5 Things We Wish We'd Known Before We Started Using Points & Miles
Taunton England
When we first started learning about points and miles, I thought we needed to know a LOT before we could actually use them. I wanted to understand all the cards, transfer partners, award charts, redemption values, and strategies before we made a move.
Looking back, I realize we probably made it more complicated than it needed to be.
We've learned a lot since we opened our first travel credit cards…and we've made some mistakes along the way. But we've also learned that points and miles don't have to be about finding every possible deal or becoming a travel-hacking expert.
For us, they've simply become a tool that helps us travel more as a family.
Here are five things we wish we'd known when we started, we hope these help you make traveling with points and miles easier for you and your family.
1. We wish we had started sooner!
Our mantra for years was, “We get a great rebate from our cashback card every year and there is no annual fee. Surely you can’t do better than that!”
Boy, were we wrong.
We learned we could do WAY better than that.
With two welcome offers from Chase Sapphire Preferred cards, which each had a $95 annual fee at the time, we booked five nights at the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar for the following spring break. Those five nights would have cost well over $1,000 a night if we had paid cash.
Four years of cash-back rebates still wouldn't have paid for those five nights, even if you take the annual fees into account (which we were able to make back in other ways).
Once that happened, we definitely wished we had started opening travel credit cards sooner!
At the Louvre in Paris, France
2. We wish we'd realized that we didn't need to know everything before opening our first card.
Let me tell you, this Enneagram 5 thinks she needs to know EVERYTHING before she does something.
So it makes sense that I wanted to learn a lot before we started opening travel credit cards.
I will also get myself into analysis paralysis trying to figure out which is THE BEST card to open.
I have learned that there are just some things you can't learn until you start doing it.
I have also learned that a lot of times, there are just a lot of good options for cards to open and not necessarily a BEST card to open.
Sometimes you just have to move forward.
Because if you don't...see number one.
You wait too long.
3. We wish we'd understood transfer partners earlier.
The other mantra we had, besides the one about getting cash back, was that using points through a travel portal didn't seem like any better of a value than getting cash back.
And a lot of times (maybe even most of the time), that's true.
What we didn't understand that made all the difference in the world was transfer partners.
A transfer partner is a hotel or airline that partners with a credit card rewards program, like Chase Ultimate Rewards, and allows you to transfer the points you earn with that credit card into their rewards program.
So, for our Grand Hyatt Baha Mar example, we could take the welcome offers we earned on our Chase Sapphire Preferred cards, as well as the points we earned by spending money on the cards, and transfer them to Hyatt.
Think of it like the free rewards program you probably already signed up for with a hotel or airline.
Those Chase Ultimate Rewards points became Hyatt points.
And that's where things get interesting.
When I compare what it would cost to book the same room through the Chase travel portal on this particular day, it would cost over 100,000 points per night, plus $215, plus an additional daily resort fee of $86.
If I transfer my Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt, I would spend 35,000 points per night with no additional taxes or fees.
So $0 is what I would pay, and I would use almost 70% fewer points.
That's a pretty dramatic difference.
Now, this isn't what happens every time you transfer points to a hotel or airline. Sometimes booking through a travel portal will actually be the better deal. But without understanding transfer partners, we wouldn't have even known to look for this option.
Our first big points trip at Baha Mar
4. We wish we'd stopped trying to find “the perfect” redemption.
This works a couple of different ways.
First, we've learned not to hang onto points because we're afraid to spend them.
It can be tempting to feel like we need to hang onto our points because we might want them later. We might regret using some now on an impromptu weekend getaway when we could have saved them for a bigger trip.
And the answer for us has been: no.
We have found that we can always earn more points.
But we can't go back in time and take that trip.
Earning points and miles has allowed us to take the impromptu weekend or overnight stay that we wouldn't have taken before. And those trips have given us much-needed breaks from the hustle of our routine and resulted in some really fun family memories.
We have not yet regretted a trip we booked with points.
Second, we've learned that searching for “the perfect redemption” isn't always the best option for us.
Look, we love a deal.
And when we feel like we get a REALLY good points redemption, meaning not a lot of points for a big cash-price night or flight, we love it. We really do.
But let me tell you what we don't love...
Spending hours hunting for one.
We don't want finding flights for our family to Italy next summer for as few points as possible to become the four- or five-month project that it can be.
Instead, we will sometimes pay more points to be done, free up that mental space, and move forward with planning the trip.
In other words, not everything has to be optimized.
Using points is already a pretty great optimization in our travel.
5. We wish we'd realized family travel was actually possible.
Outside of Taunton, England
We have always valued family vacation time together.
My father ingrained this in me at a young age: time away as a family was important. And when we could, we tried to go see someplace we had not been before.
So figuring out a place to go (usually to the beach or the mountains!) every year together was already important to us.
And when we could make a visit overseas happen to see family for a wedding, we made it happen. We loved getting to see someplace new along the way.
What points and miles did for us was make us realize we could go to the beach AND go to the Bahamas AND go to Puerto Rico all in the same year.
We no longer had to think of taking the kids to Italy as a “one day we will go” kind of trip.
I just booked the plane tickets last week for next summer.
Points and miles allowed us to act on something that we already valued: time away, adventures as a family, and seeing new places.
And honestly, that's what we love most about them.
We aren't earning points and miles just to earn points and miles.
We're using them to go places, take the trips, and make the memories while our kids are still kids.
You May Also Want To Read:
The Best Travel Credit Cards for Families
