Family Travel Unpacked: Make the Most of Travel With Kids

6 Sneaky Ways We Rack Up Travel Points (No New Cards Required)

• Melissa Conn • Season 1 • Episode 47

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Six low-effort habits for earning more travel points and miles as a family - no new credit cards required.

In this episode, you'll learn six specific strategies to earn extra points and miles without opening a single new credit card. From shopping portals and smarter everyday spending to a gift card trick that can fund hundreds of thousands of points a year, this episode covers it all, including a couple of strategies most people never think to try.

In this episode:

  • How shopping portals and browser extensions stack bonus points on every online purchase
  • Why the Chase Freedom Unlimited beats the Sapphire cards for everyday spending — and how to combine points across cards
  • The office supply store gift card trick that can add tens of thousands of points a year
  • How the Paze digital wallet is currently offering a huge bonus on Chase cards
  • Why watching your email and mailbox for targeted offers can pay off in a big way
  • How Card Pointers Plus automatically finds and activates credit card offers
  • How to ask for retention offers when an annual fee comes due
  • Why referral links are a win-win for you and your friends

Timestamps
00:00 — Intro
01:15 — Shopping portals
04:10 — Smarter daily spend cards & gift card strategy
09:17 — Targeted offers
11:08 — Card Pointers Plus
12:35 — Retention offers
15:01 — Referral bonuses
17:04 — Wrap-up

Links & Resources

Shopping Portals & Cash Back

Tools

Credit Cards Mentioned

Related Reading

Don't miss this inspiring, practical travel with kids podcast hosted by family travel expert Melissa Conn, founder of The Family Voyage, certified Child Passenger Safety Technician, and mom of two who proves family travel is achievable for everyone.

