While we love frequent travel we don’t love paying full price for it. The less you pay the more often you can get away. Here’s some beginners tips to play the travel hacking game.
We live for a deal; ballin’ on a budget if you will. Travel as much as you can when you can, but, most importantly, as cheaply as you can. After all, spending less on Trip A leaves more money for Trip B and C. Dare we dream, Trip G?? Here are a few tricks to use with the shopping you were already doing. You can accrue points for travel on the cheap.
Our first dabble into “credit card points to fund your travel” started over 10 years ago with the Southwest Airline card. Being a Southwest credit card holder meant using our daily expenses to cover flights, access family boarding, and get free checked bags for ski trips. However, lately Southwest has lost all their good perks. We needed to transition to cards that didn’t put all our points “eggs” in one basket. We also needed more international reach so we dipped our toes into the Flexible Travel Card world.
Flexible Travel Cards are credit cards that accrue points. These points can be transferred to many different airlines and hotels. You can book travel for even cheaper than what you’d find in your credit card’s portal.
We started with two and they happened to be the most popular. Their ease of use and ability to transfer to multiple airlines and hotels make them attractive.
The goal in the points game is to be earning more than 1 point for dollar spent. The 3x points on dining and groceries is nice. This comes in addition to all of the included travel protection. My other card is my points-earning workhorse, the American Express Gold (Amex). (Update 11/17/25: Current sign on bonus elevated to 100,000. Only if opened in google chrome incognito browser!) This little golden nugget (pun intended) gets me most of my daily points. It offers 4x on all dining and groceries. Literally anything you can buy at, say, Meijer will code as 4x the points. This is most of what we spend money on in our house— food we cook and food other people cook for us. Although it has some coverage, the Amex offers less in travel protection. However, it also opens up the world of gaining points through the online shopping portal Rakuten. Rakuten is a free online shopping portal that offers either cash back through their site OR, if linked to your American Express account, points back instead. Whenever I’m online shopping, I start through their website or app to claim credit for my purchases. It earns me on average about 20,000 plus extra points per quarter. That’s two one-way flights from JFK to London this summer! Open an account right now and you and I both get $30 or 3000 points! How does this work, you ask? Say I need to get some new shoes for the kids. They will just die if they’re not Nike. I can search “Nike” on Rakuten. It shows all the stores they support that sell them and how much cash back is at each store. Nike.com might be 2% back, while Shoes.com is 8%, and Zappos.com might be 10%. So, I’ll pick the particular store based on the highest cash back. Rakuten will literally send you a check for all your cash back every quarter. Cash is nice but points are more valuable. By linking Rakuten to my Amex account instead of 10% back, I get 10x the points to my American Express point bank. This applies even if I pay with an entirely different card. $50 shoes with 10x points is 500 points to Amex plus the 1 point/per dollar I’ll be getting with whatever card I’m using. That’s 550 total points for something I was already buying. Maneuvers like this help get you thousands of points online doing the spending you were already doing! With my Amex Gold, I’m getting plenty of points buying groceries and dining. I also get the quarterly Rakuten return on top! And this is just the BEGINNING! Check back periodically for more tips on stacking the deals and optimizing these points for redemption for awesome deals! Check out how to use these all these points to now BOOK YOUR NEARLY FREE TRAVEL! Check out how we did Spring Break in Paris for cheaper than Florida!
Our first, which is still lauded by most in the credit card game as the best for beginners, is the 
One more comment about travel cards… don’t ever just google for an offer. Please use our links, another travel blogger or friend to support their efforts. When you use our links we get points back in return. Thanks for the support!