Credit Card Points

A major reason we get to travel the way we do is because we optimize our credit card points. We are not points experts but we have traveled to Europe many times only using points and miles. We would encourage you (if you are able to pay off your balance completely each month) to look into credit cards with rewards programs that actually reward you for money you are already spending. These are not the airline credit cards that give you 1 point per dollar for every expenditure that isn’t a flight. We have cards that give us 3 to 5 points per dollar on dining and wifi and gas and groceries! Which makes it way easier to accumulate them and then transfer them to whatever airline makes sense. We also maximize our points further by utilizing transfer bonuses (for example: We have transferred 1000 Amex points to Virgin Atlantic’s flying club which offered a 40% transfer bonus, so 1400 points for every 1000 points transferred) which has been huge for our family’s ability to travel. Plus when you save so much money on flights, you can splurge more on food, hotels, and activities. We even just flew business class with points! We recommend using The Points Guy as a wonderful starting reference for those of you interested. If there are any amazing bonus offers for credit cards we love, we will try to keep the links below updated as best we can.