorrect date into the system. Even though a correction was clearly made on the form itself, when the data got entered into the system it took the incorrect date not the corrected date (I suspect they are using some sort of optical character recognition software to enter the data which probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish a correction like that). Either way, why was it possible for a staffer from my Representative’s office able to get that information, but I wasn’t able to? The State Department offers no mechanism for citizens to inquire about a potential mistaken entry other than going through their Senator or Representative. Seriously?

Emma’s passport showed up a couple of weeks later, which indicated to me that the moment that they looked it up, they must’ve decided to process it at that time. Cool! Now we just need to get Alex’s passport.

Expediting a Passport After Applying

In the time between when I inquired about Emma’s application and when she received it, I decided that it would probably make sense for me to go ahead and expedite the passports. We were about 5 weeks from travel, and I’m not great about cutting things close, it makes me extremely nervous, so for my own sanity, let’s just go ahead and spend the extra money and make sure they’ll be here in time. I called the passport office to set that up. The representative told me that they could email me an application for expedited services and they would let me know within 27 days if they could expedite the application. I said “You mean, you’ll have the application complete in 27 days?” “No,” she said “we will tell you in 27 days if we can expedite the application.” “So you’re going to charge me $60 a person to expedite my application and you might not even get to it in time?” I said “We leave in a little over 30 days.” Then she told me “It could take less time than that, and we won’t charge you unless we decide to expedite” Ok, fine, whatever, email me the form.

At this point, I’m pretty upset. What is the point of having services to expedite a passport if it takes a month to decide if you can expedite the damn passport? Then I check for the email and get utterly livid. The instructions on the email include 16 questions that I’m supposed to email back, questions that include entering all of my credit card information. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a security expert, but I’m pretty sure that emailing your credit card number, expiration date and cvv number isn’t kosher. It’s not like this is a local bakery or something, you’re the passport office. You process over 20 million passports a year and take payment for them. You don’t have a secure web payment process? You’re just taking credit card information through email? I mean, thank God nobody ever hacks email accounts! But, of course, I need the passport so I just threw my credit card information out into the ether and hoped nobody ever hacks it.

Panic Mode

At this point, I start emailing the staffer at my Representatives office on a fairly regular basis, trying to get him to pull off whatever magic he did for Emma’s passport. Honestly, I was probably being a bit of a grade A asshole to a guy who honestly didn’t deserve it and was doing his level best to assist. The problem was that once summer hit, the State Department was getting a ton of requests from every Congressperson and Senator from across the country and now they couldn’t even keep up with those requests. He was updating me when he could but you could tell he wasn’t getting updates very quickly from whoever he was in contact with.

At 14 days remaining before your trip, you are now allowed to contact the Passport Office and ask some additional questions. I told my boss that I would be coming in late and I called the Passport Office, and as expected, it took around 3 hours to get in touch with someone. When I finally did, the person on the phone told me she couldn’t get me any information because it wasn’t within 14 days. This is Friday, and we leave in 2 Fridays. That’s 14 days away. She said “We don’t count the day of travel.” Which doesn’t make any sense, but I think what she meant was that because they could actually process the passport on the day of travel then it’s really 15 days if you count the day of travel and the day of the call. Whatever, that’s some seriously insane semantics. I took 3 hours to get connected so that I could be told that 14 days isn’t 14 days. What?!! Whatever, can I at least pay for next day shipping while I have you on the phone? “No,” she told me, “I can’t look up the application until Monday, at that time you can pay for next day shipping”

I called on Monday, which is now just 11 days from when I need the passport in my hand and asked them to look up the passport. They told me that it had been approved and would be printed and shipped within 24 hours. I then asked if I could get the shipping upgraded to next day and was told that it was too late for that and that I could expect the passport in 1-2 weeks. So then I asked what I was to do if it actually took 2 weeks and I was told that if we didn’t get it before 5 days prior to travel, then I could request an in person appointment.

