Travel hacking – free international flights thanks to Chase

Being Frugal doesn’t mean that you cannot travel, in fact taking a frugal mindset may get you off to exotic locals that you wouldn’t normally consider, and hopefully at a fraction of the cost for a typical traveller. Flights and accommodation are likely to be your two major expenses, and this is where the art of travel hacking comes in to lower these amounts. In this regard, I’m currently focusing on building up some air miles, to enable my family and I fly off to Hawaii for free, and not just once, but several times at least!

To get this free travel I am currently using credit card offers to generate the significant amounts of miles. The number of miles you can gain are substantially more than normally awarded through flying, and hence the credit card offers help you gain miles (or points that can be converted into miles) rapidly. Right now, Chase bank seems to have some quite amazing offers, and so I am gladly taking up these. I have heard that Chase has a 5/24 rule, where they are likely to deny you a new credit card if you have already opened 5 credit cards, not those just from Chase, in the last 24 months. Fortunately, I didn’t fall foul of this rule, but I assume there are also workarounds, such as taking up one or more of their many business credit card offers, if you have some kind of small business, that are not impacted by personal credit scores, etc.

To give you an idea of how great the current opportunities are, in the last couple of months and really without much effort, I have earned about 135,000 reward points, and I am sure I could have gained much more if I really tried. Looking around at how to redeem these miles, I can see that I can get from the West Coast of the US and to Hawaii and back for 22,500 miles, so already my family can fly there a couple of times, especially as the baby can fly for free for now as he is under two.

I have earned my Chase ‘Ultimate Reward Points’ by initially signing up for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, which is a premium travel card that has a number of key bonuses, including x3 points for spending on travel and dinning, as well as a remarkable 100,000 points bonus after meeting the minimum spend. Next on the list was the Chase Sapphire Freedom unlimited card, this card provides x 1.5 points on any spend, and after $500 of initial spending it currently gives a 15,000 mile bonus (you have to have a Chase travel card to get the miles, otherwise it will be a 150 dollar cash back bonus). In addition to these two cards, I already had a Chase Freedom card that can give x 5 bonus points from rotating categories that change every quarter of the year, and together these three cards have given me this ~135,000 bonus points in a matter of a couple of months. Now to change these points into miles I have two major options, where the first is to go through the Chase travel portal, which gives a further x 1.5 bonus to the points that are used, this is a benefit of the Sapphire Reserve Card. The second option is to instead transfer the points to major airlines, with many of my favorite airlines being directly included (British Airways, Korean, Singapore, Southwest, United and Virgin airlines) and most of the other carriers can be used, as the three major airline alliances are represented by this group of airlines. Now it’s time to head off to Hawaii……

One caveat I would like to add is that you have to be good at handling credit cards before trying travel hacking. If you cannot pay off all your credit card debt right now, and instead you are carrying a balance month to month, it may be better to focus on paying off all this debt and stabilizing your financial situation first.