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Chase Sapphire credit cards

Hey there, and welcome back to Family Travel Unpacked. I'm your host, Melissa, and in case you're new here, you can find tons of detailed destination guides, travel tips, hacks, and more on my website, thefamilyvoyage.com. And if you've been enjoying the show, be sure to hit follow wherever you're listening so you never miss an episode, and drop a five-star review while you're at it. It really helps other families find the show. Today's episode was supposed to be a quick one, but I just couldn't help myself. Back in episode 42 when I talked about planning our summer trip to Europe on points, I mentioned that we used a little over 600,000 points for the four of us. If we had more flexibility, we could have used fewer. Our upcoming spring break should be closer to 500,000, and I might be able to get us on cheaper flights as we get closer. But I know that for most of you, those numbers sound huge. Don't get me wrong, they are. In reality, we get most of our points from opening new credit cards, but there are some amazing opportunities that you can explore even if you only have a few credit cards and you wanna keep it that way. Today, I'm gonna talk about six specific ways that our family earns more points without making any dramatic changes to how we spend money. No new cards, mostly simple strategies. These are small habits that stack up over time, and mean more free flights and hotel stays for us and for you, too. Okay, first up, shopping portals. If you're not using shopping portals every time you buy something online, you're leaving points on the table, no question. The concept is pretty simple. You click through a portal before you shop at a retailer, and you earn bonus miles or points on top of whatever your credit card normally earns. Most major airlines and hotel programs have their own portals, but the trick is knowing which one is offering the best rate for whatever you're buying at that moment. That's where a site called Cash Back Monitor comes in. It aggregates the offers across portals, so you can quickly see who's giving the most points per dollar at a specific retailer. Instead of logging into five different accounts, you just search the store and see the rates side by side. But here's something that doesn't show up on Cash Back Monitor: personalized offers. My Capital One account has its own set of shopping offers that are specific to my account. I have to log in to actually see them, and sometimes my husband's are different than mine. So that's a separate check I'll make if it's a bigger purchase. I think I talked about this on a previous episode, but I've seen things like spend $1,000, get 50,000 points back from Capital One. That's the equivalent of $500, so it's definitely worth taking a minute to check. I also have a few browser extensions installed that pop up automatically when I land on a retailer's site. I only install those for my favorite programs. I've got Rakuten, alaska Atmos Shopping, and American Airlines e-shopping platform. They can be a little noisy. Like, yes, I know there's an offer, I see you there, but they're also great for catching deals I might have otherwise missed. Sometimes the airline ones will even alert me that there's an extra bonus, like spend $150, get an extra 400 miles on top of the normal amount These shopping portal bonuses can be huge. My favorite was 22 points per dollar on Viator back in November. I even booked some of my tours for this coming week during that special because it was so good. A quick note on Rakuten for you. I have mine connected to my Amex Membership Rewards account rather than taking cash back. That's because I hold the no-fee Amex Blue Business Plus card, which earns Membership Rewards points. Those points can transfer to airline or hotel partners, so for me, they're worth more than cash. I can almost always get more than one cent per point out of them. If you're an Amex cardholder, definitely check whether you can make that same swap. Bilt has the same setup if you have at least gold status in their program, and those are my absolute favorite points. So if you have Bilt Gold, I would select that personally. Overall, I think Rakuten is the best of the bunch when it comes to shopping portals. They seem to have the best tracking, and they have reliably good rates. In the decades that I've been a member, since back when it was called Ebates, I've earned more than $6,000 worth of cash back just from Rakuten. If you haven't signed up yet, be sure to use my referral link down in the show notes and you can get $50 of extra cashback after you make a $50 purchase through Rakuten. The bottom line with portals is that it takes maybe 30 seconds before you check out online. That's it. Even if you don't pick the absolutely optimal portal every single time, just click through one of them to get something. Make it a habit Number two is something I think a lot of people get wrong, and I totally understand why. There's a lot of hype around certain cards. You hear it constantly: the Chase Sapphire Preferred or Reserve is the card to get. And look, I like both cards, but here's the thing, they're not what you want to be swiping at Target or Old Navy or most other places in your everyday life. In a lot of categories, the Sapphire Reserve only earns one point per dollar. One. That's despite the nearly eight hundred dollar annual fee. The Chase Sapphire Preferred recently got a little bit better. Now it's giving you three points per dollar on gas, dining, and online grocery store purchases, but it's still not great for everything else. A much smarter everyday card is the Chase Freedom Unlimited. There's no annual fee, one point five points per dollar minimum on everything, three points on dining, and three points on drugstores. That's a way better rate for most of what we actually buy day-to-day, including at places like Costco. I know, one point five doesn't sound huge, but it's fifty percent more than you're getting on the Sapphire cards. Now, and this is a key piece, those Freedom Unlimited points are Chase Ultimate Rewards points, same as what you earn on the Sapphire cards. You just need to also have a Sapphire Preferred or Reserve in your account to be able to transfer them to airline and hotel partners. It's really easy to combine them in your online account. So the move is keep your Sapphire card in your wallet for the categories where it shines, like travel purchases, streaming subscriptions at home, things like that. But for random everyday spending, swap to the Freedom Unlimited. Same points ecosystem, better earn rate. It sounds like a small thing, but if you're putting, let's say, three thousand or four thousand a month on the cards, the difference between one and one point five is thousands of points per year, and that adds up to real trips. Unless I'm working on a sign-up bonus or trying to spend toward a specific airline or hotel status, I make sure that I'm getting at least one point five points per dollar on all my spend. But if it's in a different program like Amex or Capital One, my baseline is two, which is thankfully really easy to achieve. Now there's another technique we use in this category that I want to be open about, even