Disclaimer: Credit cards are a great tool for maximizing travel. Going into credit card debt to get travel rewards points is not. Only sign up for travel rewards credit cards if you plan to pay it off in full every month.
Some links in this post are referrals that will give me some extra travel rewards points. I’m not being paid for people signing up, it’s the basic referral program that the cards offer. If this post inspired you to sign up for one of the travel rewards cards that I mention, please use my referral link!
After the school year wrapped up for Marisa, our family took an epic road trip in Quebec. We stopped overnight in Vermont. Then we hit the two major cities of Montreal and Quebec City. On the way home, we spent a couple nights in the delightful lake town of Magog. It was an ambitious trip to take with twin toddlers (we couldn’t have done it without my in-laws there with us). The twins did great with all the driving. And we planned multiple nights in most stops to break it up. The best part of our trip was all the family memories we made with the boys, Marisa’s parents, and her younger sister. But the second best part was that we paid less than $150 for 10 nights in hotels across Quebec.
Who are Travel Rewards For?
Travel rewards credit cards are good for people who fit the following three criteria:
1- Want to extend their ability to travel and are willing to put in the effort to understand how the different travel rewards systems work
If you don’t really enjoy traveling, or don’t want to invest the time to learn the systems, that’s ok! There are plenty of good cash back credit cards that still give you a little bit of your everyday spending back. Don’t bother with travel rewards if you’re not really going to use them.
2- Promise to pay off their credit cards in full every month and to not use travel rewards points and an excuse to buy things they don’t need
This is the big one. Carrying any credit card balance and paying 20% interest on it is not worth it. It would be much cheaper to just save up a travel fund in cash and pay for travel out of pocket. Credit card debt should be avoided like the plague. It’s one of the most destructive kinds of debt out there.
3- Have a high credit score (greater than 700 at least)
Many travel rewards cards require a credit score above 700. Receiving a rejection feels discouraging. When I first applied for one, I was rejected for not having enough credit history. Who knew that avoiding student loans had a strange downside! I got a basic credit card, used it for gas, and paid it off in full every month. After a year, my application for a travel rewards card was accepted.
How Travel Rewards Cards Work
There are great websites out there like The Points Guy for deep diving into travel rewards cards. But I’ll give the basic premise here: there are credit cards that give sign up bonuses in the form of points that can be spent on travel. So instead of spending $500 on a flight, you can use 50,000 points on the flight instead. If some airline credit card offers a 50,000 point sign up bonus, they’re willing to give you a free flight in exchange for using their branded credit card.
The bonus isn’t for free though. To qualify for the bonus, you’ll need to spend a certain amount of money on the card in the first several months. Sometimes it’s easy to hit by using the card on gas and groceries. For other cards, you need to strategically get the card right before making a large but unavoidable purchase (we used our replanned wedding reception to get mine).
Create Your Travel Rewards Strategy
Here are two strategies for choosing a travel rewards card. The first is maximizing flexibility. Getting the Chase Sapphire Preferred card or its main competitor, the Capital One Venture card, gives you a lot of flexibility. You can use these cards to book travel on a lot of different airlines and hotels. For example, we booked chain hotels and individually owned ones using our Chase points. There are also airline/hotel branded cards, where the goal is to maximize points for a brand that you use most often. The Southwest cards are popular for this.
You can also maximize based on travel to a specific place. There are several guides on the internet for getting credit card rewards to travel to Hawaii. This is based on getting the maximum travel rewards points for airlines that fly the best routes to Hawaii and the hotels that are there. This strategy is especially effective for going all in for a once-in-a-lifetime kind of trip.
Our Travel Rewards Strategy
We started earning travel rewards right before we got married. There were plenty of wedding expenses to pay for, so we decided to get travel rewards for the money we were paying anyway. And since we were paying those expenses anyway, we weren’t spending extra to hit the spending minimums required to get the sign up bonuses. The two credit cards that paid for our rooms were the Chase Sapphire Preferred and the Marriot Bonvoy Boundless.
I got the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card (referral link) when they were running an insane 100,000 point sign up bonus during covid. Marisa and I had wedding and honeymoon related expenses, so paid for them with the card. It was an awesome bonus, but we wouldn’t have used the card if we didn’t have the cash to pay for everything. Remember, if the card isn’t paid off in full every month, the rewards points aren’t worth it! The sign up bonus as I write this is 60,000- which is still at least worth $750 if you book travel through Chase.
The second card we used was the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless. The sign up bonus was 3 free nights, worth up to 50,000 points per night. It was enough to book a nice hotel in the Old City of Montreal for the three nights we spent in that city. The card also gives one free night per year worth up to 35,000/night. We already booked our Quebec hotels before receiving this room credit. So we used it as an excuse to do some extra travel. We stayed at a Marriott just outside of Mystic CT and took the boys for an overnight. They loved the aquarium!
Between the two cards, we were able to book all 10 nights of hotels. The only cash out of pocket that we paid was the ~$150 for on site parking in Montreal and Quebec City. Having the hotels paid for took a lot of pressure off of saving for the trip. Our travel fund only had to cover the cost of foot, gas, and souvenirs.
Travel Rewards Encourages Travel
I like that travel rewards push me to travel. Travel rewards do this because they lower the amount of money you need to save for a trip. We wouldn’t have done the overnight in Mystic without the free night from our Marriott card. And we made some special memories with the twins. They still talk about seeing the beluga whales, even a couple months later. Even when we go to our little local zoo, they ask to see the whales. Luckily the zoo has elephants, otherwise they’d be disappointed.
Travel rewards also extended our ability to pay for our Quebec road trip. We stayed in a couple of great hotels- ones we wouldn’t have paid out of pocket for, but got a good deal with the travel rewards. Our Quebec City hotel room had a view of the old walls. It took less than 5 minutes to walk to the old city. Travel rewards made that happen. We had an awesome trip (while playing some world class escape rooms), and as a family we got to spend a lot of time with Marisa’s parents (and sister). Having that time was special for all of us, especially the boys, who asked about “Meemee and Grandpa and Auntie” every morning when they woke up. After experiencing the power of travel rewards for this trip, we can’t wait to see where they’ll take us in the future!
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