My 3 Part System for Earning Miles and Points

I’ve talked about my general strategy for earning miles and points before, but I think I’ve refined it, and I wanted to do a post just on this prioritizing aspect of my strategy.

Earning miles for free can be super easy. People make it complicated but it doesn’t have to be. If it’s too difficult, pace yourself and start a little slower.

But what happens when you’re in super earning mode, where should you prioritize your efforts?

Before I begin, my surface level, beginner advice is this: First aim for 1 to 2 years of free flights. Once you have flights covered, think about your next trip’s hotels. From there, let me share with you my more developed strategy.

Earning Airline Miles

I get most of my airline miles from credit card signup bonuses. My last post was about The Best Travel Credit Cards for specific things, but truth be told, I just pick the biggest bonuses with my favorite airlines.

We do not fly long haul flights with anything but miles from bonuses, and the occasional mistake fare.

 

I personally do not do or recommend “mileage running”, “status” (unless your business pays for it), or “buying miles”.

And in that vein, as I said in “this hobby is bad at math” it is kind of annoying how people say “travel isn’t free” and then proceed to tell me how much it cost them to maintain status or to buy miles. Well no duh. You spent a ton of money on bad deals and didn’t think it was cheap/free?

I could go on and on about status and mileage running being a bad deal, but the fact of the matter is, it’s expensive. Very rare opportunities make it worth it, and even our most expensive trips are ones where we’re earning miles even with mistake fares. Status feels good, but it ultimately is expensive to maintain for something you can get from bonuses. Miles from bonuses, even on the few cards where the annual fee isn’t waived for the first year, are way cheaper or are free. 25,000 Alaska Miles for the price of the annual fee is way cheaper than 25,000 miles earned via flying. So why bother?

 

Anyways, since this is mostly about sign up bonuses, I’ll refer back to Best Travel Credit Cards, but sum it up by saying I get big bonuses with my favorite points/miles (Chase, Amex, Citi, SPG, AA, United, Alaska).

Let me sum up my strategy:

1. Credit card bonuses for airline miles
2. Occasional mistake fares
3. Discount airlines for occasional super cheap flights (I use skyscanner btw)

 

Earning Hotel Points / Free Nights

1. Promotions
2. Secondary bonuses
   1. Passive benefits
3. Fillin in the gaps with:
   1. BRGs
   2. Earning promotions
   3. Smaller alternatives

Since my primary use of credit card bonuses is airline miles, my primary way of earning hotel points is hotel promotions.

This is particularly unique to me, because we live in hotels. For me, it’s hard/impossible to earn a year’s worth of hotel points for free. 2 to 3 weeks of free hotel points? Super easy. 52 weeks? I can’t think of a way to scale it.

So let me say I would recommend for most people; secondary signup bonuses going to hotel points. If you don’t have any great Citi signup options, why not get the Hilton card? Same with Amex.

 

The reason I think you should make airline miles your primary focus is because I have zero reliable alternatives to getting a long haul flight other than throwing the money down the toilet… I mean paying for a flight.

With hotels I can always find cheap alternatives (see my post 6 ways to get “amazing” hotel fares).

• Best Rate Guarantees
• Roomer deals
• Great hotel promotions where I earn 100% back in points
  • Combined with sales (like Club Carlson’s 2 for 1 rates)
• OTA (booking sites) promotions
• MSing cheap hotels
  • 6x Hilton, 5x Club Carlson

The list goes on and on.

But the point is, if you don’t have hotel points… it’s okay, you have other ways to get great deals. Don’t have miles? You’re either going to have to pay a boat load of money or get really lucky on prices. Especially if you want to go to Bali or something, tickets can be well over $1,500 for a roundtrip ticket. And earning miles from flights isn’t profitable at all. Heck, nowadays, even major alliance partners, like Cathay Pacific, won’t earn you any AA miles at all.

Get your flight covered, and then pick up some hotel points.

 

For me though, I’m constantly picking the best opportunity at that moment. I’m going to Turkey and there aren’t any hotel promotions, so I’m going to burn some Club Carlson points. But also there are really cheap Hilton hotels, so with a BRG I was able to get a Hilton down to $17 for the night.

