7 Incredible Successes In A Few Years Of Miles & Points

Caroline and I started dating while I was hitchhiking across the country. But hey, at that point in my life free travel was a priority and I wasn’t too savvy on the miles and points thing. Never would I have predicted then that I would one day fly across the Pacific in a suite bigger than my old Ford Festiva. Never would I have predicted that one day we would stay at dozens of the world’s Top 500 hotels on points.

As I mentioned yesterday, even when we first started traveling as a married couple we slept in some very odd places. This post is about how far we’ve come, solely because of miles and points. It’s not to say that I’m too good for the other stuff; we still love adventure. But it’s more to say, look at what two people who spend around ~$20,000 a year can do with a few miles and points tricks like signing up for credit cards, or hotel deals and what not.

And still our biggest expense is food. Maybe I should do extreme couponing next. Here are some of our miles and points moments we couldn’t have achieved otherwise.

1) The flights just on miles from credit card sign up bonuses

As you may know know Caroline keep track of all our expenses and post them publicly. But I also keep track of every flight and hotel. We only started really keeping track of things July, 2013. But I was able to pull up some older emails and flight histories.

Here are the flights just from miles, and just from miles that we earned from signing up for credit cards.

 

2) Flights from mistake fares

In the last two years, here are the flight mistake fares we’ve flown (or will fly next week). One of the tickets to Milan was $150, and the other a little more. The tickets to Kenya and Oman were both $210. The most expensive ticket is the Beijing fare, but that’s in American Airlines business class. So I can’t complain. Oh, and we’ll each earn over 32,000 Alaska Miles from that one flight.

 

3) Business & First Class International Flights

Given that a roundtrip from New York to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific First Class Suites is like $20,000 (our year’s budget), I can guarantee you that we would have never ever flown this flight without miles.

Or Air New Zealand Business Class

 

4) Some crazy routes too

I actually did a post on stopovers we’ve actually booked. I also call these “hopper” flights. We’ve really milked some long United award flights (btw United miles are transfer partners of Chase Ultimate Rewards points). Here are a few examples.

 

The Pacific Hopper

For only 40,000 United miles we flew all over the pacific in Asiana Business Class, Singapore Airlines Business Class, Air New Zealand Business Class, and Thai Airways Business Class.

We spent two weeks in: Guam, New Zealand, Rarotonga, and 4 days in Tokyo. Plus we had long layovers in Sydney and Singapore. Best 40,000 miles of my life.

 

Caribbean Hopper

For 17,500 United miles we did Virginia to Aruba, to Panama City, to Puerto Rico.

 

OLD British Airways allowed “unlimited” stopovers.

Man, those were the days! My favorite is that for only 20,000 BA miles we booked a flight from Santiago Chile to New York with a 4 day stopover in Easter Island, and another 2 week stopover in Peru.

 

5) We’ve had complete free, $0 trips

We have had multiple trips now where the airfare and hotels were completely covered and the miles were earned absolutely for free.  No taxes, no fees, no costs in earning miles. FREE. $0. Actually some were profitable. But since we started making it a blog series we’ve done two “completely free” trips.

 

Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala

That trip cost us 54,500 miles and we spent 1 month in 5 star hotels for 125,000 IHG points. A month of luxury travel with few enough miles that you could fund the entire trip with a few credit card bonuses.

 

Muscat, Oman

Combined a mistake fare with a card that reimburses travel expenses.

 

6a) 121 Free 4/5 star hotels

121 different hotels completely covered by points. And some of those stays have been as long as 3 weeks.

We’ve stayed in some crazy places in the last couple of years! Here are a few:

 

Treated a friend to Floor 94 at the Park Hyatt Shanghai

 

Conrad New York

 

InterContinental Hong Kong

 

 

6b) And we’ve gotten some sweet Suite Upgrades

 

Like the InterContinental Davos, in Switzerland

or the Radisson Blu Vienna

 

 

7) We’ve been all over the world

The best part, and the reason we do all this. For us, the hobby could be void of all 4 and 5 star hotels and I would fly economy-mini seats if I had to. Seeing beautiful sites and interesting cultures is what this is all about for us. And when people ask us our favorite country or place… there are too many to list.

 

The less-touristy side of Bali

 

Jumping into the blue waters of Fiji

 

Jumping off much smaller cliffs in Greece

 

Spending 5 weeks traveling across India

 

Spending a month roaming China

 

Renting a 4×4 for a week in Kenya to “self-drive” safari

 

Conclusion

Honestly, it’s not that hard. The hobby can take up as little or as much time as you want. Signing up for a few credit cards takes an hour every few months. And in my opinion, chasing your dreams is worth the extra time.

By signing up for the newsletter you’ll get a few really good resources including our very own “complete guide to earning miles with credit cards” (which isn’t yet on the Complete Guide page).

The goal of this site is to make the giant list above reality for every reader of this site who wants. I’m bent on it, and maybe it’s the positivity of the new website launch, but I’m more inspired than ever. I hope you are too!