$0 Trip to Latin America: The Travel Credit Cards

In case you haven’t been following, the goal with our trip to Central/South America was to do a completely free trip. $0 in travel expenses. Hopefully this will be the first of many trips like this, but this series itself is just on our travels to Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

1. $0 Trip to Latin America: Introduction
2. $0 Trip to Latin America: Booking the Flights

Choosing Credit Cards

If one is setting out to prove free travel, one should pick travel/rewards credit cards based on a few things:

1. Airlines that don’t pass on fuel surcharges
2. Credit cards that waive the annual fee for the first year
3. After the first two are met, picking the biggest bonus
4. And the cheapest miles

Unfortunately, I didn’t plan this trip with these things in minds. However, I generally opperate under this philophy in the first place. The exception in what you’ll read is the Lufthansa card. This card does have its specific benefits, however, I do not think it’s as good of a card as any of the other cards I choose.

The caveat I’ll add is the value of airline miles over hotel points.

Airline miles are not only more valuable, they are more expensive to produce without credit cards.

The value of a mile should be selfevident. 60,000 miles could get you a roundtrip to Paris which would otherwise go for a minimum $1,000. A hotel room could cost anywhere from 20,000 to 95,000 points in Paris, but you could get a 3 star hotel at a minimum of $100 or so. But no matter how you spin it, airline miles are going to be more valuable for the average person. The exception would be a person who has millions of miles and no hotel points.

Think about it on the earning end as well. To earn 60,000 airline miles, I have to fly 60,000 miles on paid flights. This will surely cost $2,500 or more (or half for a person with top tier status). Yet, I showed how anyone could earn 60,000+ hotel points (or 10,000 points + 2 free nights) for $300.

There’s no doubt about it, hotel points are cheaper and generally worth a lot less.

So let’s look at what credit cards we got:

• 60,000 Chase Ink Bold bonus – used 40,000 for United miles
• 50,000 AAdvantage card bonus – used 35,000
• 80,000 IHG card bonus x2 (160,000) – used 125,000
• 50,000 Lufthansa card bonus– used 34,000
• 40,000 Barclay Arrival Plus card bonus

The Chase Ink Bold, Ink Plus and Chase Sapphire Preferred all transfer to United (and obviously the United card earns United miles). United was the back bone of this award ticket as we were allowed a stopover, a destination and, open-jawed so the ticket ended in Guatemala.

Chase Cards

A lot of people ask me if they should wait for the Ink Bold and CSP (Chase Sapphire Preferred) to increase their bonuses. The highest we’ve ever seen the Ink Bold is 60k, and the CSP used to always be 50k, however both are now 10k less.

While I do believe in the obvious consumer saavyness of getting the most anytime you buy or get anything. You wouldn’t knowingly transfer to an airline that charges more miles without a benefit, so why would you apply for a card that gets less miles?

Well, in theory there are some benefits to getting the card now instead of later. 1) The CSP has not had a 50k bonus in more than a year. That’s not an indicator that you should continue to wait as there’s no reason to believe it’s an annual bonus. 2) There’s no real reason to believe that the Ink Bold will offer the 60k again, but it is definitely more hopeful.

So given that it’s not a given, it really comes down to the sheer value of the card. Both cards are great daily spenders. I highly recommend keeping regular spending on one of these cards both because they are good cards and because Chase is a good bank to have a relationship with. The have like half of all the major travel cards right now. So if at some point you’d like to get a different Chase card or another, Chase will know that you are a valuable customer. They should want to have you as a customer.

Plus, the Ink Bold has a great shopping portal at times for major purchases and 5x on Office Supply stores if you ever need such a thing. All that to say, you could make up that 10k difference over time, an there’s no reason to think that there will be the opportunity to have 10k more.

I say go for it.

AA Cards

The American Airlines cards have been very good to us. There is so much to say about these cards, much of it does get said on flyertalk. However, I’ve realized the quantity of info doesn’t necisarily lead to a group concensus of quality info. Which is to say, there is great info in the wiki, but it doesn’t tell the complete story of just how far you can go with the AA cards.

What’s interesting is that Citi has put out so many different AA cards within the last 2 years. Alghough currently there is a:

• AA Platinum Visa
• AA Platinum MasterCard
• AA Platinum Business Visa
• AA Platinum Business MasterCard

And now the Citi AA executive card that comes with a $450 fee. The Executive card is to offer a high end product, but why so many other products?

There was an Amex version but that was apparently discontinued(?).

Another detail of the AA cards is that they give a 10% rebate of used miles. So we used 35,000 and we’ll get 3,500 miles back.

Lufthansa Card

The Lufthansa card doesn’t waive the annual fee, and for their own Miles and More members in Europe, the fuel surcharges are astoronomical. But with no last minute booking fee, two stopovers, etc… it is kind of a niche frequent flyer currency. If you’d like to learn more about lufthansa miles, read Best Use of Lufthansa Miles.

Barclay Plus Card

Barclay Arrival Plus is a card to cover airport taxes and fees. This is another great card for daily spending as it gives 2 points per dollar on everything. Then you can redeem 100 points to cover 1 dollar for travel expenses. Plus you get 10% of points redeemed for travel back. So it’s really like getting 2.2+ percent back if you use your points to cover travel costs.

Plus, the card comes with 40,000 points, which is $400 of travel plus the 10% back. Plus the card doesn’t have a foreign transaction fee.

IHG Card

Lastly, the IHG cards. There is a thread of FT with a 80,000 point bonus. That’s 80,000 points for spending $1,000, plus the card gives 10% of your redeemed points back. So on this trip, where we spend 120,000 points, we will get credited 12,000 points back to our account.

Although, it’s easy to recommend this card for another reason, it’s probably one of the only hotel cards worth keeping, in my opinion. 10% back is awesome, but I’m referring to the fact that for every year you pay the $49 annual fee (it’s waived the first year), you get a free night at any hotel.

How did I pick these cards?

Other than the Lufthansa card, this is a good representation of what I tend to use and believe in. Cards with good bonuses, waived annual fees, no fuel surcharges. And Lufthansa does fit into things I like in another way- great stopover options and no last minute booking (close-in) fees.

Picking cards for me is largely based on these things, and of course the bonus. The bonus is important just as any sale is important. If I was a parent and diapers for one month were half the price, I would seriously stock up. If I was a business that had to buy a lot of… supplies, and they were half priced, you would stock up. Whatever, the point is that given that you can usually only have one of a credit card, you should get that credit card when it doubles its bonus. Right? Why get a credit card when it’s giving a 25,000 mile bonus, when you may be able to get a 50,000 miles bonus.

Given that, when there is a bonus, and all things being equal, I get the card with the bonus. Let’s just say I value United miles the same as British Airways miles (which I don’t). The British Airways card is always hanging around a 50,000 bonus, and the United is typically 30,000. So when the United card was equal to the British Airways bonus, I would always get the United card. Which, I guess shows their marketing tactics at work, but it benefits me as well.

Conclusion

If I was limited to only earning AA and United miles (or Chase UR points which transfer to United), I wouldn’t be sad at all. Personally, I don’t feel much need to diversify outside those two as they well cover the needs of easily booking flights that have no fuel surcharges. I not only recommend it, I live it.