ParkMagic Podcast: Insider Tips To Plan Your Disneyland Adventure
Our goal is to help you simplify planning for your trip. We give you tactical tips to help you plan your next magical Disney Vacation to Disneyland and California Adventure.
We want to make you feel like you have a clear plan. In short, we want you to feel like you have a Disneyland expert in your pocket. Helping you plan your meals, rides, shows, and how to spend less time in line.
ParkMagic Podcast: Insider Tips To Plan Your Disneyland Adventure
Transforming Everyday Spending into Dream Vacations with Owen from the Points Partner
Curious about how people use credit card points to fly free to bring down the cost of their trips to Disneyland? Today's guest, Owen, delves deep into the process of accruing points through daily expenses and the strategy of choosing the card that aligns with your spending habits and wanderlust goals. Owen's insights are a springboard into not just saving on flights and hotels but also unlocking a lifestyle of savvy, financially sound luxury travel.
Right now, our tools are just for Disneyland, but we hope to expand to other parks soon. Disney changes policies, prices, and shows often. Be sure to visit our website at Parkmagic.com or Disneyland's Website for more information.
Park Magic is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Walt Disney World, Disneyland, or Disney Enterprises, Inc. Walt Disney World, Disneyland, and Mickey Mouse are all registered trademarks of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Any use of third-party names or trademarks is for identification purposes only and does not imply, nor is it intended to imply, any affiliation with, endorsement from, or business relationship with any third party, including with Walt Disney World, Disneyland, or Disney Enterprises, Inc.
I'm so excited for today's show because today we're going to be talking about something that might save you thousands of dollars on your trip to Disneyland and that you can do multiple times. I don't have a lot of gurus in my life, but Owen is my credit card points guru and he definitely helps me in a lot of different ways, but he's made it so I've been able to travel all over, including like a full, like 18 day trip to Costa Rica, lots and lots of trips to Disneyland and Disney World without having to pay for airfare or sometimes hotels and sometimes both. So, owen, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do for people?
Speaker 2:Good morning, good to hear you again. Sure yeah. For those that don't know me, my name is Owen. I am known as the points partner, and what I do is I help individuals maximize their credit card benefits, and I help people get as many credit card points and air miles as is mathematically possible for their lifestyle, and then I teach them how to use said points efficiently. In other words, I put people on beds on planes for free. That is what I do for a living. So basically, anything that stretches from credit card credit points, miles, beds on planes, airports, precheck, global entry, clear lounge access, you name it that's kind of my jam, yo.
Speaker 1:And you're really, really good at it. We definitely went from getting some credit card points and using it and having a little bit of freedom to. You know, we have a friend's wedding. We don't have to worry about how much that Chicago flight is going to be, and if you're going to Disneyland, the flights and hotels will be a big chunk of your overall expense. So if you can use points to get either a free hotel or your free flights, that might make it a trip that is not possible for you possible. Can we start with, like, what does somebody need to have, like either credit scores or income or spend, in order to even make what we're going to talk about work?
Speaker 2:Well, let's, let's, let's we can even start before that, which is your, your listeners, your crowd are trying to get to Disney and back, and the starting point is I can help them do that for free. That's, that's the most important thing. I think that a lot of people that aren't familiar with credit card points and air miles don't see the value in them. They had a bad experience, they weren't able to use them, they didn't think the value of them was very high, and I am here to tell them that that is not the case and to and to walk them through that process. Everyone, if you are spending a dollar on groceries every week, that is a free flight that you can take, and it's understanding how it works and how to derive the benefit from it. That's the important part. So I kind of want to grab the attention of everyone who's listening to this. You, whoever you are, you, as long as you're alive, you're eating. If you're eating, you're buying food, and if you're buying food, you're earning enough points that, if you use them correctly, you can fly to Disney and back for free. Not for free, for free, for free. Just to clarify, maybe there'll be a flea on the plane and, by the way, that flea wouldn't have paid for it either. Okay, so so that's the starting point.
Speaker 2:So what's the bare bones of it? What's the requirements? Well, the first of all, you've got to have decent credit, otherwise you can't get a credit card on my website, right? And what's decent credit? Credit is not really judged by the score. That's more for you and I to talk about. It's more about your credit profile and I'm not going to bore you to death with what that all means. But general rule of thumb, if you've got above a 700 in your credit score, you're probably in good shape to start getting good credit cards on my website, right? That's the starting point. Then the next thing is which credit cards should you get? There are a million to choose from. They all are good and they all are bad for you, depending on your situation. People always they love waving their credit cards in my face and saying is this a good credit card? There is no such thing as a good credit card or a bad credit card. What there is is a good credit card for you or a bad credit card for you, depending on how much money you spend every month, where you spend that money and, most importantly, what you're going to do with those points once you're given them free.
