I want to start off by saying that our overall credit card points strategy is not as efficient or sophisticated as most blogs you will read. Ours is geared toward our lifestyle, which is 2 professionals who like to spend money and travel, but who don't have a lot of free time or desire to open/close multiple credit cards or closely track spending categories. Our credit card points are exclusively used for business/first class airline travel. I know there are some great hotel redemptions out there, but we prefer to spend our points on luxury airfare rather than on luxury hotel stays. We have no problem spending thousands of dollars on a hotel, but for some inexplicable reason, it’s harder for us to spend cash on luxury flights. That being said, the experience of luxury travel is worth the cost to us, and we have used cash to book business class flights as well.
We have 2 personal credit cards that we have been using for years: the Amex Platinum card and Chase Sapphire Reserve, and almost all of our discretionary spending goes on these cards. At first glance, the Amex Platinum card does seem excessive, as it comes with a hefty yearly fee of $695. However, if you use a lot of their benefits, it can essentially pay for itself. This is not just our everyday spending card, but we also use it for booking flights directly with an airline, as it gives 5X points when you do that. There are definitely more lucrative daily spending credit cards out there, but we try to keep our quiver of cards simple. We really like the perks and luxury aspect of this card, and we value Amex membership reward points for their numerous transfer options and frequent transfer bonuses.
AMEX Platinum
On top of flights, we also frequently book hotel stays through the Amex travel portal, especially the Fine Hotels and Resorts (FHR) properties. The Amex Platinum card gets you $200 off these bookings every year, plus you get 5X points when you pay at the time of the booking (as opposed to later at the hotel). You get a bunch of perks when booking through the FHR options, including early 12 PM check-in (when available), guaranteed late 4PM check-out, free breakfast for 2, a resort credit (various by property but usually $100-$125 used towards property charges or the spa), and room upgrades when available. There are other options out there which give you similar benefits, such as the Virtuoso program. Overall, most of the benefits are nice, but it is not necessarily a money saver, as the total cost can sometimes be higher than what you could find otherwise online. I can’t remember ever getting a substantial upgrade on a room either, so definitely think about if it is worth it before spending more than what is offered on other sites.
The 5X points for airfare booked directly through the airline is huge since we fly so often. Even just paying the fees on award bookings adds up to extra points. This tends to be the majority of the points that we earn on this card each year. There is also a monthly Uber credit, which expires if you don’t use it in the month. We definitely take Uber less frequently now due to Jai being in our lives, but the credit aso works for Uber Eats (end of the month Salt and Straw deliveries are our favorite way to use up expiring credits).
The other main benefit we take advantage of frequently with the Amex Platinum is lounge access. Many higher-end credit cards offer Priority Pass membership, and the Amex is no different. The main thing that sets the Amex apart is having its own exclusive lounge network. This includes the Centurion Lounge as well as the Escape lounges (although most Escape lounges have now been added to the Priority Pass network, so that dilutes the value quite a bit). Our local airport has an Escape lounge, and we use it every time we fly. Other credit cards are building lounges of their own to try and catch up, but Amex is ahead of the game in terms of options. You also get access to Delta and Lufthansa lounges when you are flying on those airlines, regardless of class of travel. These benefits do have some specific rules and limitations, so check out their website for more details.
Something that I was very excited about is that Platinum card holders now have access to the website point.me, which allows cardholders to use this convenient service to search for award booking availability. While the flight searches are slow, they tend to be pretty accurate as it is searching for real time award availability across all Amex airline transfer partners. This has been quite a valuable addition when it comes to booking award flights.
Chase Sapphire Reserve
The second card we use frequently is the Chase Sapphire Reserve (CSR) . This card also has a high fee of $550 per year, but one of the huge perks is that it gives an automatic $300 yearly statement credit for travel. Their definition of “travel” is quite broad, and it is pretty much an automatic credit for us each year. This effectively lowers the yearly fee to $250 without having to really do anything other than our normal spending (if you are reading this then I assume you like to spend money and travel like we do, so you will likely have no trouble using this credit).
The CSR and Chase Sapphire Preferred are two of the O.G. travel reward cards, and we have had these since near the beginning of our travels. The biggest perk is 3X points on dining and travel. While we use the Amex Platinum for booking our airfare, most of our other travel expenses and any restaurants go on this card. There are some better options out there for dining credit cards (such as the Amex Gold card), but like I mentioned previously, we try to keep things simple, even if that means we may be missing out on some reward points here and there.
Another reason to have the CSR in addition to the Amex is that when traveling abroad, we often come across vendors who do not take Amex as a payment option. Having a backup card which is Visa or Mastercard is important. Both the Amex Platinum and the CSR card have no foreign transaction fees, and pretty good fraud monitoring systems. CSR also has their own travel portal as well as their own fancy hotel program with similar perks to FHR called Relais & Chateaux, but it tends to be a little pricier, so we tend not to use this too much.
