Start Here: Intro to Traveling With Points and Miles

Traveling the world using points and miles, whether flying first class and staying in luxury hotels or even taking more modest trips, sounds too good to be true, but it is completely real. We have been doing it for over 5 years. 

The funny thing is that the key to efficiently accumulating hundreds of thousands of points and miles is not in traveling frequently, nor in being loyal to an airline or a hotel chain, but rather in how we use credit cards.

Traveling with credit card points has been a common practice for decades in the United States, especially among Anglo-Saxons, but even though we are millions of Hispanics living in this country or with access to its credit system without even living there, it is still a very little-known concept for Hispanics, leaving thousands of travel opportunities on the table.

But to take full advantage of this system, it is necessary to have sufficient knowledge, implement proven strategies, and not be swayed by myths.

In this guide, we will teach you the basics and the first steps so that you too can start traveling almost for free using credit cards and rewards programs.

The Basics

The process of accumulating points and starting to travel with points can be summarized quite simply:

1️⃣ Apply for a credit card that generates travel rewards

2️⃣ Meet the minimum spend required to earn the welcome bonus

3️⃣ Use the generated rewards to travel 

Done! Pretty simple, right? 

The issue is that there is a lot to break down here because there is an endless number of details in the process that are usually confusing at first, but once we understand the basics, everything starts to take shape. 

Generating Points: Welcome Bonuses

Welcome bonuses are the star of this hobby. They offer the easiest, most direct, and cheapest way to generate hundreds of thousands of points for travel, though it is not the only way. This is how they work:

Often, credit cards offer a welcome bonus upon approval and upon spending a certain amount of money within a specific timeframe with it. It is usually something like: “60,000 points after spending $4,000 in 3 months from account opening.” 

Depending on the type of points we are generating, these 60,000 points can have a value of $600 in cash or for travel, although sometimes they can be worth much more, perhaps $1,200 or $1,800, for example. It all depends on the type of points generated and how they are redeemed. There are many ways to do it, and not all points are created equal. 

The $4,000 spend you need to make is what is known as the minimum spend requirement. Once you have spent that amount within the required timeframe, you are awarded the bonus, you can redeem them for flights and/or hotel stays, and that's it! You are traveling without spending out of pocket.

Keep in mind that many cards occasionally offer "elevated offers" on their welcome bonuses. For example, instead of offering 60,000 points for spending $4,000 in 3 months, the offer is 70,000 points. On the blog, you'll find the best travel cards with their respective current offers, and we also publish elevated offers from other cards that are worth mentioning. 

Is it really free travel? 

Now, you might think… I'm not spending on my trip, but I had to spend $4,000 in 3 months to get those points, so I am indeed spending! 

And yes, you are absolutely right. It is necessary to spend to get points on credit cards. The detail here is that we all have expenses in our day-to-day lives (unless a child is reading this, in which case, show it to your parents), so the idea is to use credit cards for our daily expenses without spending more than we had already budgeted, then pay off the card in full to avoid paying interest, and benefit from the points generated. 

If a credit card requires spending $4,000 in 3 months to get a 60,000-point bonus, this equates to a monthly spend of approximately $1,333.

As we can see, the average person spends much more than $1,333 a month. We could even organize ourselves to pay for a large expense all at once, like an annual insurance policy, and earn a welcome bonus in the process. 

So, if we are spending what we would spend anyway, regardless of whether we pay with one card or another, or even cash, we could say that the trips we take with credit card points are practically free. 

Getting to know Prague without spending on accommodation thanks to points and miles 🤩

How can I generate more points?

Beyond welcome bonuses, credit cards inherently generate points for the purchases we make with them, but the number of points we earn can vary by card and category. 

Some cards have "multipliers," which are additional points in certain categories. So instead of generating 1 point per dollar in a specific category like restaurants, you could generate 3 points per dollar (3x). 

To accumulate the most points, we want to focus on using the card that gives us the most points in our main categories. Instead of paying $500 a month on groceries with a card that gives us 1 point per dollar (500 points), we can consider one that gives us 4 points per dollar (2,500 points). The difference over a year would be 24,000 points, enough for 2 to 3 hotel nights or an economy class flight. And without changing anything in your budget. 

At a minimum, we should be getting 2 points per dollar on any transaction. Unless we are using a card specifically to reach a welcome bonus.