To be clear, I had requested next day shipping at 5 weeks prior, 14 days prior and 11 days prior and was unable to pull that off. I really wasn’t nervous at this point, however, because I’ve never had anything take 2 weeks in the US mail. It ended up being delivered in 3 days. That’s the good news, but all I can think of is just how useless all of this was. I had over 20 emails back and forth with my Congressperson’s office, several phone calls to the State Department and about half of the hair that I started this process with. Throughout the entire process, I kept reading about peoples’ experiences and I really did have one conclusion – they were always going to make sure we had the passport. If that’s the case, then, why not just do something on the customer service side to calm me down and make sure that I’m not going to get frustrated with your customer service reps and my Congressional Representative’s office? In the end, I wasted so much time for myself and so many people and it was all really preventable.

A Modest Proposal

It seems to me that a good, modern website could fix these issues and save a whole lot of labor for both the State Department and Congressional staffers. A redesign of the website to function better for applicants would make the process much smoother. Just as is does now, after filling out your application, you should be able to go to the website and check on the status. However, instead of just seeing a message that says “In Process” it should say “Based on the service requested, and the number of applications that we have, we anticipate that your application will be processed on the week of [date range]. After processing, please allow up to two weeks for shipping. If that is not soon enough, please choose from the below options to expedite processing or shipping.” Below that should be the ability to add expedited shipping or processing to a cart and you could then pay for those additional services with a credit card on a secure payment processor. Once you paid the new information should be displayed on the page with updated dates and/or shipping times. This is fairly basic and could free up so much time and effort for the State Department.

That being said, I don’t anticipate the State Department will do anything like this soon. My take away from this entire experience is that if you allow the State Department enough time to process your passport, they will get it done and you probably don’t need to make a hundred phone calls for them to do so. They know when the date of your travel is and they know it takes around 3-5 days normally to ship something. It’ll get done. I just don’t know why they feel the need to hold back information and needlessly stress citizens out. My passport is expiring in about 8 months and I’m going to apply for a renewal soon, without a planned trip, because frankly, I can’t take the stress of having a trip planned and not knowing for sure that it’s actually going to happen. I’m never going to put myself through this again and all of this stress took away from the anticipation of taking what I hope will be an incredible vacation. But now that this is over, we can concentrate on the most important thing – We’re going to Europe!

We now Have $10K in Points & Miles, What Does That Mean?

Posted on by David Cox

After really pushing every angle we could for the last 17 months, we now have accumulated 25,000 Citi Thank You points, 45,700 United miles, 80,000 Delta miles, 5,300 American Airlines miles, 58,300 Marriott Bonvoy points, 1,600 Hyatt Points, 274,900 Ultimate Reward points, 49,500 Wyndham points, 83,300 Capital One Venture Miles and $470 in Cash Back. By using the Points Guy valuations located at https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/ that comes to a total value of $10,650. That sounds like a lot, but what exactly does that mean? It’s a bunch of points, but it’s spread over a ton of different programs. How useable are they, really? It turns out, that they are really useful because the real power are the transferable points that total up to around $7,500 worth of value between the Citi Thank You points, Capital One Venture miles, and the 274,900 Ultimate Reward points. Those points can either bulk up the points that you have in airline or hotel programs, or they can be transferred to a program you don’t even have points in, if there’s a great deal available. Let’s examine what these points could actually do.

United Airlines

Because Chase Ultimate Reward points are transferable to United Airlines (as long as you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve Card, or a Chase Ink Business Preferred Card) the 274,900 points can be transferred to United. That means that while we have a total of 45,700 United miles, it actually means we have the potential to have 320,600 United miles. With United Airlines saver rates to Europe running at 40K right now, that means the possibility of 4 round trip tickets to Europe.

