My Fave List App, a Trip Planning Tool, + 10X Chase UR?!?!

Rakuten Referral Link: www.rakuten.com/r/RAYAPI6?eeid=28187

Chase Sapphire Reserve 150K REFERRAL LINK!

Capital One Shopping Referral Link (turns out I do have one!!!!)

We share the exact tools we use to plan trips faster, keep packing under control, and squeeze more value out of everyday spending. We also break down a 10x Chase Ultimate Rewards play using Paze, including where it works, how to stack it, and what to troubleshoot if your accounts get messy. 
• noting the elevated Chase Sapphire Reserve offer and why we still use it heavily 
• using Rakuten to earn cash back or points on regular online shopping 
• testing Capital One Shopping for strong cash back offers 
• building trip idea lists and reusable packing checklists in Google Keep 
• planning itineraries with Trava linked to TripIt for confirmation email imports 
• earning 10x Chase Ultimate Rewards with Paze on eligible retailers 
• maximizing the promo with Newegg gift cards including Airbnb 
• stacking card category multipliers on top of the 10x where it applies 
• fixing Paze issues by separating emails and phone numbers across accounts 
If you have questions, find me on Instagram and we will catch you on the next episode. 

Transcript

Quick Updates And What’s Ahead

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's a quick and dirty episode today, but I've got a new trip planning tool, a handy dandy list tool that I use, and how we're earning 10x Chase Ultimate Rewards for the rest of the year. So listen in. Hi, I'm Raya.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

And I'm Dwayne.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

And we are your hosts of the Travel Party of Five podcast, where we share how we travel as a family of five around the world.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

We will also share how we use points and miles to travel as affordably as possible, and sometimes even completely free.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

So if you're wanting to travel more with your family, but you're not sure how, we'd love for you to listen in.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

So welcome to our podcast where we hope you learn a thing or two to get you closer to your next trip.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

I am your host. I am solo today, and this is probably going to be a bit of a shorter episode. So apologies if you like the longer ones, but I really just had a couple of things I wanted to chat about today. And some of these might be a little bit basic, but I think a couple of them might be helpful. So these are just a couple of tools that I've been using to either earn extra points or plan our trips or keep track of, you know, packing lists and trip like ideas and that sort of thing. So

Chase Sapphire Reserve Offer Notes

SPEAKER_00 1:43

a couple of housekeeping items before we jump into those. First of all, the Chase Sapphire Reserve offer is still elevated. So you can earn up to 150,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points. If you have never held that card, and if you hold a Chase Sapphire preferred card, you should still be able to get the reserve. So now you can hold both. And so I am going to put a link to our referral link in the show notes. If you have not already gotten that card, I would highly recommend it. I it's one of our most used cards in our wallet, so much so that we have two of them. So Dwayne and I each have one. And the annual fee is still pretty steep. It's $800, but I think sorry, $795. But all of the benefits that come with it and the credits that help offset that fee, if you can use them, then I think it's a fantastic card. It is what we use for all of our like primary rental car insurance when we're booking rental cars. I make sure to pay all of our taxes and fees on flights with this card as well because that activates the travel insurance benefits on the card. So if you have not had that card and the annual fee doesn't scare you off, I would highly recommend it. And again, I'll put our referral note, uh referral link in the show notes. Um, I just that's a fantastic offer. I wish that I could apply for it again, but we both already have it. So oh well. Okay.

