Traveling With Credit Card Points- Video #4- Tips and Strategies to Maximize Benefits

Okay, how to maximize points. So the biggest mistake that I’ve seen is, for example, Chase we love. You go on to Chase, they have a travel porter. This is what they want you to do. Let’s say someone has Chase, 500 ,000 points, and they go in and they book the park Hyatt directly on the Chase portal, where the park Hyatt in New York City is $1,800 a night.

They’re probably gonna charge 200,000 points per night. And so we can get two nights if we go straight through the Chase portal. However, if we know we can transfer Chase points one to one to our Hyatt loyalty ID, which we have set up, and we go on to the park Hyatt, it’s only 25 ,000 points a night directly through, so okay, we’re staying there two nights.

We transfer 50,000 points, and now we’ve saved $3,600, which would be the rate times two. And I just did this a couple of weeks ago, so I’m using that example. It’s the park Hyatt in New York City.

We can blow all 500,000 points on two nights, or we can use 10% of our points for two nights, which we’d rather have pretty simple. So we never want to typically book travel directly through the portals. They can go so much more if you know where the best deals are at.

So in general, I used to not pay for hotels with points because the points we’re gonna show in a second, other than these kind of deals, which you can find are extremely valuable on airlines. So let’s just talk this through for a second.

So if we have an airline domestically, and we’re going from, let’s say, Pittsburgh to across the country, like LA, I don’t even know if that’s a direct flight, but just in general, a domestic economy of flight, we’ll talk about them, we’ll talk about a first class flight for the same flight.

So if we purchase this in cash, we’re probably looking at $400 one way, or like $1,100 one way if we wanna go first class. If we go with points, that’s probably gonna be 60,000 points, or 80 to 120,000 points.

So almost a one to one ratio in some of these, travel is getting more expensive, so they’re actually charging you more than one point for that if you really wanna get there. However, if you’re going international, so one of the most recent trips I did was, we went to Switzerland, and we went from Pittsburgh direct to London, and then we went London direct to Zurich.

And so this one we actually paid cash for, it was like, I don’t know, 200 bucks. The Pittsburgh to London, if you paid cash for the economy seat, it was like 2,000, and if you paid cash for the business class seat, it was 7,000.

The associated points here, I believe, from Colin Creck was like 80 ,000 or 160 ,000. So if you see 160 ,000 points, this was British Airways to save $7 ,000, that’s a no -brainer. And so generally speaking, the best value in the points game is first class international flights.

These flights are typically costing between $6,000 to $10,000 per person per way. You can get completely for free if you build up enough points with a chase, with American Express, and then one for one transfer those to the airline that you choose to get there.

And then as far as the hotels, one for one there, or maybe you were planning on doing this trip on cash, and we’re saving 70% of the cost by knocking the airlines out, and you decide to do an Airbnb or hotel, and you just add a cash, and you have more money then to spend on going out, food, experiencing the cities, et cetera.

Any questions on that? No, that makes sense. Yeah. All right, perfect.