Speaker 2:Travel is a very generic term. Are you traveling alone? Are you traveling with family? Are you traveling in coach? Are you traveling in business class? Are you going one way? Do you have certain requirements? Are there certain terminals, airports? There's so many permutations and that's why it's kind of a minefield which I can kind of walk people through, all right. So let's presume that the said Joe blogs has got good credit. Where did they start? They start by. You can go to my website, thepointspartnercom. There's a bunch of free resources there. There's a free course that you can watch that will start to talk you down the path. And then, once you've started, picking the credit cards that are going to suit you best and the easiest place to start is where you spend the most money, which for most people is food and drink grocery stores, supermarkets, cafes, bars, coffee houses, delicatessants, food delivery. Is this sounding familiar, robin?
Speaker 1:Yes, all things that we use and I think that's one of the things that I learned in the course is depending on what you spend your money on. That helps you determine which card is going to get you the most points.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I love it. So let's just talk about. Let's give a couple of examples. Let's say we talk about food and drink. Now there are seven or eight different credit cards that will give you extra points for food and drink, and one of the best one, or certainly the most popular credit card on my website, is the American Express Personal Rose Gold card right, which gives you four times points on all your food and drink. So let's do a little bit of math so people can understand how much free travel you can get. Let's say the average family probably spends I'm going to guess 500 bucks a month on food in the supermarket and probably a thousand bucks a month on restaurants and some families it might be the other way around. But let's just call it 1500 bucks a month roughly on food and drink for a family of three or four.
Speaker 2:So, we're getting four times points. That's going to come out as 6000 points a month. There are 12 months a year. Six times 12 is 72, which means that 72,000 points just on food and drink. And food and drink tends to represent about 35% of what people spend on their credit cards. So let's kind of chuck in. We'll be very conservative and we'll say 150,000 points a year that you can achieve.
Speaker 2:What's 150,000 points actually worth in free travel? Well, if you don't know what you're doing and you just click on the travel button on your credit card company, 150,000 points will get you roughly 1500 bucks worth of free travel. And some people listening to this might be thinking, wow, that's great. And I'm here to tell you, wow, that's terrible. Because if you were to use those 150,000 points correctly, it could be worth about 12 or 13,000 dollars worth of free travel.
Speaker 2:By understanding what to do with the points, you can move them out of the credit card company and into airlines at certain times and all that kind of good stuff, right when it starts to increase the value of it.
Speaker 2:So when we start talking about, you know, trying to get free travel, even if you're a big family of five or six and you want to go to Disneyland five times this year. All of those times could be done for free, using the right credit card points at the right time. So I think that fundamentally, from a bird's eye perspective, is you can say, ok, if I've got good credit, I can go to thepointspartnercom, get some free videos, watch some stuff, and then I can pick a couple of credit cards on his website and now, theoretically, you can start to travel for free. It is that simple. It can also be a lot more involved and more complicated and, as I'm sure you'll talk about later on, robin, your experience coming through one of my processes and how you can actually take it to the next level and start getting beds on planes to Asia and Europe and Africa and wherever else. They're going to put a new Disneyland for us next.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, let's start with like. So let's say, somebody is like brand new. What are some ways that, if somebody is, you know, because we're putting our tickets on our credit card maybe, or we've got to purchase a bunch of different things for our trip If somebody just wanted to say, just get their airfare or just their hotel for Disneyland, what is like a one card that they could do if they don't want it, if they're not quite ready to dive in, but they want to use this trip to kind of test the wires? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So a couple of couple of great starting points, and I'll kind of do one for each of the major credit card companies. I'm a big fan of the American Express Rose Gold card just because it gives you so many points on a place where most people spend money, which is food and drink. Under Capital One, there's a couple of great options. There is the Capital One Venture card, which gives you two times points on everything, which, for somebody who doesn't spend so much on food, that's a great option if you're spending a lot on other things bills, online shopping, all sorts of stuff. So that's the Capital One Venture card. Now, for those of you who have a family and when you get to the airport, it drives you crazy that you have to then spend 150 bucks on coffees and food at the airport.
Speaker 2:Lounge Access is a massive part of travel that doesn't get spoken about enough. The Capital One Venture X, which is its big brother, gives your entire family lounge access at 1300 lounges. Now again, let's do the math. Robin, the average kid in an airport spends about $25 before their flight on snacks and drinks and food. Adults, it's 45. So that means every time you're a family of four, you're saving 100, 150 bucks every time you go to an airport if you have lounge access. So the Venture X comes with that lounge access, so you can save yourself a fortune by getting the right credit card. And the Venture X, yeah, has a big annual fee. It's 395 bucks, which most people it scares them off, but it comes with a $300 travel credit, so really it's 95 bucks. It also comes with free global entry and pre-check, which is worth 100 bucks. So when you start to look at, you know what is the value of having lounge access. Even if you went to Disneyland once in a year round trip, you'd be saving at least 300 bucks and you would have only paid 95 for the access to the lounge. So the Capital One Venture or the Venture X, if you want the lounge access, are a couple of great options as well.
