We’ve earned more than one million points for travel this year. Here’s how.
Earning points for travel is a non-negotiable if you want to travel hack. In January, I decided that I wanted to see if we could earn 800,000 points this year. I recently added up our points, and we’ve passed one million! This absolutely does not mean we’ve spent one million dollars this year – far from it. The below strategies outline how we accrue points and miles.
Sign-up bonuses
The fastest way to earn tens of thousands of points. Open a new credit card, hit the sign-up bonus target, receive your reward, and repeat. This is how we’ve earned most of our points this year. For many people, however, continually opening new credit cards and hitting the spend total is not sustainable, so keep reading for how we earn points.
Referral bonuses
We have referred each other to several cards this year – the person referring earns points (usually between 10k – 15k) and then we also get the points when the sign-up bonus is hit. If you have cards you love, refer to family and friends for a low-effort way to add to your points total.
Regular spend
We all have daily expenses. Figuring out a way to maximize that spend is a big component of earning points and miles. Here are some of our favorite cards for regular spend.
American Express Gold – earns 4x on groceries and dining
Chase Sapphire Preferred – earns 2x on travel, 3x on dining, 3x on online grocery purchases, and 3x on streaming
Chase Freedom Unlimited – 1.5x on all categories and 3x on drugstore purchases
Shopping Portals
Nearly every major airline (United, American, Delta, Southwest) has an online shopping portal. Add the extension to your browser, activate it when you’re shopping online, and watch the miles add up! Our go-to is the United Portal because we’re based out of O’Hare, a United hub.
If United is not an option for the site, we use Rakuten, which earns AmEx points that are deposited into your account quarterly. If you don’t have an AmEx account, you can earn cash back.
United MileagePlus X app
One of my favorite easy ways to earn miles for flights. I wrote a long post about the app here. Simply put, buy gift cards for yourself, earn points on your credit card for the gift card purchase AND earn United miles on top of those credit card points.
Regular travel spend
Nearly every trip we take is a combination of using points & miles and paying in cash (credit card). When we are paying with a credit card, we use one with a higher travel multiplier (like the Chase Sapphire or Marriott Bonvoy) to accrue additional points for future travel.
Marriott is our preferred hotel chain for a number of reasons, but one thing we’ve really liked this year is their frequent promotions to earn more points. They had a promotion earlier this year that earned us 8,000 points towards future stays on stays we already were planning on – not bad!