though it takes a little extra effort. This is the next level kind of stuff, and it took a few years of working on my points and miles strategy before I was willing to go this route. I'm talking about gift cards. One credit card that I have in my Apple Wallet is the Chase Ink Cash card. This is a no-fee business credit card that can pool points with your Sapphire or Freedom cards. Its superpower is that it earns five points per dollar at office supply stores, and that includes gift cardS. So I can buy a $200 Amazon gift card and earn 1,000 points. Same thing for Target and other stores. Even better, usually a few times every month, one of the office supply stores will sell those generic Visa and MasterCard gift cards with no activation fee. I check the Doctor of Credit website to see what the current deal is, and then I go pick up anywhere between $600 and $1,000 at a time. Those are great to use at places like Costco or the grocery store where I don't usually get a category bonus. And when a night with Hyatt starts at 3,000 points, this is a really powerful strategy One practical tip for this is that Staples gift card purchases code as office supply stores whether you do it in store or online. However, OfficeMax and Office Depot only work if you're purchasing in the store. Online gift card purchases from OfficeMax and Office Depot go through a different merchant that doesn't code as office supply. You should also keep in mind that Chase recently made some changes to how points transfer to Hyatt. It's a little complicated and depends on which cards you hold and when you got them. But I cover the full breakdown over on The Family Voyage. I'll link to it in the show notes if you want the details. I'd say we usually earn twenty thousand to thirty thousand points per year this way. Since Ronnie and I actually each have one of those cards, we could go up to two hundred and fifty thousand points just from doing gift cards at office supply stores, but it kinda gets to be a lot since most of them are in two hundred dollar and three hundred dollar denominations There are a few other little tricks in the same realm that can kick off serious points. A brand-new one is PAZE, that's P-A-Z-E, which is a digital wallet service that's offered by the big banks. Right now, Chase is giving you an extra ten points per dollar when you pay with PAZE on a Freedom, Sapphire, or United card. Guys, that's crazy good. There aren't a ton of websites where you can use PAZE yet, but I've seen it on StubHub, United, Domino's, broadway.com, and Newegg. That last one is super powerful. Let me give you some examples of why this is so amazing. I just grabbed three hundred dollars in Netflix gift cards from Newegg and loaded them to my account to cover a year of service. If I'd kept that charge on our Chase Sapphire Preferred, we would have earned six hundred points. But instead, by using my Chase Freedom Unlimited through PAZE, it was almost thirty-five hundred. Also, last month, I had to order two hundred and fifty dollars in pizza from Domino's for my son's soccer team party, and I earned over three thousand points just from that one charge. And then the other parents paid me back anyway. So talk about a win. If you've got any summer concerts or sporting events on the horizon, you can click through something like TopCashback to get ten percent back at StubHub, And then put it on one of the cards that's eligible for the Paze bonus to also get 10 points back per dollar. And if you're charging it to the Chase Sapphire Reserve, don't forget that you'll also get a $150 statement credit for StubHub every six months as long as you activate it. Again, that could be a major win. Number three is one that I think even some experienced points people overlook: watching your email and your actual physical mailbox for targeted offers. I know it's tempting to opt out of marketing messages, but hear me out. Card issuers send promotions out all the time, and because they're targeted to your specific account, they can be really worthwhile. Let me give you a few examples from my own experience. I recently got a physical mailer from United about my Quest card. It was offering an extra five thousand miles for each new authorized user I added. My kids are obviously not out there opening their own cards independently, but adding them as authorized users costs me nothing and the bonus posts to my account. But in this case, I can actually only add my son because I already added my daughter last year when they gave me a 10,000-point bonus for doing it. That's covering an entire flight for her this fall. I also got an email from Barclays about my Hawaiian Airlines business card offering a bonus if I put $750 in spend on the card in a month. I had a few software renewals and my monthly health insurance premium coming up, so I just shifted those and it was done. Or my Southwest card will send a one-click registration offer to earn extra points in specific categories for a limited time. In our experience, the United cards from Chase have been the most generous with this kind of bonus. I feel like we're constantly getting an offer for that Quest card or my husband's less expensive Explorer card, and those offers kick off so many points. Earlier this year, I had five points per dollar on gas, groceries, and restaurants, and my husband had an 8,000 mile bonus after $3,000 in spending on top of his regular earnings. Any guesses how we're doing our spring break trip next year? Now, these aren't offers you can always find by poking around on the website. They're sent to your specific accounts, so you have to actually see them to act on them. Sometimes you can find them buried in an offers section of your online account, but it's not predictable where you'll necessarily find it. So check your email, check your mailbox, and make sure your card accounts have your current email addresss so that you're actually getting these things. The fourth one has made a huge difference for me recently, CardPointers Plus. I bought a lifetime subscription back in November for a hundred and forty dollars, and I've already gotten that back several times over. Here's the problem it solves. Credit cards often have built-in limited time offers like spend fifty dollars at Home Depot, get ten dollars back, or earn five points per dollar at a specific restaurant chain. The problem is that you have to manually activate each offer on each individual card. If you have multiple cards, that's a ton of clicking around, and most people just don't do it. CardPointers automates the whole thing. Once you do the initial setup through the Chrome extension and connect your accounts, every time you log into a bank's website to check a transaction or pay your bill, the extension automatically adds all available offers to that card. You don't even have to think about it. You just go about your normal banking, and it happens in the background. And I was able to include all of my cards and my husband's, so that's a great value. Then when you're actually ready to make a purchase, you can search by merchant name or category in the app and instantly see which cards have active offers for that store. Sometimes it's bonus points, sometimes it's straight cash back. Either way, you're not leaving money