Speaker 2:Citibank has got the Citibank Premier Card, which gives you three times points on all food and drink. Why would I mention that if I've already offered you one that has four? Well, the Citibank Premier Card is a Mastercard, not an American Express, which means more places take it, which can be a stumping point for some people. So there's so many credit cards and they all do different things. You know. Some of them give you free, clear, global entry pre-check. Some of them give you lounge access. Some of them give you travel credits. Some of them give you more points for spending money on food or drink or gas or travel marketing office supplies. All of these places are called what's known in the industry as bonus categories places that will get you extra points for your day-to-day spend, and there is no one credit card that can do all these things, and the more involved you become in it and the more you see the benefit of it, probably the more credit cards you'll get.
Speaker 2:Which brings us on to another contentious topic, which is some people think that having lots of credit cards is bad, and I'm here to tell you it's the opposite. If you are responsible with your credit cards, you can improve your credit score and the amount of available credit you have and the amount of benefits you're getting by having lots of credit cards. Your credit is a tool. You can do good with it and you can do bad with it. You can take a hammer and you can knock down my house with that hammer. You can also rob and take a hammer and build me a house right, and your credit is exactly the same. It's your responsibility will decide whether credit and credit cards is a good thing for you and you can leverage the opportunity and get free travel and all these benefits, or you can get yourself into debt and ruin your credit. So that comes down to the responsibility of the individual and obviously I wouldn't recommend anyone going on my website and getting a credit card if you don't know how to use one and how to pay one off.
Speaker 1:And I think that there can be a pitfall where the way that you get the big bulk of points in the beginning is by using what? The signup bonus. So you spend three or six, sometimes 12, depending on the card, in a period of three months.
Speaker 2:So let's explain what that is and why it is. So it's called a signup bonus. When you get a new credit card, if you complete the minimum spend, which is normally around $3,000 or $4,000 within three or four months, which is pretty achievable for most average people you then get a ton of points and that can range between 30 and 100,000 points just for getting the card. Why do they do that? They do that to buy you. They buy you as a customer. It costs them money. It costs them lots of money to buy you to use their credit card. Why do they want you to have their credit card? Massive misconception.
Speaker 2:People think that credit card companies make money by charging you interest when you don't pay on time. Well, they do, but that's not how they actually make their money. How they actually make their money is charging the place that you're swiping that credit card a percentage of how much money you're spending there. So let's use an example. Let's call it McDonald's. Mcdonald's will take your Capital One or your American Express credit card and they'll get charged by American Express or Capital One, two or 3% in order to use that credit card at their terminal. That's how they make their money, so they actually make more money from you spending and paying it back than they do from you spending and not paying it back, if that makes sense. And the interest the crazy interest that these credit cards have is actually there as a deterrent to make sure that you pay on time, not as a punishment when you don't right, and that's the massive misconception. They would love for you to pay on time. They just make money by charging the vendor itself. So that's the reason they give these sign up bonuses and they spend the vast majority of their marketing budget on the sign up bonuses, because that's what attracts us Fundamentally.
Speaker 2:I live off of those sign up bonuses. I do about $150,000 worth of free travel a year. I'm on, you know, $10,000 beds on planes to Europe, asia, south America, middle East Africa pretty much, you know, at least once a month. If you keep up with me on Instagram, you see it all. I do it all. I show people how I do it all and I don't pay for it. It can be done and, admittedly, I'm at the higher echelons or the most advanced level of this game and it is a game, let's not be under any misunderstanding, but everyone has to start somewhere and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how you started, because I believe when you first came across me you were relatively fresh to it, and now one could argue you're somewhat of a Jedi master yourself at this point.
Speaker 1:Before I go into that, I just want to talk about that responsibility thing, that the pitfall is you have to spend that amount of money and that. So sometimes people will buy things they might not normally have bought during that time. And you can. You don't want to go into debt. You want to spend the way that you're normally spending and pay things off and not carry a balance, because otherwise you're you're not getting everything for free anymore. Now you're losing the value because you're paying some interest.
Speaker 2:I can summarize what you just said in one sentence. Admittedly, I do this for a living. Treat your credit cards as if they are debit card. It is that simple. If you don't have the money, don't spend it. Don't look at it as a an opportunity to spend money that you don't have. Look at it as a different way of spending the money that you've already got to get a benefit. And the benefit is not just credit card points or air miles or cash back. There's also purchase protection. That is a huge part of this, especially if you're buying stuff like a trip to Disney, where potentially somebody could get sick, or you get robbed at the hotel room or some other drama that comes along with life. For example, my car didn't start this morning. And if you have a good credit card, it has this awesome purchase protection that you can phone and it's it's almost like an insurance policy where you don't have a deductible Right.
