The Journey to Points and Miles

Lots of points and miles travel blogs will recommend an outline for how they suggest people get started with points and miles. The reality is that everyone gets started in different ways and for different reasons.

For our family it started simply with my wife and I getting airline credit cards for the airlines we each flew relatively frequently at the time. I had an American Airlines card and my wife had a US Airways card. We both traveled for work and the benefits of the cards made sense for us at the time.

As we gathered points on the cards we used them for flights for ourselves and for family as a means of cost minimization (i.e. avoiding paying cash). The value for us was getting a “free” flight. It was simple, easy and we were happy with the value we were getting. Most people getting into points and miles start here and are perfectly happy just like we were.

Things began to change in 2014 when my wife and the kids were going to spend an extended time visiting family in Canada. All the cards we had at the time would charge an extra fee for using the card outside the US. The fees can be several percent for each transaction which can add up pretty quickly.

Using the power of the internet, I found an offer for a new credit card that had no foreign transaction fees and also offered 60,000 hotel points after spending $2000 in the first 3 months of having the card. Those 60,000 points fit nicely with hotel stays for a golf trip I was planning at the time. I could easily shift spending to the new card to get the signup bonus and the card had no foreign transaction fees for the trip to Canada. WIN!

We got great value out of the card by saving on the foreign transaction fees as well as using the bonus points towards 3 hotel room nights. The card also came with an annual free night certificate that we later used to stay at the Intercontinental in Times Square in New York City.

By this time the kids were old enough to more easily travel (4 and 6) and we decided to set our sights on a dream family vacation to Hawaii. We gave ourselves about 18 months to accumulate points and plan for the trip. Having a goal definitely helped us focus on making that trip a reality!

In the 18 months leading up to the trip, we found ourselves finding ways to prepare the kids for the long flight from the east coast. We made a summer trip to LA to see how they would be able to handle the time zone changes (better than us). During a fluke 4 day stretch off from school we ended up going to the Dominican Republic due to some very cheap flights we found. We also used some points originally intended for the Hawaii trip that we ended up not being able to use for that trip and went to Paris during a school vacation. All this was before our dream trip to Hawaii and really got us hooked on traveling as a family!

The moral of the story is that it’s easy and simple to get started with points and miles. You don’t need to stress about always getting the perfect value for your points. Once you get started, you may find yourself digging deeper into the various programs than you ever thought!