But when I go to Egypt I’m going to just burn all the points I can because it’s a good deal.

But if I was going to Turkey and there was a great hotel promotion, like the IHG Into The Nights promo (now over), where you could earn 2 free nights or 50,000 points (I earned 2 free nights and 50,000 points!) for only 3 paid night stays… that’s where I stop and do my earning. I try to get good deals on paid hotel stays and stack up the earning as best I can. That way on my next trip I have more points.

 

That being said, there are some credit credit card opportunities. See this post and scroll down to the section “Best Card for Free Hotel Stays?” to see a chart of how many points you can earn from one credit card.

 

MS = CashBack

People ask me about MS and I’ve totally flipped based on the current opportunities of cashback cards.

If you’re doing specific spends (grocery, gas, pharmacy, office, etc…) there likely is a 5% cashback card for that. And the costs of any spending are always justified with a net positive of cash.

While on the other hand, I don’t buy airline miles because I can get them for free… so I don’t see the point in doing it here. The exception is chasing a specific redemption you’re willing to pay for, like a first class flight. However, I’m never willing to pay more for it, but everyone is different.

So if I’m going to go through the trouble, I want my profit to be as high as possible. Most reward for the time I spent. And I don’t actually want to spend money. So cashback cards are winning me over, and I even just applied for my first Discover card based on my 40%+ cashback talk with Frequent Miler.

 

A note about daily spendings

My “daily spending” comes out to be around $20,000 a year. Most of it is international, the biggest expense might be food, then “travel”. So for me the Chase Sapphire Preferred is a great fit, or the Ink Plus.

Either way I’m not too worried about the bonus, I’m more worried about my relationship with the bank. I spend with Chase not just because it’s the best card, but because I want to have a good relationship with the bank. I want them to see me as a valuable customer. I find that helps with future apps.

I mention this because for a while I moved all my daily spend to my cashback card because I wanted to be a good customer there. However, taking away spend from my favorite bank led to my first denial with my favorite bank. So I decided to shift my spend back.

 

Conclusion

• Airline Miles = Credit Card bonuses
• Hotel points = promotions, and secondary cards and other options
• Cashback = MS

 

Based on two years of keeping track of our stats, I’m more and more convinced this is the best strategy for us. The major exceptions I mentioned might be the following.

Exceptions for airline miles: I think it’s worth going for status if your company is going to fly you 100,000 miles a year anyways. You might as well earn double AA miles instead of a small number of miles with a small number of airlines.

Airline status or mileage running as a hobby is an expensive hobby and it is not a “strategy”… it’s just an expensive hobby. You like flying, and you like when check in agents refer to you as type of rare stone… to each his own. But it is not profitable. You could have gotten those miles for cheaper, no doubt.

Although another exception are those who can’t get cards the way Americans with good credit scores can. Then I can understand the rare occasion where buying miles is an actually good deal (not just a big discount off the retail price of first class), or flying for miles can be a good deal.

And mistake fares are often a good deal. Our $440 mistake fare in Business Class to Beijing earned us 36,000 Alaska Miles. Which… is only really worth it if you were already wanting to go to China. I don’t think buying 36,000 Alaska Miles is a great deal for $440 when you can get it for much cheaper. Carrie actually thinks the flight was totally not worth it and I’m on the fence about whether I would do it again.

Exceptions for hotel points: if you already have a ton of miles somehow, maybe hotel points is a better way to go right now, especially if there are big bonuses.

Also, paying for hotel promotions isn’t at all necessary for those who do 2 weeks of travel a year. Totally get those points for free from a credit card.

Exceptions for MS/Cashback: Sure, everyone has to run the math and the value for themselves. For me, I don’t want to pay for miles when I can get them for free. But others who fly First Class more than us might. Also, everyone seems to have different MS strategies, and you just have to find what works for you. Just don’t get suckered into spending money because of an arbitrary definition of “value”.

 

This strategy works for me, and with the exceptions included, I think it can work for most people.