Speaker 2:And I always tell this famous story. I'm sure you've heard me tell this, rubin. I used to be in the photography business and I went and bought $20,000 worth of camera gear for one of my photographers and I drove back home and somebody had some scumbag, had followed me back from the store and broke into my car while I was in my house and took the whole lot five minutes after I bought it. I didn't phone my now ex-wife at the time. I didn't phone the police. I didn't phone my car insurance. I phoned American Express and within five minutes they put all $20,000 back on my credit card. I went straight back to the store. I wish I had an iPhone back then. I could have taken a photo of the sales guys jaw dropping when I went back in there and said, can I get the same again please? And that's kind of you know, a great example of how phenomenal credit cards and purchase protection can be.
Speaker 1:And same for rental car insurance. You know, on like the platinum you can get, you can save yourself the amount of the rental insurance because some of them do have that. But, like you said, I only spend things on credit cards If I can pay them off in cash every month. I don't buy them on a. Hopefully one day, someday, my life will turn out and I'll be able to pay this off, like I think it's really important. Credit card debt is really dangerous, so you'd want to be be really careful.
Speaker 1:But when we started out, we had a couple credit cards.
Speaker 1:I had American Express, platinum for our business and a couple of I think I had one or two credit cards that were for personal and we were doing alright, like I was getting some flights and things along those lines, but instead of earning I think I was earning maybe like 20 to 50,000 points a year, maybe.
Speaker 1:And then, after having Owen look at my spend now granted, I have a business, so my spend is higher, so I was able to move things along faster we basically went to getting a million points in the first year and that allowed us to take several trips to Disney, both on both coasts, and that 18 day trip to Costa Rica where I only paid for two nights of hotels. Everything else the flight, the hotel, the insurance on the rental car all of that was taken care of. So a lot of things that were taken care of there. It has really helped me be able to expand and before I was really just going into the portal and booking in the portal. So American Express would say, here by this flight and then you can get 35% back because you're a Platinum member, and I thought that was a really, really good deal. But then I learned how to transfer those out to different airlines to get the best value for my points and it made a big difference in how far I was able to travel and how often I was able to travel.
Speaker 2:You mentioned during that bit that you learned the difference between using the portal and transferring the points out and fundamentally that is a one line explanation of my entire career is teaching people the difference between just booking it through the way the credit cards company wants you to, versus doing it essentially manually and moving the points out into airlines and they become miles. But the value difference is so significant that it's impossible to ignore. In some scenarios you're talking 10, 12 times the value of your free travel by clicking two extra buttons and that the complex detail behind that is essentially the content that I share and people always it's so funny people book calls with me just for 10, 15 minutes to ask me a couple of questions and they always say well, what do you want me to do? And I tell people I don't mind what you do, it's the same content. You can invite me on your podcast. You can book me for a private session. You can have me do after dinner speaking at your company. You can watch my online course. You can have me find your flights or book your flights. You can do anything you want.
Speaker 2:My answer won't change. It's just a case of how do you want to consume that knowledge and information on this topic, and it's different for different people. Some people like to read, some people like to listen, some people like to do it in group therapy, other people like to do it over zoom. Some people want to come to my house and have me teach them in my living room. I don't mind. It's the same content however you consume it. But it's important to consume it because it will be the difference between free travel for life and luxury versus paying for it less often and sitting upright.
Speaker 1:So if somebody wanted to take the because, one thing that if you are already in the credit card points if you're looking to buy your Disneyland tickets, disneyland usually registers as entertainment. It codes as entertainment Our friends at undercover tourist because they're a travel agency. It usually does code as travel, which can be a higher multiplier depending on the card. But if somebody is looking to just pay for their airfare, what is one recommended path that they could use to kind of get started?
Speaker 2:Here would be. My recommendation is we're going to work backwards. They don't want to pay for their family of four from Ohio to Los Angeles. So I'm going to tell you how much we can save and the best way to do it. To buy tickets from Ohio round trip is probably going to be roughly 300 bucks ish per person. There's four people, so that's $1,200. So what we're trying to do is see how much of that $1,200 can we get rid of. So now let's talk about the cost of those tickets.
Speaker 2:In mileage, in the best case scenario it would be 12,000 points per person each way, so that's 24,000 points per person. So it's just under 100,000 points. Plus it would be $5.60 in taxes per person each way. So any way you slice it, you've got about 40 bucks 45 bucks of taxes. So I'm going to try and bring $1,200 down to as near to 45 bucks as I can. And it's so, so simple. You can go on my website, get yourself the Capital One Venture card. I don't think it even has an annual fee the first year and I think it's 95 bucks. The second year it comes with a 70,000, I think it's a 60 or 70,000 point sign up bonus. So even in the first month or two you would have 70,000 points. And if you're getting two times points on all of your spend, you would only need to spend about $10,000 before you would have enough points to take a family of four to Disneyland and back, and plus the 45 bucks in taxes. So in other words, if you were spending roughly let's call it $4,000 a month on all of you, you've put everything on the credit card every month. It would only be about three or four months before you would have enough for the entire family to go roundtrip For free to Disneyland and back. And where it gets interesting is that's like one credit card. If you were to get two credit cards immediately, you would have your free trip because the sign up bonus. If you were to get the American Express Rose Gold card as well, that's another 60,000 points. So you'd already have 135,000 points. In fact, you could already book your free trip to Disneyland for the whole family and be halfway on your way to your next roundtrip to Disneyland. That's how it can get.