The Rest of our Quiver
We have a few more cards that we use for specific things, but not on a regular basis. These include the Southwest Rapid Rewards credit card and the Charles Schwab Investor Checking Account. We signed up for the Southwest card because they were offering a deal where if you spent a certain amount of money in the first 3 months of opening the card, you would get the Southwest Airlines Companion Pass (CP) for the remainder of the year. The CP is the greatest domestic airline status/perk that I have ever had. It offers unlimited buy-one-get-one free flights for whoever you designate as your companion (you can change your companion up to 3 times in a year). Think about that for a second…unlimited free flights for your companion (you only need to pay the taxes, which is $5.60 per flight segment at the time of writing this) on Southwest flights. Many people complain about Southwest Airlines, but we have had a great experience flying with them over the years. We have been lucky enough to have the CP for the last 4 years through a variety of means including credit card sign-on bonuses, promotions, and COVID policies in which the airline extended CP expirations due to the pandemic.
One of the biggest benefits of having the CP when it comes to airline reward travel is the ability to book “position flights.” This essentially means that we can book a short flight from our home airport (mid-sized West Coast city) to a larger hub airport, and then fly on an international carrier from there. Without positioning flights, we would be stuck looking for award travel from our home airport only (or airports within a reasonable driving distance). You can still use positioning flights without the CP, but you can see how paying for only one flight instead of two comes in handy here. Now when we search for flight award bookings using credit card points, I can broaden my search radius. We tend to limit our positioning flights to about 2-3 hours flight time maximum, mainly for our (and Jai’s) sanity.
We don’t need any frills when flying domestic, so a short Southwest flight works perfectly for us. With the amount we fly, we could have both easily made mid-tier status on any of the big airlines, but with the CP I’d rather have cash money as a perk than a slightly bigger seat and some free drinks on the plane. This benefit has easily saved us many thousands of dollars over the past few years.
The second accessory card that I mentioned is the Charles Schwab Investor Checking Account ATM card. This card is linked to my brokerage account at Charles Schwab, and we use this ATM card when withdrawing cash in a foreign country. The card offers no foreign transaction fees as well as unlimited ATM fee rebates for cash withdrawals worldwide. Gone are the days of using Travelers Cheques or exchanging US dollars at some shady kiosk. The benefit of using a fee-free ATM card is that you usually get a better exchange rate when doing so; you just have to decline the exchange rate the local bank ATM gives you and go with your personal bank’s rate instead.
Turning Points into Flights
Now that you know how we earn our points, let me tell you how we spend them. We get the most enjoyment from using our credit card points for business/first class air travel. That’s all that we ever use our points for. Yes, there are some great redemption offers for other luxury products such as hotels, but we get more enjoyment out of flying at the pointy end of the plane than getting a good deal on a hotel room.
We transfer credit card points directly to our airline rewards account after we have found a reward flight that works for us. You can use your credit card points to book flights directly through the card’s travel portal, but in general this is a low value use of your hard earned points since they essentially give you a $0.01 per point valuation. For example, a $5,000 flight will cost you 500,000 points when booking on the credit card travel portal; you can get that same flight for a fraction of the price if you use the points through the airline directly. We recently redeemed a round trip business class flight on Air France from LAX to Oslo for 110,000 points per person.
With that said, we do have some significant limitations when it comes to booking award flights. Due to our primary jobs, we have specific dates on which we can travel, and that limits our award booking searches. Most people are able to search for flights over a broad range of dates, which makes it easier to find a good option. That's where positioning flights come in handy for us. We often have to travel to a larger airport in order to find an award flight which is available for a reasonable price and on the dates we want to travel.
We always try book award travel as early as possible. Both Akhila and I are able to plan travel about a year in advance which allows us to take advantage of booking an award flight in one of the “sweet spots.” That is, booking right when the airline releases award availability (varies by airline but is usually around 1 year prior). The last minute booking option doesn’t usually work for us, as I am very risk averse and need to make sure I can return from a trip and make it to work the next day (after every trip I also tell myself that next time we should arrive home a day early to give us a buffer in case anything goes wrong and to relax, but we still have too much FOMO to do it).
At the end of the day, we prioritize flying business/first class on our trips. That means that sometimes, we do need to pay for a flight using cash. It seems that reasonable award bookings are harder to come by these days (at least that’s what I have noticed), likely due to the public’s increased demand for luxury travel, people getting more savvy about awards bookings, and airline point devaluations. Seats.aero and Point.me are great resources when trying to find award flights.
Due to unexpected point devaluations that airlines love to throw at us, I wouldn't recommend transferring points to an airline unless you have designated use for those points. There are exceptions of course, but this is my general rule of thumb. When I’m searching for a cash flight, google flights is my go to website. There are different options you can configure, and you can search to/from numerous cities at once (remember those positioning flights)! I also want to send a shout out to aeroLOPA, which has become my go to airline seating chart. I find it to be a bit easier to find what you are looking for (things like window placement and location of bassinets) than SeatGuru.
Comments