Do you dream of flying business class without paying full price for it? What if I told you that I recently flew business class to Hong Kong with Turkish airlines for 62 USD and back from Singapore on Singapore airlines for less than 100$?
The secret is using credit card points wisely. In this post, I am giving you some hints how to do that – note that I am by no means a financial advisor but I advise you to only use this strategy if you are paying off your credit cards each month! You will also need to have a very good credit score in order to qualify for some of these programs.
There are two main approaches to this – using one (or multiple) branded airline credit card or collecting points through a card such as Capital One, Chase or Amex.
Using a non-airline affiliated card is my preferred way of collecting points since it just gives you so much more flexibility. My top choice here is the Capital One Venture X card (affilate link), which offers a huge sign-up bonus (currently 75.000 points after spending 4000$ in three months).
Once you are holding your card in hand, get spending to make sure you meet the sign up bonus. Therefore, I recommend timing this wisely. So, for example, if you already know that you will pay for a trip, buy a new sofa or anything else that you can use a credit card for, this is the time to sign up.
Then, the exciting part starts: looking for flight. This can be time consuming and a bit frustrating at times, but the rewards will be huge.
The way to approach this is by searching for flights (for example on https://www.google.com/travel/flights ) and then start looking for award availability. There are various sites that can help you with this such as pointsme, pointsyeah – some are free, some are paid. One of my favorite places to look for flight awards is Air Canada´s Aeroplan.