American Airlines & Delta Airlines

American Airlines doesn’t have typical transfer partners. There was a brief moment when Citi Thank You points were transferable in late 2021, but there aren’t any current transfer partners. So the 5,300 miles are basically useless unless I get an AA credit card with a sign up bonus. However, Marriott Bonvoy will transfer to AA at 3:1, so 57,000 Bonvoy points could turn into 19,000 AA miles for a total of 24,300 AA miles, with which you could probably pretty easily get a domestic round trip ticket. With Delta we have 80,000 points, so that’s a usable amount, but we don’t have any points with Delta’s only major transfer partner, American Express. There is a 3:1 transfer opportunity from Marriott, so we could transfer 57,000 Marriott Bonvoy points to Delta for 19,000 Delta miles to make 99,000 Delta miles when added to the 80,000 we already have. Neither one of the Marriott transfers would be an ideal use of Bonvoy points, but it is available. That could pretty easily get us a few domestic round-trip tickets as 16K round-trip in Basic Economy is not too hard to find.

Marriott Bonvoy Points

Transferring to Marriott can be done at a 1:1 rate from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Marriott Bonvoy. This means that there is a potential of more than 330,000 Bonvoy points by combining our Ultimate Reward Points and Bonvoy points. Since I’ve been eyeballing a trip to the Canary Islands, I found this listing which is a 3 bedroom villa with a heated pool in the Canary Islands for 43K points per night. That’s 7 nights in this villa.

Hyatt

Hyatt is known for having the most valuable hotel reward points. Because of that, Hyatt has been a favorite way for people to use Ultimate Reward points for years, since they transfer at 1:1 to Hyatt. While I only have 1,600 Hyatt points, we are able to leverage as much as 276,500 Hyatt points by transferring our Ultimate Reward Points. Hyatt points are extremely valuable. For example, if you just need a clean and comfortable room, Hyatt has some pretty nice category 1 Hyatt Places that you can routinely book for 5,000 per night. If you were to use those points that way it’s a total of 55 nights at 5,000 per night. If you want to book all-inclusive resorts, they are classed from A-F. The standard night bookings for A is 15k points per night, B is 20k, C is 25K, D is 30K, E is 40K, and F is 50K. So we would be able to book 18 nights at a class A, 13 nights at a class B, 11 nights at a class C, 9 nights at a class D, 6 nights at a class E or 5 nights at a super-swanky class F. We stayed at the Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos (which recently jumped from a class B to a class D) and we thought it was fantastic. If we were to go back we could stay for 9 nights, although my liver probably couldn’t handle it.

Wyndham Rewards

Both Capital One Venture miles and Citi Thank You points transfer to Wyndham at a 1:1 ratio, so if you total all of those points up, I have the possibility of 157,800 Wyndham points. The only interesting use of Wyndham points, for me, is to use them for Vacasa rentals. The generally accepted rule on Vacasa is that the you can basically book any available Vacasa for 15,000 points per bedroom per night as long as the normal price of the rental isn’t more than $500 per bedroom per night. In other words, these points would be worth 10 nights at a one-bedroom Vacasa rental worth up to $500 per night, or 5 days at a two-bedroom Vacasa worth up to $1,000 per night or even 3 nights at a Vacasa rental worth $1,500 per night. It’s such a good deal that we recently purchased points for a rental in Nashville and it saved us around $1000 over three nights.

Flying Blue

Ok, I have exactly 0 Flying Blue miles. Flying Blue is the rewards currency of Air France, KLM, and 4 smaller airlines. Just because I don’t have Flying Blue miles doesn’t mean that I can’t redeem them for flights, though. Flying Blue is great because they have great transfer partners and occasionally have ridiculous deals. They are 1:1 transfer partners with Chase, Capital One, American Express, Citi and Bilt. They are also 3:1 partners with Marriott Bonvoy. So if I do the math on the Capital One, Citi, Chase and Marriott Bonvoy Points, I have access to over 375,000 Flying Blue miles. On top of that, sometimes they have some awesome transatlantic flight rates. Here is an example I put together from Chicago to Paris. It’s round trip in Economy, 30K miles and less than $200 in taxes and fees. I could literally book this 12 times with the available points.