Speaker 2:And then you end up with people like me. I have I think I have 57 credit cards right now. So imagine when you start scaling that up. You know I have millions of points, millions. I can go anywhere I want in the world, in any class, with anyone I want. Stay in any hotel, get picked up, fight it five. I just this week alone I booked a trip for me and my girlfriend to Egypt where we're going to the pyramids. We're going there six foot lay flat beds, we're staying at the four seasons. And we just booked for October next year we're going to the Maldives all business class beds. We're going to have the hut on the water, all that kind of stuff, these crazy bucket list trips that people pay tens of thousands of dollars for.
Speaker 2:I do it for free. Yes, I do spend a lot on my credit cards every month, but no more than I would do if I didn't have credit cards. It's still the same amount of money I'm spending every month. And people, people moan about annual fees. Every single annual fee of any credit card ever is easily justified if it's the right credit card for you. Yes, there's no point paying 500 bucks a year for a big boy credit card If you're not going to use any of the benefits of it. But if you're somebody who travels a lot and you can save 50 bucks every time you go to an airport on food and drink by having lounge access. All of these things pay for themselves Very, very quickly.
Speaker 2:I'm the most extreme case there is. I have 57 credit cards. I pay, I think, just under two and a half thousand dollars a year in annual fees of all these credit cards, but I'm doing $150,000 worth of free travel. So that means I'm paying less than 2% of the free travel that I'm getting in annual fees. So let's scale that down to somebody who's never done this before what's 2% of 1200 bucks and that's what you would be paying in annual fees. It's so, so worth it. The math is in our favor, not theirs.
Speaker 1:So let's talk. I think a lot of people say well, if I'm going to know I'm going to use it for airfare, I think I should probably just get an American Airlines or a Delta or a Marriott card. Can you talk about why these other cards have a better benefit most of the time, for most use cases, than going with the airline card?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are two types of credit cards. There are generic credit cards that collect credit card points and those credit card points can be used on any airline, any hotel, at any time, and on top of that they can be transferred into a bunch of different hotels and frequent flyer programs of airlines and become airlines or hotel points. And those are predominantly the big blue bank that rhymes with face Capital, one city bank and American Express. And then you have what's called co branded credit cards. That's when a credit card gets together with either an airline or a hotel group, you earn your benefit on that credit card in the local currency, which will be either a public inspection, a public ticket, a public French and a public guests on the island. It takes the pretty neat one. If they fly a lot on JetBlue, that, oh, I should get the JetBlue credit card. No, you shouldn't, it's not meant for you.
Speaker 2:These air miles that you're collecting on these credit cards are not as valuable as generic credit card points that can turn into those, in this example, jetblue air miles. But they can also turn into Bombay points, they can also turn into Air France, they can turn into British Airways, they can turn in to whatever you want them to. So let's talk a bit about the value. Your average air mile is worth 1.1 cent each. Your average credit card point used badly is worth more than that, but in the best case scenario is worth 8 cents each. So credit card points are worth way, way more than air miles, and you can do more with them. So my recommendation, as a general rule of thumb, is to be loyal to the credit card companies, not to airlines. You can still enjoy airlines. You can still fly the majority of your time or even have status and all that good stuff with an airline, but you should. The majority of your organic monthly spend should be going to the credit card companies, not to the airlines and that also gives you more flexibility.
Speaker 1:So let's say you want to fly from Ohio and you know that you want to try to avoid LAX because oh, one lives there. Like I tell people not even people who live near LAX like going to LAX exactly, exactly so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. You don't want to pin yourself into one airline. If you've got a delta credit card and you can only fly on delta and delta doesn't have anything good the day that you want to go, you're screwed, you're going to end up buying tickets, whereas if you have generic credit card points, you can move them to a different airline and you have lots more availability, a lot more flexibility, a lot more availability and thus a better option of pricing. So, on the day that you know that I talked about it being 12,000 air miles each way from Ohio, there's somebody listening to this who lives in Ohio, who had a look today and they're going to go.
Speaker 2:No, it's not. It was 45,000 points. That's because you are only looking on American Airlines, where they've already sold all their tickets. If you had every single air mile, you'd be able to find one of them that was doing it for 12. So having generic credit card points that you can transfer to any airline is the ticket to cheaper, free travel. The assumption is you're already, you're not paying for it, but I don't want to even pay.