Rakuten And Capital One Shopping

SPEAKER_00 3:08

The other thing I wanted to share about is a bunch of people have been asking me about Rackiton lately. And I'm not sure why, because I feel like if you've been in this hobby long enough, surely you are using Rackiton. But I thought, you know what, maybe not. So um Rackettin is a shopping portal that can earn either cashback or built points or American Express membership rewards if you hold either of those cards. So if you can basically decide how you want to earn your cash back, and that cash back comes every quarter. So I've earned like almost $3,000, I think, in the last few years utilizing Rackiton just for regular purchases. And of course, that's the cash value. I actually choose currently to get those that cash back in built points. Previously to built being an option, I had it as American Express membership rewards. So, you know, however you want to work it, it's I think a great option just to add into your regular routine of online shopping and earn a little bit extra back. The other one I've been utilizing on that note is Capital One Shopping. So not Capital One offers, which is points, although I do use that as well. But Capital One Shopping has been giving me some really good cashback offers lately. Matter of fact, I just used one this morning to buy a Kate Spade purse. So it wasn't a ton back. I think it was like 16% or something, but Capital One Shopping is um another one that I've been getting into a lot. I don't know if I have a shopping link, a Capital One shopping link, but I do have a Rackettin referral link, and I'll also put that in the show notes. So I wanted to get that out of the way because for some reason, I don't know if they've been doing like an advertising push or something, but I've been getting a lot of questions about Rackton. So, okay, now that that is out of the way, uh, let's jump into the the main topics

Google Keep For Trips And Packing

SPEAKER_00 4:59

today. So I was chatting with some friends the other day and they were talking about you know making lists and how do you keep track of your to-dos and all this, all these things. And someone recommended Google Keep. And I actually have been using Google Keep for years. I just I don't really use it as a to-do list app, although it certainly could be used for that and maybe even is meant to. But I thought, you know what, what I use it for is two things. One, I keep a like a list or a note little note page basically of each trip that we want to take. And every time I see someone mention something that I think might sound fun for us to do, or a restaurant to visit while we're there, or anything like that, I add it to that document. And that's where I also start to plan out, like at the very beginning stages of a trip, I'm like, okay, we're gonna do four nights here and three nights here, and blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's where I start to kind of begin the outline, and then it all it just lives there as like a almost like a sticky note. The other thing I use it for is packing lists. So I have a general packing list of all the stuff that we generally bring on a trip. And obviously it's gonna vary a little bit depending on where we're going and weather and all that sort of thing, but I do kind of have like a winter section and a summer section, and then everything else that's the same no matter what. That way I don't have to go through every single time and think, okay, what do I need to bring? What do I need to bring? I just I already have the list and I add and take away as needed, but there are check boxes. So when I'm focusing or on packing for a certain trip, I just go through and check, check, check, check, check all the things that I've, you know, packed or whatever. And then when that trip is over, I just uncheck them all and have the same list ready to go for the next trip. So I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. And that saves me not only a lot of time, but also a lot of like mental brain space. And as busy moms, we all need it. The other thing that I use Google Keep for that is completely unrelated to travel is it holds a list of all of our restaurant, uh not restaurant, recipes that I typically make in rotation for dinner. And when I make a new one that everyone really likes, I add the link into the bottom. So the top of the document is basically a like a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And I just write the meals for the week next to each day. Then I do my shopping list for whatever I need to make those meals and whatever else we happen to need. And then at the bottom is just a list of recipe links, or if I, if it's not a recipe that I or I'm sorry, if it's not a meal that I need a recipe for, then I might just write the name of, you know, the recipe, like macaroni and cheese or whatever. But that way when I'm meal planning for the week, I can look at the bottom and just I don't have to constantly remember, okay, what do we like to eat? You know, again, I'm not reinventing the wheel, I'm just pulling from a repository of recipes and meals that I know we already like. So Google Keep. If you're not using it already, I think it's a fantastic tool. And I totally recommend in terms of keeping yourself organized for you know trips that you'd either planning to take or would like to take, or any other lists that you may need. If that was super basic for you, also sorry. But I'm always looking for productivity hacks, and I thought if people don't know about this, then they should.

