How I Scored 4 FREE Flights To South America

The mountains ring the city of Santiago, Chile

While you are relaxing on the beach or in the mountains this summer, you may want to start thinking about your next trip. That's the key to scoring FREE flights for your entire family. I started planning for our trip to 2020 Chile more than a year ago. So by the time the flights opened approximately 330 days before the departure date, I was ready with enough points for all the tickets. So how do you do it?

Let's break it down. 

1. Identify where you want to go and which airlines fly there - for South America, American Airlines and their partner, LAN, are the largest carriers. It doesn't mean that United and its network are not an option, American just has more options. Some airlines also charge less miles for the same ticket like Singapore Airlines so it's worth checking a few award charts. In this case, all the airlines were the same. So I chose to focus on American Airlines just for simplicity. 

2. How many points will you need to fly your family there and back. I needed 4 round trip tickets (my older daughter will already be there). Each ticket would probably cost me 60,000 points. You can check the award chart on American's website or just enter some dummy dates and see what pops up. If I got super lucky, it could be less, but 30,000 each way is pretty likely. 

3. So how do you collect 240,000 American Airlines miles? It can seem daunting, but don't despair. I already had 35,000 American Airlines miles in my account from various flights and an old bonus and my husband had 90,000 in his account from various flights and another old bonus. So that was a good start. We could use those for 2 round trip tickets. One of the benefits of Marriott Bonvoy is when you transfer 60,000 points to an airline, you get a bonus 15,000 points. So for every 60,000 Marriott points, you get 25,000 airline miles. If you transfer to United, you will actually get a bit more since those transfer with an additional 10% bonus. We needed just an additional 120,000 airline miles. Fortunately for us, we had lots of Marriott points from using our Starwood credit cards, staying at Marriott hotels and a 100,000 bonus for upgrading to the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant credit card. We focused all of our spend on our Marriott credit cards and American credit cards to build up more points. And bam, we had enough to cover the tickets. Marriott Bonvoy is currently offering 75,000 points for a $3,000 minimum spend on the Brilliant card. The Brilliant card comes with FREE Global Entry and a $300 Marriott credit. It does carry a $450 annual fee. Please use our referral link for any Marrriott Bonvoy credit card. 

4. Now the challenge is to find 4 award travel economy tickets. I start looking as soon as the flights open approximately 330 days before the date. Be sure to open the full calendar because sometimes a reduced mileage ticket will pop up. Even if you can get 2 tickets at a reduced rate, it will save you something. 

Be sure to try different airports too. We usually fly out of Los Angeles because there are more options, but I always try San Diego to see if we get lucky. I also try different destination cities. We could fly into Santiago and return from Buenos Aires or we could fly into Buenos Aires and return from Santiago. In this case, it didn't make any difference. 
The other thing to remember is to be flexible with dates. Our first choice dates didn't show any economy award tickets. I even called American to ask about it and they were stumped. So, we decided to stay a few days longer. 

When I was ready to book, there was one more issue. I could only secure 2 return flights to Los Angeles International Airport at 30,000 miles each. However, a quick search, showed 2 return flights to John Wayne Airport in Orange County at 30,000 miles each. So,  2 of us will fly to LAX and 2 will fly to Orange County. Fortunately, Orange County is on our way home so we will just drive by and pick them up. 

A bit of an inconvenience, yes, but we just booked a trip that would have cost about $5000 for flights alone for about $350 in taxes. We also used the Chase Sapphire Reserve travel credit to erase $300 of those taxes. So really, we just booked all of our flights for $50. 

In my book, that's how we do it at almostFREEfamilytravel.com. In my next post, I'll show you how we scored flights from Santiago to Buenos Aires for FREE with a stop at the largest glacier in the world.