- I wanted to plan a trip to visit a friend who lives in Australia, so I started saving credit card rewards.
- I opened two cards that both had intro rewards and transferred the points to a card.
- I decided an alarm and I waited for free tickets – my cost for 4 tickets was $ 348.
15 years ago, I studied abroad in Australia, and I returned twice, including honeymoon. Whenever, I have paid at least $ 1,300 for a ticket to Sydney from Minneapolis/St. Paula
This year marks my third trip to the continent, and I paid for our entire fourth ticket family with credit card rewards and less than $ 350 from the pocket.
My best friend married an Australian man she met while we were studying abroad. They live in the north of Sydney with their two children and most recently bought a home. We realized it was the perfect opportunity to visit them.
Arriving in Sydney can be expensive, and our oldest no longer qualifies as a lap baby. In 2023, when they were visiting us, we intended to go to Australia within the next few years. I began to strategy how we would win and reproduce the credit card reward points for the flight.
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1. I opened the credit cards with bonus points
Because I have my own business, I knew that opening and using business credit cards would give me a significant amount of points to use. I started with the paint business money card, hitting the amount of welcoming expenses and got the bonus bonus points.
After that, I started the process again with the other card, the unlimited Ink business. After hitting the bonus welcome amount, those points were deposited in my Chase account. I have collected over 200,000 miles relatively quickly, including points from the initial welcome bid and the points I have received from using the card for expenses.
2. I transferred all my points to a card
I just had a reserve of Chase Ultimate RewardsABOUT Points, I had to transfer my business card points so that all my points were accessible from a card. I transferred my points to my favorite Chase Sapphire account.
My favorite Sapphire Chase account already had approximately 125,000 points from a previous welcome offer and additional accumulation that had not yet been used. Although we have not used this opportunity, you can also transfer points from the Chase credit card of a family member.
3. I set an alarm to get the cheapest tickets
The last part of the puzzle was to find affordable tickets for which we had enough points. I set up a price alarm on Google Flegs for the days we were interested in, and then waiting for notifications. I have also used Tralller’s Flight Premium service, which sends flight arrangements to your box. When I saw the flight prices fall from MSP to Sydney, I threw everything to control it.
While I could have transferred points to an airline to get even more redemption miles, I didn’t know how long the flight deal would last. Thus, I reserved directly through the travel platform Chase Ultimate Rewards to catch the flight deal. The cheapest and fastest flights were through United, an airline I didn’t fly often, but we were willing to reserve for the price.
We adjusted our travel dates for a few days to ensure that we received the cheapest agreement, but we were able to book tickets for a two-week period coinciding with the rest of our children’s spring.
I found tickets for $ 1,117 each and used my total combined of approximately 330,000 points to reserve them. Since I didn’t have enough points to cover the whole cost of flights, I paid the remaining balance in cash, which ended to be about $ 348.
As we had to pay an annual fee to open the business money credit card, it was still worth it. Even including the annual fee, this strategy saved us just over $ 4,027 in these four flights to Australia.