Trava And TripIt For Itineraries

SPEAKER_00 8:28

The second thing that I want to talk about is an episode, no, not an episode, a software that I've been using for trip planning. So I'm always on the hunt for a good trip planning tool. I haven't quite found the right one, and I would still say that even despite the one I'm about to share with you, I still feel like there's a tool that could be better. And matter of fact, I met someone at the award travel meetup who was working on one, and I am very excited to kind of see where that goes. I played around with it a little bit and it was, I needed it to be quicker for the phase that I was in, which was like, I have to get this trip planned now, and I like don't have time to spend like troubleshooting things. Um, but I'm very excited for the potential of that. But in the meantime, I was like, I need something that I can literally plan a trip that's gonna happen in a month. And so I found Trava, T-R-A-V-A-A, and Trava links with Tripit. And you might be thinking, why don't you just use Tripit? Sure. Trip it is a trip planning app. You can use it. I personally don't really like it. I find it clunky and weird, and it doesn't work for my brain. The other ones that I've tried are like Wanderlog, which I also don't like. Like I do, I don't know if it's too much to ask, but I just want an app that can track all of our confirmations for flights, hotels, whatever. And I don't care if it uses AI or whatever, but can compile that information into a basic itinerary of like, okay, you arrive on the first and you spend your first four days here in this hotel, and then you take a train. Your train leaves at 11 a.m. Your train goes to this other city, and then you spend five days there. And then I want to be able to drop in activities that we're doing with the address of where we have to meet the guide, maybe like the confirmation email, and like really not difficult things, but yet none of these softwares seem to quite do it how I want it. So, anyways, the one that I use to plan our London Scotland trip is called Trava. It links with Tripit, and I do recommend linking it because it will pull in all of the confirmation emails that Trippit receives, and then it can start to populate your itinerary for you. So it does do that piece that I was mentioning where it pulls in, like, okay, your hotel stays and your flights and all of that. It does that. So that's the the piece I think Tripit does really well is you either can have it scrape your email for those things, or you can forward your confirmation emails to a specific email and it will populate in your trip. So that's the piece of Trippet that I think works really well. And that is the piece and the reason why I linked Trava to Tripit. I do have the Tripit professional version. I don't know that you need it for this, but that I have it. So I don't know. So Trava, there's a free version and a paid version. The free version only allows you to plan one trip. And so I do have the paid version because I'm planning three trips right now. But here's what I like about it. And you're gonna because this isn't video, I'm gonna do my best to explain it. And then I'll I'll link it, either link it in the show notes or you can just Google it. But essentially it shows a calendar. And on the calendar on one side, so on the right hand side, it shows the I'm sorry, let me back up. It shows a calendar, but instead of going from left to right, it goes top to bottom. So for example, if I'm going on a trip and I'm leaving on July 4th, okay, the July 4th is my date at the top, then the the the row underneath it is July 5th, July 6th, all the all the way down to whenever we go home, right? And so it's it's instead of a left to right, it's a top to bottom calendar. That took me a second to get used to, but now that I have it, it's totally fine. And then on the right hand side, there is a section for where you will stay during those dates. So for example, if July 4th through the 7th, you're gonna stay at a hyatt in uh New Hampshire, then it's gonna block off those three days for that hyat. And then if you go to, you know, Rhode Island, then starting on the 7th, it'll show on the right hand side a second multi-different colored block for okay, these, you know, these are the four days that you're in Rhode Island and so on. And then in the middle between the date and the right hand side is your days, right? So from seven or eight o'clock in the morning until eight or nine o'clock at night, you have these blocks that you can just drag and drop. And each block has the ability to have like a website link in it. So for example, we uh we're gonna go to the Tower of London and I have already purchased tickets for all seven of us when we go to London. So on the date that we're going to the Tower of London, I have from like 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. blocked off for the Tower of London. Then I can choose to mark things either flexible, uh reserved, or paid. And I've already bought the tickets, so I marked it paid. And if I click into that little section, I have the link to the Tower of London website if I want to go there. And then so on and so forth. So I have on here, like we're gonna be driving into the Scottish Highlands, and so we have to pick up our rental car. So it's like I have the time we have to pick up our rental car. Then I have, you know, it's a two or three hour drive to get to our first Airbnb. So I have, you know, three, three or so hours blocked off for that. Obviously, there's free time in there as well, but it enables me to look at the whole trip like easily laid out in a visual format. And I really, really like that. There are things that are a little clunky, like it always, whenever I click in, it always tries to add another box, and I don't always want it to add a box. And so there's a few things that you just have to play around with. But overall, um, I would use it again. I will use it again to plan our Switzerland trip. Matter of fact, I've already started that. And um yeah, so I think if you're looking for a good trip planning and organizing software, I think this will do for now. And then I'm always looking for something better, but I really like this. And the other thing that's really good if you are traveling with a group, or if you're like me and you like to give, you know, your immediate family like an itinerary, this will actually generate a website that you can and you can make it public or private, right? So private, it would only be people with the link can access it, or you can share your trip for other people to, I guess, uh, I don't know, uh, look at your itinerary, I guess is how that would work. But I can generate a website and then I can send it to my mom or my sister who are coming on this trip, but I've planned it all, so they don't really know what's going on. So I can say, hey, here's our itinerary. Let me know if you have any questions. What do you think? You know? And so I really thought that was fantastic as well. So trava, t-ra-a-va.com is the website for that. Again, I did link it with my Tripit, and I would recommend doing that because it pulls in all of the confirmation emails and stuff like Tripit does. So that is my current trip planning method. And then

