Another
card I have had for many years is my American Express Rewards card. I
earn award points for every dollar spent and some retailers offer bonuses for
using the card in order to earn your business. For example, if I’m
buying flowers for Mother’s Day anyway, why not use the florist that gives me 3
miles for every dollar spent? Well, over the years I have built up
66,000 rewards points. Through the Travel Hacker site I learned that
I could get 1.5 miles for every reward point transferred to the British Air frequent
flyer program. You don’t have to be a math prodigy to figure out
that by opening a BA Executive Club account I could start out with over 100,000
Avios (their term for the frequent flyer club points). Done.
But
it gets better. BA had a credit card offer that gave you 25,000
miles just for getting the card and another 25,000 miles for spending $2,500 in
the first 90 days you have the card. Done. I spend about
$800 every month for things like my cell phone, ISP, alarm service, utilities,
etc. Throwing in grocery purchases and other necessity spending
makes it easy to get to $2,500 in 90 days without spending money on
non-necessities. I haven’t received the card yet, but my application
was accepted and once I receive the card, I will switch my automatic payments
from my Citibank Amex card to the BA card. So… within a very short
time I will have a BA Avios balance of 150,000 miles.
I
relayed this information to a friend who wanted to know what the heck I would
do with 150,000 British Air miles. Excellent question. You
can book flights on American and many other airlines using your BA miles and
avoid paying fuel surcharges at the same time! This is covered in
one of the Travel Hacker tutorials. I thought I knew a lot about how
the airline points programs work, but Chris Guillebeau, the founder of
Travel Hackers, and his crew have taught me much more about both
earning and spending points.
An
important thing to understand about the airlines is that all major airlines and
many regional airlines belong to one of three consortiums that work
cooperatively to serve each other’s customers. You’ve probably
booked a multi-segment trip before and got onto a plane operated by a different
airline. That’s because of the code-share partnerships between
airlines. This also works on a broader scale for the member airlines
of the One World, Star Alliance and SkyTeam associations.
Before
deciding on my Panama trip last year, I was toying with going back to Morocco
for a ten-day trip. As usual, I went to Hipmunk to do my initial search for flights and noticed
that some of the best flight combinations used Delta and Air France; both
airlines are SkyTeam members. For a period of almost a week, I could
have booked flights to either Marrakech or Rabat for only 90,000 Delta
SkyMiles. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough miles and by the time
I figured out that I could have moved miles to Delta from my AmEx Rewards
account the offer was gone. But this points out the importance of
having miles in members of all three airline partnerships. I now
have points built up in American and British (One World), Delta (SkyTeam) and
United and US Air (Star Alliance).
All
of these tidbits and more are detailed in the tutorials offered by the Travel
Hackers web site. Could you do this on your own? Maybe,
but getting regular updates and reminders from Travel Hackers is helpful and
keeps you from going to every site imaginable to stay on top of it. I
encourage you to click the link and check it out. You won’t regret
it and the worst that can happen is that you learn how to get more travel for
less.
Some
people have concerns about having multiple credit cards. I
understand that and you need to have a plan to keep yourself out of financial
and credit trouble. To make sure I stay within my budget each month,
I have an automatic payment made to my current credit card of choice from my
checking account. That covers my regular spending (as outlined
above) and then I add up my spending each week and make an additional payment
as I spend the money. That way I don’t rely on the credit card for
living expenses and always ensure my card is paid off each month and avoid
paying interest.
