If you’ve read some of my previous posts you might have picked up on my love to travel hack! This basically means that you take advantage of credit card rewards and sign up bonuses so that you can get free or discounted travel. You can read more about how that works here, but I wanted to give an update on our progress since I get asked all the time about how it’s going and how we are able to travel so much as a family of four.
It’s been about 15 months that we started this travel hacking journey. Since then between myself and my husband we have accumulated over 500,000 credit card points, this equates to thousands upon thousands of dollars that we have redeemed for travel!
We have opened and utilized about 8 different credit cards within those 15 months. It sounds like a lot but we only use one at a time, once we reach the minimum spend we move on to another card and so on to keep acquiring points.
We achieved the coveted Southwest Companion Pass in early 2019 by opening up 2 specific Southwest branded credit cards so this allows me to fly for FREE with my husband on ANY flights he takes for the remainder of 2019 and ALL OF 2020!
Within these last 15 months we have taken multiple trips with our family of four. Here’s a quick breakdown of what we were able to accomplish thus far, based out of Oklahoma, in the last 8 months (keep in mind that our son who is under 2 years old flies free as a lap child).
4 free last minute round trip flights to Ohio using Chase Ultimate Reward Points
5 free hotel night stays at various Hyatt hotel properties in New Mexico, Oregon, and Oklahoma using Hyatt points
4 free round trip flights to Portland, Oregon using Southwest Rapid Rewards Points
4 free round trip flights to Cancun, Mexico using Southwest Rapid Rewards Poing
The total cost of these flights and hotels was over $5,700 and we literally only paid a few hundred dollars total for mandatory government fees and the annual fee on a couple credit cards thus saving us over $5,400 this year alone in travel!!!
We took some other trips during this time but we did not redeem points for them, mostly due to wanting to road trip and stay at a particular airbnb or other factors that came into play.
We are still accumulating points and planning our next trips. We haven’t even used half of the points that we have accrued in the last 15 months so there is a lot we can still do, and since these points don’t expire we can keep collecting until we are ready to book our next trip.
Have you travel hacked or are you interested in learning more? If so drop me a comment and I’d love to chat more about it! Again, travel hacking is not for everybody so be sure to check out my last post to see if it’s something that fits your lifestyle.
I think this is an awesome way to travel, I never could have figured ANY of this out on my own, I’m so grateful for you and your penny-pinchin’ brain and all “bossin me around” to do this stuff! Thank you very much- Z
Ps…have you decided where we are going for spring break yet???