Speaker 1:I want to pay the least amount of air miles on top of the least amount of money and because most of you are going to want to try to fly into sna santa anna airport or long beach airport using delta as an example. Delta has very, very few flights into those airports, so having that flexibility, especially with disneyland, is helpful. And then sometimes the credit cards will offer a bonus. They'll say, hey, if you transfer your points to myriad, we'll give you 40, a 40% bonus. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:absolutely so. There's two bonuses that make a huge difference in the credit card points world. The first one we've already spoken about, which is a sign-up bonus. When you get a credit card, they give you tons of points. The other bonus and this is really separates the amateurs from the ninjas is the transfer bonus, and every month different credit card companies offer different percentage bonuses when you move credit card points to an airline or hotel group.
Speaker 2:I shall give you an example right now. If you've got I think it's american express points, you can move them to virgin atlantic and you'll get 30 more air miles will show up than points than you transfer. So let's say you transfer 100 000 points, 130 000 air miles will show up, and somebody's probably thinking, oh, that's cool, but I don't want to fly on virgin atlantic. They don't fly to disneyland or disneyworld. Well, actually they do. So let me explain to you how it works.
Speaker 2:Each airline is a part of an alliance. Alliances are groups of of airlines. There are three major alliances there is sky team, there is Star Alliance and there is one world, and pretty much every single airline you've ever flown on is a part of one of those three and you can book any one of those airlines from any one of those members. So Virgin Atlantic is a part of Sky Team. Who else is a part of Sky Team? Well, approximately a third of all the airlines out there, but included, but not limited, to, delta, which means you can book Delta flights using Virgin Atlantic air miles.
Speaker 2:And here's the crazy part. Here's the bit that blows people's minds it's nine times out of ten cheaper to book the same seat on the same Delta plane through Virgin Atlantic than it is to do on Delta's website, and that's not even unique. It is exactly the same for American Airlines and British Airways and it is exactly the same for United Airlines and Air Canada. It is cheaper to book through partners than it is with them directly, and the reason it's cheaper to book through their partners than it is with them directly is the only people that have watched my online course or listened to me speak on a podcast or TV Know that that's the case, and therefore everyone goes to the big brand the Delta, united or American. So they hike the prices up.
Speaker 1:And let's talk about somebody who might say well, you know, I think my hotel is actually going to be more expensive. You know, I'm only flying from Arizona. When is it better to save your points and only use it for airfare, and when is it worthwhile to use it for hotel?
Speaker 2:So we spoke briefly about the value of these points and we said that airline miles are worth less than credit card points. Well, there's one thing worth less than air miles, and that's hotel points. In fact, excluding Hyatt, all of them are worth roughly 0.4 or 0.5 cents. Each. Hyatt can be worth considerably more. Their programs are a bit more beneficial, but any way you slice it, your points are best used for flights and then hotels. So how do you distinguish the two? Well, here's the simple rule of thumb, which is, once you finish booking all of your flights for the year, whatever you've got left over, in theory you can use that for hotels, but to do it the other way round would be mathematically inefficient. If you don't have any flights to book, then and you live within driving distance of Disney, then absolutely use your points for hotels. But if you've got flying to do, you will end up it will end up costing you more money if you try and get the hotels free and not the flights. It is literally that simple.
Speaker 1:And if somebody was looking to, if you had to tell somebody, if they were going to try this for the first time, what are some things that you would say like these are the biggest or have we already covered them the biggest mistakes that people make.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the number one mistake that people make is they don't know how to use the points. They just go into the portal of or the travel button within American Express or Capital One and they click travel and then they just use all their points. You're throwing them away doing that. It's worth the investment of watching an online course or doing a session with me or learning another way, because once you've learned it once it's like riding a bike you then have that skill set and you can you can increase the value of your points tenfold. That, fundamentally is, is the number one mistake is learning how to use your points. The second mistake is when you do start looking for your mileage tickets is people search roundtrip and you don't want to do that. You want to search one way, always going to find more availability and better pricing searching one way and booking two one ways than you will be as a roundtrip, and it seems counterintuitive because we all grow up being told always book a roundtrip, it's cheaper, and it is cheaper if you're paying for your ticket but we're not paying for it. This is a mileage ticket. It's not the same rules, it's not the same availability, it's not the same pricing and it actually is more beneficial to book two one ways. Even if I found something as a roundtrip, I would still book it as two one ways. And the reason I would do that is if you book a roundtrip and while you're on that trip you need to make that trip shorter or longer, and you phone, for example, delta and say, hey, I'm sick, I need to stay here an extra couple of days. Now They've got you by the balls. You're in the middle of your trip. They're going to charge you five, six, seven hundred bucks per person to change those flights. But if you book two one ways, technically you haven't started what is your return trip. But it's actually a one way and the way they look at it is they don't want to lose your business. You haven't even started your trip yet and they let you change it for the phone fee, which is 50 bucks. We find ourselves in this curious position where it makes more sense to collect credit card points but turn them into air miles and we should book two one ways which could be booked as a roundtrip. But that is the math behind what I have discovered over the years and I teach and I preach and I help others do it it makes a massive difference, a massive, massive difference.
