Congratulations! You’ve reached an exciting milestone in your Travel Freely journey! Obtaining a rewards credit card and hitting your spending bonus is no small feat, and it’s definitely something to celebrate. Now, you’re about to reap the rewards for your efforts. Booking your free travel can be straightforward and strategic, ensuring you get the most value out of your points and miles both now and in the future.
Get Started Booking Your Bucket List: Focus on Your Travel Dreams
Our biggest piece of advice is to prioritize the travel experiences that excite you the most. While it’s important to be savvy with your rewards, never compromise on what will make you happiest. If a particular flight or hotel stay captures your heart, even if it requires a few more points, go for it. Your joy is worth the extra points.
Redeeming Your Points for Free Travel
Since each rewards program differs, we’ve compiled a wealth of resources to guide you through the redemption process. Our comprehensive guides and video walkthroughs will help you navigate the specifics of each program with ease.
Reward Program Guides
- Chase Ultimate Rewards
- Capital One Venture Miles
- American Express Membership Rewards
- Citi ThankYou Points
Transfer Partners
Get Inspired
Award Booking 101
Maximizing the value of your points and miles is all about using transfer partners from cards that earn flexible rewards with transfer partners. Read Travel Freely’s Rewards Cards 101 to understand which cards earn these points and miles.
The good news is there’s no better time to book trips with points and miles because of some amazing tools. But, there is a learning curve. If you are a beginner, using a bank’s travel portal is probably the easiest way to book your first free trip. If you are willing to become an intermediate points and miles traveler, you must get a feel for transfer partners. The motivation is pretty strong. With a few minutes, you can book international business class tickets to achieve your bucket list destinations in style.
Because there is a learning curve, we have a separate post explaining this concept of transfer partners. Before proceeding below, please check out our Ultimate Guide to Maximizing Credit Card Points with Transfer Partners.
Also, remember that we discuss transfer partners in each rewards program guide mentioned at the top of this post.
Overall Tips
Plan Ahead: Award availability can be limited, especially for popular routes and dates. Planning your travel and transfers well in advance ensures you have the best chance to secure the flights and accommodations you want. Start monitoring availability as soon as you know your travel dates, and be prepared to book quickly when you find a good deal. Many programs open up their award calendar 11 to 12 months in advance, so it’s truly never too early to start looking.
Be Flexible: Being flexible with your travel dates and destinations can help you find better award availability and lower points costs. If you can adjust your travel by a few days or consider alternative destinations, you might unlock significant savings. Flexibility often leads to discovering unique travel opportunities that you might not have considered otherwise.
Consider One-Way Flights: Look at one-way flights instead of roundtrips to find the best options for both your departure and return tickets. Many people are programmed to look only at roundtrip costs, but one-way flights can offer better flexibility and value. This approach allows you to mix and match different airlines and routes, potentially saving points and providing more travel options. Just be aware that for international flights, booking a roundtrip might save you on hefty taxes and fees — depending on the airline and program.
Use Award Booking Tools: Great tools like PointsYeah.com can save time and dramatically reduce the learning curve. These tools help you compare various redemption options across multiple loyalty programs, find the best deals, and ensure you’re getting maximum value from your points. They can be a great way to explore your options and find the best deals efficiently.
Explore Routes: Use Google Flights or FlightConnections to understand ideal routes and the number of stops from your home airport to your destination. This can be fun for generally exploring where you want to go! By familiarizing yourself with various routes, you can identify which airlines and connections offer the best value and convenience for your trip.
Consider Using Positioning Flights: If you are struggling to find great options from your home airport, consider other major hub airports. This gives you even more flexibility. To maximize this strategy, you’d need to book a separate flight to get to that hub airport. This booking can be with any airline and simply sets you up for your next flight. This is called a “positioning flight.” Positioning flights can be crucial because they allow you to start your journey from an airport with better award availability or lower redemption rates. This strategy can open up more options and help you save points or miles on long-haul flights.
Flights
Google Flights: Super Fast Research
Google Flights is not just about checking prices. It’s great for discovering which routes and airlines are possible for your trip. You can quickly filter and sort your options for maximum efficiency. You can also use their Explore feature to get a feel for some future trips. You can also integrate the tool PointsPath as an extension to Google Flights to populate points and miles prices next to the cash prices.
FlightConnections: Find Best Routes
My Top Tool for Visualizing Routes: FlightConnections is awesome for exploring routes and visualizing them on a map. It simplifies the process of finding flights from and to specific airports by airline or alliance, and so much more. If you want to see what destinations are nonstop from an airport, it’s just a few clicks to find out.
Use An Award Booking Tool
Our #1 recommendation is PointsYeah.com. In our opinion, PointsYeah the easiest, fastest, and best all around for multiple reasons. It’s trusted by the Travel Freely team and plenty of other points and miles experts. Best of all, there are free and paid account options. While the free version is robust relative to other options, we recommend getting the paid account if you see yourself searching a lot for flights throughout the year. With flexible date searches, multiple airports, the Daydream Explorer feature, and alerts, it’s super helpful and at lightning speed.
Other options: Many other free and paid tools exist with different pros and cons. They are listed here in alphabetical order: AwardTool, Point.me, AwardLogic, and Roame. For more advanced points and miles experts, the following can be difficult but helpful to use: ExpertFlyer, Seats.aero, and SeatSpy.
Hotels
For robust award hotel searching, there are several options to choose from.
If you want a tool to aggregate various hotel programs, we also recommend PointsYeah.com, which has a Hotel Search feature. It can often be easier to go directly to the Hotel website of the program you want to use to search for and book your travel. Other options include MaxMyPoint, Rooms.aero, and StayWithPoints.
Free Alert Options: Open Hotel Alert is a free tool that notifies you when a specific room type becomes available at a hotel within your chosen date range. It’s perfect for those with fixed travel dates who know which room types qualify as standard for award bookings. Unlike StayWithPoints and MaxMyPoint, Open Hotel Alert doesn’t display a year of availability at a glance or offer flexible alerts for uncertain travel dates.
Cars
The sweet spot for free travel with points and miles is with flights and hotels, but here’s some basic car rental advice.
The easiest way to get “free” car rentals would be to get a Capital One Venture card, put your car rental booking on the card, and then use your Venture miles to reimburse yourself for that purchase. This works for anything that codes as travel on those cards – trains, taxis, cruises, etc. Read more about Venture Miles here.
Another way to book a rental car with points is to use points in your card’s travel portal or “travel credits” that come with more premium cards. You may want to shop around to see if it’s worth using points to book. Be careful; your experiences may vary when using a third party to book a car regarding changes or cancellations.
When booking, consider using your most premium travel card to pay for the rental car to get the best car rental insurance.
Conclusion
By understanding and utilizing the above strategies, you can maximize the value of your points and miles to create incredible travel experiences. Whether booking flights, hotels, or car rentals, being strategic and flexible will help you get the most out of your rewards.
More Reading
Sweet Spots
- Chase Ultimate Rewards Sweet Spots
- Capital One Miles Sweet Spots
- Citi ThankYou Points Sweet Spots
- Amex Membership Rewards Sweet Spots
Destinations
- Best Ways to Travel to Hawaii on Points and Miles
- How to Fly to Europe with Miles and Points
- Best Ways to Get to Africa Using Miles
- Best Ways to Get to Cities in the US and Canada Using Miles
- Best Ways to Get to South America Using Miles (Economy and Premium Cabins)
- Best Ways to Get to Asia Using Miles
- Best Ways to Get to Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Using Miles from the US