Paze 10x Chase Points Strategy

SPEAKER_00 16:11

the third thing that I want to talk about actually relates to me mentioning the Chase Sapphire Reserve card in the beginning because there is a way to earn 10x ultimate rewards points for the rest of the year. And if you are like me and you transferred all of your chase points to Hyatt before the devaluation, then you're gonna want to listen in to this. So Pays, P-A-Z-E, rolled out kind of quietly a 10x Chase Ultimate Rewards promotion on up to $1,500 in purchases per month when you check out at eligible retailers using Pays. So, first of all, think of Pays as like a PayPal or a uh uh shop, right? Like when I think that's another similar one. PayPal is probably the most well known, or Apple Pay or Google Pay, also, those are also well known. It's very similar to that. So when you're at one of these retailers and you go to pay, instead of at putting in your credit card information, you click pay with pays and you go through pays, the same way you would go through PayPal or whatever. Now, this isn't on all Chase cards, so it is on the Chase Sapphire cards, so the preferred and the reserve. It is on the Chase Freedom cards, so Freedom Flex, Freedom Unlimited, the Plain Legacy Freedom, and then it's also on some co-branded cards, mainly the United ones, it seems to be. However, it is not on the United Business card, which is the only United card that we have, and so that was disappointing. Although it's not that disappointing because it earns the United card earns 10x United Miles, which I guess is fine if you live in a United hub, but we do not. So I don't have a big need for United Miles, whereas I do very much need Chase Ultimate Rewards points. So I we have three cards that have this offer. So that means we could earn up to 15,000 points per card per month through the end of 2026, which is a total of 45,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points every single month, which is fantastic. So that is another reason that if you are on the fence about the Chase Sapphire Reserve and you don't have it yet, you 1000% should apply because in addition to the sign-up bonus, you will also unlock the 10x on $1,500 in spend using Pays. So let's talk about the retailers that you can earn this through because it's not just using Pays anywhere. So a couple of the main retailers are United, ironically. So that's maybe why it's on the United card. It is Dunkin' Donuts, Domino's, Whataburger, and Wendy's. Those are like the dining ones. Stubhub, GNZ, Sephora. There's one more. Oh, Teleflora, I think is the other one. Um Fanatics is one. And then the big one that I think people are excited about is New Egg. So New Egg is like an electronics kind of retailer. But the thing about New Egg is they sell a few things that, and this is why people are excited. They sell gift cards. Sometimes they're discounted, sometimes they're not. But I'm gonna tell you a few ways that I'm planning to do my best to maximize the fifth, uh no, the 10x promotion on on all of our cards if I can. So we are staying at a few Airbnbs in Scotland in the next month, and so I still I've paid the deposit on them, but I still have like the 50% or whatever of the balance to pay. And it's not cheap. So I'm going to go through New Egg to buy Airbnb gift cards. They're gonna be full price gift cards, which is fine, but I'm gonna earn 10x on that spend. And I think I should be able to max out one card for the month just doing that alone, because we definitely owe over $1,500. On top of that, if you have it's graduation season. So if you have graduations or birthdays or Christmas or any kind of holiday coming up, and you're planning to buy gift cards for that person as a gift, I would recommend buying them through New Egg so that you can earn 10x. This one is not exciting to me, but if you live near a shop right, that is another retailer that I'm not sure I mentioned. But so you can order groceries for pickup through them if you live near one and also pay with pays. And then you would earn, you would actually earn 13x on that because you would earn 10x for the promotion. But the Chase Sapphire cards, if you're using those, also earn 3x on online grocery. So then you would actually earn the 10x plus the 3x. So I guess that's exciting too. If you have to pay cash for an upcoming flight or two or three, consider flying on United Airlines because