Speaker 2:I'll give you another thing, and you touched on it briefly before. You were talking about which airports to fly into and how do I know which, who flies where and what, and all that kind of good stuff. Here's a great tip. People love this one. Go to flightconnectionscom it's a free website that won't cost you a penny FlightConnectionscom, and put in the name of the airport that you're trying to fly to or you're flying from, and it will show you exactly what airlines, on what days, fly where to and from that place. So let's say you want to fly into Orange County. You can put in Orange County and see if there's a flight that comes from your airport, rather than going to each individual website and seeing if they've got a flight for you. You can you can work out the flight path yourself, and that's another way of kind of cheating the system, and you can do some really cool stuff at the advanced level of this game. So, for example, there's a feature on that website where you can just draw a circle and it shows you all the airports within that area.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to Sardinia, which is an island off of Italy, this summer and there was no flights from Cairo, where we're going to be in Egypt to Sardinia. So I drew a map around the whole island and it turns out there's not one airport there. There's one airport that everyone's heard of, there's also six tiny ones, and they fly to lots of places, included but not limited to Athens, of which I could find a cheap flight from Cairo to Athens. So now I'm going to go from Cairo to Athens, athens to Sardinia, without having to do 14 extra stops, which is what Google Flights wanted me to do, and that's where this stuff kind of gets a bit more involved. But it's good to hear these examples so you can understand what can be done.
Speaker 1:And one thing you had that I really struggled with in the beginning was I was like I fly American, I fly American, but how can I? You don't have to worry about the same benefits of loyalty because you can get that upgrade to get you the earlier boarding, because you're able to use that on the point, so you don't need to be loyal to just one airline Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's like music to my ears, robin. So yeah, absolutely A lot of people struggle when they hear me say points are better than airmars because they love their status. Let me just tell you status is a joke. You are left at the gate sweating, staring at a board, praying that somebody felt ill, and you're going to get an upgrade because of your status. When you do it my way, you'll have more points than you will airmars and you can book yourself in business class six months earlier and probably for the same amount that you were paying to go and coach anyway.
Speaker 2:So there's different ways of skinning a cat and the way that they want you to, which is with the status where you're tied to them and all this stuff. It just doesn't make sense in today's day and age. It makes much more sense to get a boatload of points and bully your way into beds. I walk past you know million marlers on every flight and I go and sit in business class and I paid less than them and I didn't have to sweat at the gate. I booked mine six months ago.
Speaker 1:And then you still get the free luggage, and all of that because you're booking the higher value.
Speaker 2:Yeah, once you're business class, you get the lounge, you get the luggage, you get everything.
Speaker 1:So it gives you more options. And for every airline there are cities that are a pain to get to. You know, from Phoenix Delta just doesn't work well for me, you know, but they're you know, but my friends live in Florida. They can't really imagine flying, and you know, from another, a different airline, because Delta works really great from Atlanta and a couple other places. So having that flexibility will give you the ability to go anywhere you want to avoid layovers. What are your thoughts on, like when is a layover worth it or when should you, you know, pay the extra in points or dollars to avoid a layover?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that if you're not an experienced traveler, the layover is torturous because you're hanging out in an airport. It's uncomfortable, it's smelly, it's expensive. If you're a regular traveler, the likelihood is you have a premium credit card and thus you've got lounge access, free food and drinks. When you do travel luxury and there's no cost involved it, I do it all for free, but when you do it in luxury, it's a pleasure, a travel day, not a burden.
Speaker 2:Most people hate traveling because it costs them a fortune. They have to get up early in the morning cost them money. When they get to the airport, they have to stand in a long line. They have to sit uncomfortably on a plane, get served crap food and then pay, you know, for an expensive Uber. The other end that sounds horrible Mine is I get up. When I get up because I can get on the most expensive flight, which is later in the day, I get a free ride to the airport. There's no lines for me because I have global entry, pre check and clear all free on my credit cards. So I walk through I think I'm sitting in the lounge, get drunk and stuff my face with food and then I get onto a bed on a plane where I get treated like an absolute king and brought five star cuisine. I have a nice sleep. I wake up in a different country and somebody picks me up at the airport for free, on a credit on one of my credit cards. The whole thing is free and luxurious. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 2:I love going to. It's cheaper for me to fly to Asia than it is for me to drive five minutes down the road to McDonald's and get and get lunch. Now it's a strange scenario, but it's absolutely true. If I get in my car, it's going to cost me why I have an electric car, so it won't cost me any gas, but it will cost me, let's say, 20 cents in electricity. It's going to cost me $2 to park on the street and it's going to cost me $7 to buy a McDonald's. If I go to the airport, it's free. On an Uber credit, I all my food and drink is covered. The flight is free. It's it's cheaper for me to go to Asia to have sushi than it is for me to drive down the road to McDonald's.
