In the summer of 2024, I spent a two-week vacation and went to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This trip was one of the happiest holidays of my life. I have to spend time with great friends. I had a lot of green Chilean burgers, blue corn piled with enchiladas and other delicious New Mexican delicacies. Then I saw fantastic scenes like the Santa Fe Opera and the National Park and the Carlsbad Caverns.
Perhaps the happiest part is that I didn’t spend money on paying for my trip.
That’s right: I almost paid 100% of the (almost) New Mexico travel adventure costs, not cash, but with reward credit card points. I finally understand why people are so excited about travel reward credit cards. The way of earning points from daily expenses becomes real in a whole new way.
Here are my travel tips for booking (mainly) credit card points.
I made points with a welcome quote
There are a lot of great credit cards that will allow you to earn bonus points from your daily purchases. However, if you want to use your points specifically for travel, one of the best credit cards I found is the Chase Sapphire preferred credit card.
My credit card has a generous welcome offer, which is based on my first three months of spending after opening an account. I found it was easy to get the amount needed just by using my card to pay monthly bills like car insurance and utilities, and daily expenses like groceries.
After receiving a welcome offer for bonus points, I use my card in a strategic, targeted way by buying extra points from the “Bonus Category”. As time goes by, the bonus points do add up! A few months later, I got enough points to pay for the holiday.
Chase Sapphire Priority® Card
Regular APR
19.99%-28.24% variables
Earn 100,000 bonus points
- High introductory bonus quotes give you a lot of points
- Strong travel coverage
- Global Entry Not Offered/TSA Precheck Application Fee Credit
Product details
- Earn 100,000 points of bonus after you spend $5,000 in the first 3 months of your account opening.
- Enjoy such as travel purchases via Chase Travel, 3x dining, 5x featured streaming services and online groceries, 2x on all other travel purchases, 1x on all other purchases, 50 per year Chase Travel Hotel Credit, and more.
- Get 25% of the value when you redeem your tickets, hotels, car rentals and cruise through Chase Travel℠. For example, a trip of 60,000 points is worth $750.
- Calculate cancel/interrupt insurance, automatic rental collision loss exemption, lost luggage insurance, and more.
- When you activate before December 31, 2027, you can get Dashpass for free, which accesses Dashpass, at least reduces the service fee.
- FDIC Members
I transferred a cheap flight ticket
Chase Sapphire’s preferred credit card is not only a good card to win points; it provides me with a flexible way to redeem points. A good option is to book a trip directly through Chase Travel Tortal with Chase Sapphire points – my opinion is worth an extra 25% when redeemed this way.
But I found a better option to redeem my chase credit card point for cheap travel. Chase Sapphire cards allow customers to transfer points to common flyer plans for certain airlines on a 1:1 basis. Southwest Quick Reward is one of these Chase Transfer Partners.
I ended up being cheaper than I could get through cash by converting my chase credit card points to Southwest points. At the time, Southwest Airlines tickets were about $500, or 30,000 fast bonus points. This is the ideal way to redeem my credit card points for the maximum travel value, as I basically earned a $500 worth of ticket with $300 points.
I stayed in a hotel for a few nights
Chase Sapphire Card also has a 1:1 reward transfer partnership with Hyatt’s loyalty program World of Hyatt. So for my Albuquerque stay I stayed at a hotel at Hyatt and spent a few hotel nights transferring Hyatt’s loyalty point from my Chase credit card.
Sometimes, even when you pay with points instead of cash, you can find cheap hotels in Hyatt World even when compared to discount hotel websites. I paid about half of the hotel costs with points, not cash.