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I’m trying to offer a little more in the way of practical advice here as s**t is getting expensive out there. I want you to be able to travel, but not sell your eldest for the privilege. Let me show you how I’d plan a trip to Bangkok for myself if I were starting with no points.
Phase One: Check My Spending
Before opening any cards, I need to check my spending habits. As you saw in the previous section, each bonus has vastly different requirements, meaning some bonuses will be open to you, and others will not. For the sake of ease, we’re going to say that our monthly outgoings are $2,500. We’re prioritizing bonuses, so I won’t bother with what that money is spent on. We also have a small business with $2,000 in outgoings per month.
Narrow Down Potential Flights and Dates
It’s vital not to commit too hard at this point, especially if you’re giving yourself a lot of time to get it done. I know your employer might have PTO rules for when you can submit, but wherever possible, stay flexible.
In this case, I’m going to search for a broad range of flights from San Francisco (where we live in our imaginary world) to Bangkok, then check hotels. I wasn’t a fan previously, but now I use a site like seats.aero to check as many different options as I can. It’s tremendous and cuts my search times down drastically. I set my parameters to flights between San Francisco and Bangkok within a 28-day radius of February 9th. Annoyingly, flights are all pretty high, with the cheapest being 55K with United. A Biz class seat is only 87,500 points, though — worth remembering.
There were some flights to Singapore for 42,000, but we’d still need another 8-10,000 to get to Bangkok from there, so it’s looking like 55,000 is the best bet. The cash prices are hovering at around $500 for the cheapest op,tion which means 42K would be less than 1 cent per point. Terrible.
Instead, I switch to November and find an American Airlines flight for 37.5K + $25. Flights at that time were around $439, so I’m getting 1.1 cents per point. Slightly better but not great.
Hotels, on the other hand, are easy. There are multiple Hyatt hotels for just 4,500 points a night. That’s unbelievable. I’ve stayed at a few of them, and they’re great.
Work out what card to open.
We have rough options — these may go down or up, it’s not clear. But from the looks of it, I’m going to need at least 37,000 American Airlines AAdvantage Miles or upwards of 40,000 United Miles. No cards offer both, so I need to make a decision there. I could open a Citi card for American, or a Chase card for United, or a co-branded card for either of them. For the hotels, Hyatt points are earned with co-branded Hyatt cards or with a Chase product.
If we want to fly in November, we’ve really only got about five months to earn those points. That’s a short window.
With $2,500 of personal outgoings a month, I have $12,500 to spend on personal cards, plus another $10,000 in business expenses. That’s plenty.
In this case, I would:
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Open this card, put all my spending on it, and hit the 150,000 point bonus in 2.5 months
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Open this card and earn 60,000 points in 1.5 months
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Open this business card and earn 60,000 World of Hyatt Points in 2.5 months.
With that, you’re covering multiple bases, giving yourself room for fluctuations, and potentially giving yourself some nice add-ons at the hotel, too.
You’d be ready to book within three months and have enough points to repeat the process on the way back.
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