Virgin

Ok, this one, honestly, I don’t even believe this exists. Bear with me on this, again I have precisely 0 Virgin miles. Virgin has a ton of great transfer partners, similar to Flying Blue. They have Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi Thank You points, Capital One and Amex all at 1:1 as well as Marriott Bonvoy at 3:1. In this case, it would be similar to Flying Blue with us able to covert our points to 375,000 Virgin miles, however, they also right now are offering a 30% transfer bonus from Chase, as described in this post from One Mile at a Time. With the transfer bonus, we would have access to 464,500 Virgin miles if we did complete transfers from Citi, Chase, Capital One and Marriott. Here is the deal from Virgin that would be the most intriguing to me – Virgin cruises occasionally runs sales on cruises where you can get a one week cruise for 2 people for 80,000 points. The latest special, as described by Upgraded Points, has 4 different 7 day itineraries for Mediterranean cruises to choose from. With the available points, we could cruise for 5 weeks and have points to spare. That’s just silly.

The importance of Flexibility

Obviously, a lot of these examples are ridiculous. We’re not going to stay 55 nights in a Hyatt Place, fly to Paris 12 times or cruise for 5 weeks, but they are meant to illustrate a point. If you stay on top of deals and know who you can transfer points to, you can really stretch out your points. If you can also be flexible with dates and locations, you can stretch it out even more. Keep in mind though, a typical, non-saver one way fare across the Atlantic Ocean is 70K United miles, not 40K, and business class typically runs 155K so these miles can disappear quickly if you’re not shopping around. If you try pricing out a Saturday to Saturday trip to Cancun during spring break on points to stay at an all-inclusive resort, that will probably be an ungodly amount of points, if you can even book on points at all. However, flying to Europe during spring break is off-peak and can be extremely cheap by comparison. Just like with cash, your points can go a lot farther if you are a diligent shopper.

Cash

I hope this never happens, but there is always the possibility that at some point I won’t want to travel, or can’t travel for some reason. In which case, these points are useless, correct? Well, not exactly. The credit card points do have a cash value, not the airline and hotel points, but the credit card points. The Chase Ultimate Reward points are worth 1 cent each, the Citi Thank You points are worth 1 cent each and the Capital One miles we have are worth half a cent each, when redeemed for cash. That would mean all of those transferable points have a current cash value of over $3,400. Which is nice, but probably not how I want to use the points.

What do we do now?

It’s almost strange to think about, but I just consider this to be a good base of points. We finally have enough points to utilize multiple programs (this post doesn’t even scratch the surface of great transfer partners, I didn’t even mention one of my favorites, Turkish Airlines). Our strategy moving forward will probably include a decent amount of cash back cards to fill in those gaps that points can’t, like Airbnb and taxes and fees on flights. It will also probably mean getting cards that are running elevated sign up bonuses. Either way, the next vacation we book should be easier for us to get a really good deal because of the flexibility we have built with this cache of points and miles.

We profited $1,350 from paying our taxes!

Posted on by David Cox

Ever since I started into the Miles and Points game, I had heard people talking about how they paid their taxes with a credit card. My first reaction was that doing that is idiotic, after all there are always fees for charging your taxes. Once the fees are charged, the value of any points that you earned are going to be wiped out, right? That’s true-ish (I think I could find examples where it would still be profitable) but if you figure in sign up bonuses, all of a sudden it gets a lot more lucrative.

I have a full-time job and pay into taxes like any normal paycheck employee, but Jenn owns a business as an owner/operator. We’ve debated for years about whether she should pay quarterly taxes or just wait until the end of the year to pay in one lump sum. The lump sum thing always wins, because frankly, it’s just easier. We knew that we were going to have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 dollars in additional taxes to cover what she hasn’t paid in, so we thought what better way to pick up some points than with a nice credit card bonus?

Some people use this as an opportunity to go after a massive signup bonus on a card that has a large spend to meet the bonus and then use the big tax payment to make that spend a little more reasonable. The typical example of this is the American Express Business Platinum Card where they might offer 150,000 points after you spend $15,000 in 3 months. It might not be reasonable for you to spend that much in 3 months, but if you pay your taxes on it, maybe the spend is reasonable. This is something we might think about in the future, but it wasn’t worth it for us this time.