sitting there unclaimed. It also shows you which of your cards earn the most points for a given transaction. So if you're at a restaurant that has an offer on one card, but another card has a better base earning rate for dining, it shows you that information all in one place so that you can try to sort it out. You can get your subscription at cardpointers.com/thefamilyvoyage. I'll link to it in the show notes too. And if you have more than two or three cards, I think it pays for itself pretty quickly. Another option I want to talk about is something I just did an hour before recording this episode. It isn't quite as easy as the other strategies, but I have to share it because it's a huge help for our family, and I'm not gatekeeping today or ever. When you get a new credit card, you need to keep it open for at least a year. You pay the annual fee, you get the welcome offer, plus you can test drive whatever benefits come with the card. But after that full year is up, you have to weigh whether or not to keep the card. Obviously, there are some cards that are no-brainers to keep, like let's say you get a free night with your favorite hotel chain every year just for paying the $99 fee. I mean, that's almost always a keeper, right? But if it's a bigger annual fee or you might not love the benefits after you spent a year with the card, or maybe it's just a duplicate, you can call the bank to talk about it. If you tell them you're thinking about closing the card because you aren't getting a lot of value relative to the annual fee, they might just give you what's called a retention offer to keep your business. These can vary a lot. Sometimes they'll offer to waive the annual fee, but other times they might give you extra points in exchange for keeping the card. The two best banks for that in my experience are Amex and Citi. Obviously, you have to weigh the offer versus the annual fee, but I'll give you two examples from our family. First is with the Citibank American Airlines cards. They have a $99 annual fee, and my husband and I are just kind of meh about the cards at this point. We don't check bags and these days we usually book our American Airlines flights for less with our Alaska points, but we do still use American directly every now and then. So when our annual fees have come due, including today, we've reached out to see what our options are. Each time we've gotten the choice to waive the annual fee, which is fine, or to get 7,500 points in exchange for doing $1,000 in spending over the next three months. And that's in addition to the points that we would normally earn. Personally, I take that 7,500 point offer in a heartbeat. Our daughter's flight to camp was 14,000 points, but with cash it would have been over $400. So we're much better off keeping the cards with that extra bonus. We basically cut her flight cost in half. On the other hand, Amex offers have been kind of stingy for our business platinums, but I know sometimes they can be generous. We've gotten offers like 15,000 membership rewards points for spending $5,000. That's fine, but it's not super exciting to me on a $900 card, you know? Other people have definitely gotten better offers, so you just have to see what they're willing to give you based on your spending patterns and your history with the bank. Anyway, you can think of those retention offers as kind of mini sign-up bonuses, and if you have enough of them over the course of the year, they can definitely help pad your point balances Okay, this episode has gotten way longer than I planned for. Originally it was only gonna be four strategies, and then I added another, and now I've got just one more that I can't resist telling you about. If you've listened this far or are following the show, you've probably started to at least like traveling on points and miles, or maybe you've become borderline obsessed like me. And if you're anything like me, you can't help but tell random strangers walking down the street about how they can make their travels better or cheaper with points. Big apology to my husband for all the times I embarrass him by doing it So why not get rewarded for sharing your love? A few of our favorite credit card companies offer generous referral bonuses when your friends sign up for cards through your links. Content creators like me earn this way too, which is why I always appreciate your using my links that are down in the show notes. The biggies for referrals are Chase, Amex, and Capital One. Not every card is eligible for referrals, and it's a little different for each one that does. Like Capital One seems to only let you refer for the exact same card you have, whereas with Chase, it's sometimes for the exact same card, but sometimes any card within a given family. Like I can create a referral link with my United business card and still get points when someone opens a fee-free United personal card. And Amex actually lets you link to any card from any other card. They all have limits on how many referrals you can do in a given year, but they're pretty high. So if you're at lunch talking with your friend about how you snagged flights to Spain for 16,000 points each, why don't you email her a referral link to that card that let you do it? Also don't forget that you can refer your partner or your adult children, or even your parents to the same cards you already have. That can be really powerful because then you can collect a lot of the same points all at once and use them for a big trip together. We tend to get a few referrals every year for cards like the Chase Sapphires, the United Cards, and the Capital One Venture X. But we get a ton of referrals from my blog for the Southwest cards, and that one is particularly powerful because those referral points can count toward your companion pass re-qualification. So if you've got a big network of friends who trust your advice, or maybe your kid is on a travel sports team, referrals can be a goldmine. Just make sure you know what you're talking about and that you're recommending specific cards for the right reasons. So that's it. Six methods: shopping portals, smarter everyday spending, watching for targeted offers, Card Pointers Plus, asking for retention offers, and sharing with friends. One of these strategies alone probably won't move the needle as much as getting a new card or two, but if you try out a few of them, you could be looking at enough extra points every year to plan an extra weekend getaway or make your big annual trip longer or more special. Heck, if you're really focused, you might be able to add another trip entirely. You don't have to open a new card or restructure anything major. These are just habits and tools that work alongside what you're already doing. If this episode was helpful, I'd love it if you share it with a friend who's trying to get into the points and miles world. This kind of thing is a great starting point for people who don't wanna go too deep, but still wanna make the most of what they have. And as always, be sure you're following the show on your platform of choice, so you never miss an episode. Leave a like or a five-star review, and you'll be my new best friend. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next week on Family Travel Unpacked. Safe travels