Sometimes it's hard to use points and miles for all the free tickets when you travel as a family. Perhaps you only have enough points or miles for 2 or 3 tickets or perhaps you want to fly on an airline that you don't have any points or miles with.
That happened to me 2 years ago, when my mother in law invited the family to join her on an all expense trip to Costa Rica. The only catch we had to pay to get to Costa Rica and we all had to fly on the same Delta flight.
Argh.
Delta is not an airline I usually fly. Since I can't stomach paying full price for an airline ticket, I had to figure out another way to get my family of 5 to Costa Rica. Airline tickets on this particular Delta flight were selling for about $600 per round trip. But I figured out if I charged the tickets to my Barclays Arrival Plus card I would get 1.5 free.
The 50,000 bonus plus 2,000 for minimum spend and the 10% bonus for redemption on travel was enough to get 1.5 tickets free. My husband did the same thing and got another 1.5 tickets free.
So essentially we paid for 2 tickets and got 3 tickets free. Not bad. Savings $1600.
I told my mother in law about the card and she applied and then used it to pay for the trip and saved thousands of dollars.
And bought me a pina colada on the beach!
This card is pretty easy to churn so we just applied for the card again and charged our property taxes to it to reach the minimum spend. Even though we paid $60 in fees to charge the taxes, it's worth it because we will use the bonus to pay for airline taxes and hotels for our summer vacation. The redemption is now just 5%, but I think it is still worth it to cover airline taxes, trains, airbnb etc.
A big part of this game is strategy and how to use the tools. If you would like help planning your next big vacation to be almost free, let us know. We love to help!
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