you would earn, I think, 14x on that because if you were paying with the Chase Sapphire Reserve, or 12x if you were paying with a preferred, because it would be 10x for the pays promotion, and then the reserve earns 4x on airline bookings direct, and the preferred earns 2x on uh direct bookings with the airline. So any bonus multiplier that would be on the card already is going to also be earned in addition to the 10x, which is also really exciting. Stub. So the the three main uses I see for us personally for this is new egg, specifically the Airbnb gift cards. And then I'm not sure what other gift cards I might get from there, if if any, but that's what I'm planning to max out the June promotion, is at least. On one card is Airbnb gift cards. I'm going to do a Sephora order for myself and I'm going to earn 10X because I'm going to pay with uh pays. And then we still have to use up our Stub Hub credits. Dwayne almost had me convinced that we had already used them because he did go to a basketball game that we bought tickets for earlier in the year, but that was actually me using the 2025 Stub Hub credits. So we do still have two Stub Hub credits to use. So I'm going to try to finagle away to also pay with Pays so that we can stack that with our Sapphire Reserve biannual credits. Now a couple things to note about Pays. First of all, this isn't like a Chase offer where you have to go in and add it to your card. It should automatically be on your card as a benefit if you have any of the cards I listed before. So Chase Sapphire Reserve or Preferred, Chase Freedoms, or basically any of the consumer united cards, not the United Business. But again, remember the United cards are only going to earn United Miles. So if you want Chase Ultimate Rewards, you want to do the Sapphires and the Freedoms. Now, I have a few friends that have had some issues getting their pays to either link correctly or to show all their cards. And I'm not a hundred percent sure how a pay is like decided. Like I don't know. When I first signed in, the only two cards I could see were my Capital One cards. And I thought, how do they even know that I have these cards? Like it was kind of crazy to me. But I don't even remember what I did. But all of both of our pays is work fine. So Dwayne has one and I have one. They do this via phone number and also email. So if you have you and if you and your P2 have co-mingled phone numbers or emails between your Chase accounts, you might run into trouble getting pays to show you the correct um cards. So you'll want to clean that up first. If if you're having trouble, sign in, see if it works. But if it doesn't work or if it's not showing you all of your cards or all of your player two's cards, then I would investigate. So we didn't really have any issue. But you'll want to clean up all of that first and make sure that all all of um, like if it's your email, that all of your email is removed from your P2's account and vice versa. Same thing with phone numbers. Some people use the same phone number across both accounts. Again, we don't do that, so I don't know, but I do know that has caused people problems because Pays is using your email and your phone number to verify you. And so if that phone number shows linked to accounts that don't belong to you, then you're gonna run into a problem. So clean up the emails and the phone numbers if you're running into trouble. Give it a couple of days and then try again. If you want to feed your kids dominoes all summer for dinner because it's 10x, go crazy. I'm not gonna judge you. And you know what? I'm probably gonna do that too. Oh, one more thing. I do know some people have had better luck accessing Pays on a desktop. And then some people are not able to access it on a desktop and can only access it through uh either mobile or through the Pays app. So again, if one doesn't work for you, try the other. Don't be afraid to troubleshoot it a little bit before you, you know, call anyone.

Final Tips And Wrap-Up

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Okay, that is going to wrap it up for today. Um, sorry for the quick and dirty episode, but we are heading off soon to a week in oceanside and very excited to get some ocean air and ocean views and just relax for a little bit. So hope this was helpful. If you have questions, find me on Instagram and we will catch you on the next episode. Bye.