How to travel for free .

How to travel for free ...

Tips and tricks for maximizing your vacation 

When people find out how much I travel they assume I have loads of spare money just sitting around for adventures.  The truth is that I don’t have loads of money, it’s just that travel is a high priority in our family and therefore it gets a bigger budget than, say, new clothes or shoes.  Even then our budget is still limited and I’m forced to get creative when planning our numerous adventures.

There are plenty of ways to travel on a tight budget if you’re young and single.  We’ve all heard those tips: hitchhiking, couch surfing, staying in hostels or bartending at night while you surf during the day.  And they’re great tips if they fit your lifestyle.  But I’m not young anymore, I’m married with a child who needs 3 square meals a day and a quieter place to sleep than a youth hostel.

So instead of cutting corners on our travel budget I use a combination of savings and savvy spending to go where we want but for less money.  If I’m extremely diligent then one vacation can pay for the next but in most cases it’s a “Buy 3 Vacations, Get 1 Free” deal.  In this three-part series I’ll share a variety of ways you can save enough money and/or rewards points to travel for free, ending with a few scenarios of how you can get a vacation for next to nothing.

Credit Cards

Credit cards are by far the easiest way to travel for free.  Well-timed sign up bonuses can earn you a free roundtrip ticket or a few nights at a beach resort.  Credit cards are also an essential part of my travels because they’re my preferred method of payment.

The secret to getting the most from credit card rewards is to use them to pay your monthly bills and everyday spending.  These are bills you have to pay anyway so why not charge them on the credit card and earn rewards at the same time?  Simply pay with a credit card first and then pay the credit cards off every month.  If you can’t pay off your credit card every month then you shouldn’t sign up for one, at least until you’re able to control your spending.

We use our credit cards to pay all of our monthly bills except rent.  The monthly expenses that we charge add up to about $1,400, making it easy to sign up for credit cards that require a $3,000 spend in 3 months to earn their sign up bonus.

If you have a hard time finding $1,000 per month in regular expenses to charge then consider timing large purchases around a new credit card application.  Car and home maintenance, medical bills, taxes and insurance are hefty expenses that we all face.  If you know that this winter you’ll need new tires for your car then start shopping for a credit card now and use your big purchases to reach that sign up bonus more easily.

Frequently signing up for credit cards in order to reap the benefits of a sign up bonus is known as credit card churning.  Some experienced travelers churn credit cards every 3 months, even signing up for multiple cards at a time.  Brandon and I usually sign up for 1-2 new cards per year, keeping our old cards for a few years and then cancelling them if they’re no longer useful.

Our newest credit card additions have been the Citi Premier and the Starwood Preferred Guest American Express.  The Citi Premier offers 50,000 ThankYou points when we spend $3,000 in the first 3 months.  Those ThankYou points can be converted to other points or miles with Citi’s travel partners such as Hilton HHonors, Air France and Virgin Atlantic.  The SPG card offers 30,000 points when we spend $3,000 in the first 3 months, enough for 8 nights in their Category 2 hotels.  There are plenty of Starwood hotels in Europe so we’re saving those points for weekend trips when we move to Germany.

We earned over 36,000 points at Hilton Munich Park for a 5-night stay, enough for a free night at a Category 6 hotel

Travel Reward Programs

Travel reward programs are another excellent way to travel for free and I’m not just talking about frequent flier miles.  There are reward programs for almost every type of travel: hotels, airlines, third party booking sites like Expedia, airport parking, etc.  I flew out of the Boston Logan Airport almost a dozen times before realizing that many of the offsite airport parking companies offer reward programs.  During our recent trip to Europe I earned 500 American AAdvantage miles as well as one free night of parking with PreFlight Airport Parking.  Their daily rates were considerably cheaper than parking at the airport, further increasing my savings.

It’s always a good idea to sign up for a rewards program before booking a flight or hotel, even if you don’t plan to use that brand again in the future.  Our flight to Europe was through Icelandair and we each earned 7,800 miles for the trip.  I had no plans to fly with them again so before the miles expired I exchanged them for $60 in Amazon.com giftcards through a website called Points.com.  It wasn’t a great exchange rate but it was better than letting them go to waste…or not having earned them at all!

To make things easier to track I keep an Excel spreadsheet of all my reward programs and their current balances.  AwardWallet is a website that does the same thing automatically but I prefer doing it myself with my little spreadsheet.  To each his own!

We earned $60 in gift cards just for signing up for Icelandair’s frequent flier program

Cashback Portals

Cashback portals are one of my favorite ways to earn free money.  A cashback portal is a special link you use to make an online purchase.  For example, say you want to purchase a $50 shirt at Kohls.com.  Instead of typing “kohls.com” directly into your browser and making your purchase you would visit a website such as Ebates.  A quick search shows that Kohl’s is offering 3% cashback.  Use the Ebates link which will take you to the Kohls.com website and then make your purchase.  Now your $50 shirt will earn you $1.50 in cash back.

A great website I use to compare various portal offers is Cashback Monitor.  It shows all known cashback offers for a particular store so you can compare the best ones.  Beware, however, that not all of the cashback websites are that great.  Some are bad at tracking your purchases or take months to credit your money.  I read reviews on each cashback website before signing up for a new account and usually stick with using the same 3-4 websites, even if there’s a better offer out there.  BeFrugal is one of the cashback portals that has the best offers but can take FOREVER to credit.  A purchase I made on Amazon.com won’t get credited to my account for 3 months, after the return policy for that item has expired.  I still use BeFrugal but not as often as other websites.

One thing to consider before using a cashback portal is that most of them won’t allow promo codes to be used if the code isn’t listed on their own site.  That means if you sign up for a store’s newsletter and get a promo code via email you won’t be able to use it and get cashback.  Ebates is one of the few exceptions and it’s one of my favorite cashback portals to use.

Many airline rewards programs have shopping portals too and instead of getting cash back you’ll receive airline miles when you shop online.  This is great for earning those last few hundred miles for an award ticket and often they will also have special offers on top of the miles you’ll earn.  Last month I took advantage of a great back-to-school offer from American Airlines and earned an extra 1,250 miles.  Similar promotions were run by Delta, United and Southwest.  If you’re looking to make a large purchase then it would be wise to wait until a promotion like this to rack up a hefty amount of miles.

Travel Hacking

Using a combination of credit cards, rewards programs, cashback portals and coupon codes to get a great deal on a vacation is known as travel hacking.  I personally hate the term.  It implies some sort of illegal activity, cheating the system to pay less than what is owed.  Really it’s just smart shopping.  When I wrote this post about saving over $200 on my Disney resort hotel I was travel hacking, but on a small scale.

There’s a fine moral line with travel hacking though.  Sometimes airlines make mistakes and it’s an opportunity for travel hackers to capitalize on that, gaming the system to get a flight that they know they shouldn’t have access to.  In February United posted a mistake fare for first-class flights leaving the UK but in order to get the incredibly low $50 flight you had to set your profile location to Denmark.  Many Americans tricked the system, purchased these tickets and then complained when United refused to honor the fares.  Some bloggers like this one promoted the fare and encouraged their readers to protest when the mistake was corrected.  I’m all about saving money but not at the expense of my moral values.  Just because you can save money in some situations doesn’t mean you should.