After discovering Turkish Miles and Smiles last year and realizing just how great a deal it was for booking United Airlines flights domestically and to Mexico (15,000 points round trip domestic in economy, 20,000 points round trip to Mexico in economy) we knew we at least wanted some points we could transfer to Turkish. The Points Guy has a great article about how this program can be a tremendous deal. We had been amassing a lot of Chase Ultimate Reward points, but they aren’t transferable to Turkish. Citi Thank You points and Capital One Miles are, however. I already had a Citi Premier Card so we decided to go with the Capital One Venture Rewards Card.

The Capital One Venture Rewards Card is great for it’s simplicity, its 2x points on everything. The great thing about that for people who have multiple credit cards is that its usually pretty easy to find a credit card that will give you 3x, 4x, or even 5x on things like travel, groceries, gas or dining out but so many categories are always 1x that this is a great everything else card. Like, if instance, paying your taxes. This card was also offering a 75,000 point signup bonus, which is a very generous offer. There is a $95 annual fee for the card and the minimum spend for the bonus was $4,000 in 3 months.

Jenn signed up for the offer and was approved. Our taxes did indeed come out to around $4,000 owed, and with the amount that we spent on Turbotax it got us to a total of $4,030. The fee for using a credit card turned out to be $95 which was a little less than 2.4 percent, I’ve heard that you can get a fee about a half percent lower than that, but I guess we didn’t shop around enough. If you add in the $95 annual fee that we paid to get the points our fees for doing this was around $190 dollars. The end result of all of this was that we earned the 75,000 sign up bonus and with the 2x on the spend, it brought our total to 83,254 Venture Miles.

The cash value of these points are 1 cent per point, so if you just take the cash it would be $832 minus the $190 in fees for a quick profit of $642. I prefer points over the cash, because I like to travel. The points guy values these points at 1.85 cents per point or a total of $1,540 minus the fees gets me a profit of $1,350. Now in all honestly, the accurate way of looking at this is that the points acquired are worth approximately 4 off-peak flights to Mexico or 5 off-peak domestic flights. And in the words of my lovely wife “I ain’t mad about it.”

For a more in-depth article about the benefits of paying taxes with credit cards, check out this article from Frequent Miler.

Is this a scam?

Posted on by David Cox

When we started into the points and miles hobby, I didn’t think about whether I was scamming the credit card companies that much, but each time we opened an additional credit card account it bothered me more and more. What if they figure out what we’re doing? Will we be caught and put into some sort of credit jail and never be able to borrow anything ever again? Ok, that’s overly dramatic but I was worried that we’d get cut off, and we wouldn’t be able to do this anymore.

After spending way too much of the last year thinking about how and why the points and miles game works, I believe I have a theory, of sorts. It’s basically this – You’re not screwing the credit card companies over, they’re more than happy to do this, it’s a symbiotic relationship.

Relax, you’re not in control.

What? But I can only relax when I’m firmly in control!

Look, the credit card companies are in 100% total control of the points and miles world and you have zero control, but it’s fine. That’s why I’m convinced that I’m not scamming anyone. Every time I apply for a credit card, they pull my credit history, it’s literally right in front of them, if they wanted to stop me from doing this, they would, but they don’t. I’m not hiding anything, hell there are a ton of blogs and podcasts where they flat-out discuss all the ways they maximize the points and miles game and those people haven’t had their accounts shut down (ok, there have been a couple, but only when they’ve violated terms and conditions).

There is a huge difference between the value of points and the cost of points

Hands down, the greatest value that someone earning credit card rewards will get is in travel rewards. It’s way more valuable than cash back. But, I’d bet it’s also less expensive to give out. Look at the massive rewards companies are willing to give out for airline or hotel rewards. A quick glance at Chase’s website shows bonuses for co-branded hotel and airline cards easily worth between $600 and $1500. Cash back cards on the same site, however, are usually $200. That seems like an odd disconnect, unless you figure out that they want you to use it for travel and why they want you to use it for travel.