Speaker 1:It's a pretty unique place to be, but the credit card points can be really, really helpful. They can I mean they can take your trip from a $5,000 or $10,000 trip down to you know, sometimes half or less, depending on where you're flying from. So it can be really valuable and can even get you to some of the Disney's, like Tokyo, shanghai. You know all of those Disney's as well. If, if you're a big Disney person so I know that you said you had a hard stop on want to be respectful of your time Can you tell people a little bit about you? Know how they can reach you and if somebody's like I have points but I don't know how to book them, how they can use you to book their tickets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. The starting point if anyone who wants to find me is the points partnercom. That's my website and I'm on all social media platforms at the points partner Instagram is probably your best port of call, so I'll just talk you through. The first thing I would say anyone who's interested in this stuff, just go on my website, watch the. There's a free version of my online course which is called the fly free Academy. Go watch the free course. It's about an hour and a half of free stuff there, does not cost you a penny. And then, if you do want to watch the full course which Robin has watched and perhaps she can speak on that in a minute I'll give you guys a discount code. Just use the discount code. I G is an Instagram live, ig live and that'll get you a chunk off the full course.
Speaker 2:Everything I do is completely guaranteed money back guarantee. You're not happy with anything, ever, anywhere, with anything I've ever said or done, I'll happily give you back your time, money or anything else you are owed. It doesn't happen. I am obsessed with what I do for a living. It is not just my business, it is my life, my hobby, my passion, it is my everything. So that's the online course. If you want to help booking a flight on my, on my website, there's a form you just fill out. Take your 10 seconds to fill out what points have you got, where you're going, how many people, what class, what dates, and I will or me or someone of my team will come back to you with options. You pick them, will book them and you pay us for the service of doing that. All the prices are on the form so you can see what it will cost you. It is a phenomenal deal If you are traveling international.
Speaker 2:For domestic, I wouldn't recommend it. You should do that stuff yourself. So if you want beds on planes for Europe or Asia or Africa for next summer, where the people to come to, if you've got a ton of points and you don't know how to use them outside of that, there's a couple of other services that I offer. I do a white glove consultation, which is better than I thought. I do a white glove consultation, which is basically an hour and a half to two hours with me on zoom, which will be bespoke made to your situation.
Speaker 2:I recommend that for high spenders or business owners, so if you're spending more than seven or $8000 a month or you own a business that spends more than that every month on credit cards. That's probably your best starting point, but there's also everything else under the sun. So if you just want help choosing a credit card, you can book a call with me for 15 minutes and have a bunch of questions that you can ask me. That tends to be a lot of the place that people start. They want to just kind of grab me on a zoom call for 15 minutes and bend my ear on their situation, so maybe that makes sense and I can kind of guide you from that point as to where to take it from there. But those are predominantly the offerings that I have. I'd actually, robin, I'd love for you, just before we we wrap, I'd love for you to tell people how you found me and what you've done with, or of my process and kind of where you're at now.
Speaker 1:I don't remember how I found you. I think I must have seen somebody post something or I must have seen a Tik Tok or something. I saw something and I reached out to you and then, because we have a business outside of what we do at Park Magic, we did the white glove thing first and that really helped because we were able to really change how many points we were able to do. I took the course afterwards and I recommended that to a bunch of friends because it really did lay it out like okay, that makes sense. And he goes.
Speaker 1:There's a section where he goes through like each credit card and why you know what's the right use case for each credit card, and that really did help some of my friends identify the best place to start. And then he has kind of this inner circle that we do that. You know there's a zoom call where people can ask questions and he has guests on that talk about specific topics. So I found all of them helpful. I think in the beginning I was just, you know, I came actually from more of like a Dave Ramsey all the way over here. So you know, I think that I was very overwhelmed in the beginning of it. So it definitely helped to have someone on one time, but I think that even if I hadn't done that, the course would have gotten me most of the way there.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. I was funny, interesting, because some people there's no real sort of starting point or finishing point.
Speaker 2:Yeah because the inner circle, which I forgot to mention before, which is my private community, we do two zoom calls a month. That's just kind of ongoing in the background. People come and they go and you know that doesn't necessarily pay relevance to people that do white glove consultations or watch the course or any of these things. So there's no real starting point. I would say go to my website, fish around, pick something. Either way I'll be here and I will get you on your beds on planes for free. That's what I do.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to thank you for your time here. I know you're busy. I know you're probably getting ready to go someplace else, so thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing about credit card points and how to use them.
Speaker 2:My absolute pleasure Anytime. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Just a reminder make sure you use those credit cards responsibly. It can be easy to get yourself into a mess you can't get yourself out of, so only do this if you know you have enough discipline to do it responsibly and keep your your, the well being of your family and financial future safe.