Law of Supply and Demand

The supply of hotel rooms and flights are completely inelastic. Flights have the same number of seats on Tuesday as they do on Saturday. It is the same with hotel rooms. There are days which are extremely popular and others that are not. For example, if you own a hotel by the beach, there is a good chance that you are going to be fully booked on a weekend in the summer. On the other hand, you might be completely empty on a Wednesday in the winter. On the flipside, if you have a hotel near a convention center, a weekday in April might be fully booked where a weekend might be mostly empty. Getting people in those empty rooms can make a huge difference in your profitability. The problem is that cutting your prices to fill rooms could be counter productive. Lets say you own a hotel that has 100 rooms. The typical going rate when you are busy is around $200 and you have no problem filling up at those prices. However, on an off-day, a $200 room charge only gets you 30% full. The typical thought would be that you need to cut your prices. The problem with that is that you might have to cut the price of the room to $100 just to get 50% full. Your revenue actually drops doing that.

What you need is a way to offload extra inventory without cutting the price for the people who are still willing to pay you $200. I’m sure there are a variety of ways that hotels do that, but setting up an alternative currency that isn’t really going to compete with cash is a really good idea. First of all, the hotel chain can urge loyalty by getting you into their points program. Maybe you go out of your way to stay with a certain hotel chain, because you like their points program. That’s good for them. Secondly, when someone does book a hotel on points the hotel does receive compensation for the room, although I assume it is at a much lower rate. But since so much of hotel costs are fixed, the additional room can still be profitable at that lower compensation.

Airlines are similar to hotels, the costs to operate the flight are going to be very similar whether or not all the seats are full. Yes, technically if there is more weight on the plane and if the person in that seat is getting snacks and drinks, it will cost more to operate the flight, but not a lot more. So getting some sort of marginal compensation from those points does make the flight more profitable.

Because of this, airlines and hotels work with credit card companies to develop these alternate currencies that can help fill seats or rooms on days when they wouldn’t ordinarily be full. The credit card companies make money on interest and credit card processing fees and they use the lure of signup bonuses to acquire new customers. They are literally begging you to take the points, and that’s fine, it’s good for you too. That is, as long as you follow the first commandment of points and miles.

Thou shalt not pay interest, ever.

Points and miles can be very lucrative for consumers, but the interest on rewards cards, especially, are ridiculous. Here’s the thing, I don’t know what the interest is on any of my cards, because I never pay interest. Every month I autopay the full statement balance. Set it and forget it. If you are paying interest on those cards, all of the benefits you are getting from those cards disappear very quickly.

You’re not really getting the deal you think you’re getting

Hotel and Airline programs are not going to give you awesome points and miles deals on flights and rooms that they expect to sell out. If you think you’re going to use your airline miles to get Saver rates on a flight to Cancun on a Saturday during spring break, I got bad news for you. You’ll probably be able to book with points, but those rates are probably 3x off-peak rates or higher. I looked at how much United would charge for a Saturday to Saturday roundtrip to Cancun during spring break and it was 110,000 miles, if you shifted it to Tuesday to Tuesday, all of a sudden its 40,000 miles, if you look in October, all of a sudden you can go round trip for around 25,000 miles. If you are going to get maximum value for points and miles, you will need to be flexible about when you book, because that’s what this is about. They are trying to get rid of their excess off-peak inventory of seats and rooms.

That sounds bad, but I kind of like it. We recently stayed at the all-inclusive Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos in San Jose Del Cabo in early January. We were able to book that for 43,000 points for 2 nights for a room that routinely goes for $600 a night. The hotel was about 25% full, and that’s why we got such a good deal. I actually enjoyed it more, because the pool wasn’t full and we got great service everywhere in the hotel. As it gets closer to spring break however, the availability has dropped off and the available rooms have much higher point rates per night.

I don’t think points and miles are going away any time soon

I’m convinced now that this is not going away anytime soon. I’ll be able to earn massive amounts of points and miles and use them for vacations for as long as I want. It’s because hotels and airlines have excess inventory that they want to get rid of and I’m happy to take them up on the offer. The more flexible that we can be, the more ridiculous the deals will be, and as the kids get older, we are able to be more flexible. So again, I’m not scamming the credit card companies, I’m working with them.