How to travel for free
What you get and how
A quick guide to credit card churning, or the practice of applying for credit cards for the signup bonuses.
You should earn at least about $30,000 a year and have no massive stains on your credit. The rate of return on time is extremely high; a single credit card can bring you ~60,000 award miles (or even up to 200,000 for some applications) and might be worth thousands of dollars of flights. I usually value these rewards at about 1.5-2 cents per mile (CPM), but if you spend them on fancy travel like certain Business or First class flights, you can get 4-10 CPM. If you have enough natural spend, you can pull in ~500,000+ miles a year. And you may even end up keeping some cards for the long haul which offer 5-10% back on key spend categories.
You might be interested in this if:
Getting a credit card and spending a thousand, a few thousand, or maybe even 8k+ in three months seems doable without spending extra
You find frugality easy and are not tempted to spend on stupid things just because you can
You have flexible travel plans and prize serendipity and novelty
Headaches
The downside is potential difficulty getting exactly what you want. I’ve had plenty of times when I’ve said “grr, 50,000 miles for a $600 flight? Coach? No fully flat bed? They won’t even have a separate door for me to board from the economy flyers, or drink and snack service before takeoff? What a ripoff. This is literally theft!” It’s best to bank a lot of award miles, and then idly compare cash to award fares once you want to take a flight. It can be especially tough if your dates are strict, you want multiple seats on the same flight, or to fly in Business and First - though those seats are often available in the week before a flight or about a year out.
All said, there is no point where I have looked at some flights and thought, “man, I really wish I didn’t have airline miles! Wouldn’t spending actual money be great?” And there are times when I’ve seen a ticket that would’ve been $1,000 or $2,000 in coach with no alternatives and picked it up for 20,000 miles.
Side benefits
Plus, this increases your credit score in the long term: having more available credit decreases your “utilization ratio”, which is one of the biggest factors in your score. My credit score sits at about 820 after 60 credit cards over the years, which is helpful for car insurance and certainly would be if I wanted a mortgage.
Premium credit cards often come with huge slates of benefits including travel and delay insurance, extended warranties, concierges, and sometimes even features like primary rental insurance.
What do I do now?
What cards you want to get and in what order depends on many factors. Comment here or reach out to me, and I can give better advice knowing your individual circumstances, including:
What you want (flights, hotels)
Where you want to fly
How much you can spend in 3 months
Whether you have a business and what your risk tolerance is
Reddit.com/r/churning has a quite thorough (and complex) decision flowchart to decide what to apply for
Examples & Strategy
This is where I’m going to shamelessly plug my referral links - if you end up choosing one of the cards here I already have, I’d appreciate if you use my link. A referral is generally worth at least a hundred bucks, but as much as $600 in the case of a Chase Ink.
Take the Sapphire Preferred. You spend 4k in 3 months, you get 60,000 award miles with a $95 fee.
Or 6-10k in 3 months for the Chase Ink mentioned before and get up to 100,000 miles. It’s a business card, so you need the intent to consider forming a business, with at least 0 revenue; the business does not have to be registered in any form. Do not lie about the revenue. Lying is both bad and unnecessary. Possibly the greatest churning strategy right now is for two people to apply for Inks every 3 months while referring each other. 8 cards = 800,000 miles + 320,000 in referral points is over a million miles all in. These cards may have an annual fee, but you can always cancel them if you don’t feel they are worth it after a year.
The Freedom Flex have no annual fee and only $500 required spend, but has rotating bonuses on key categories like restaurants and groceries.
The United cards have 60,000-75,000 United miles for spending $3,000 - 5,000k and a variety of other benefits!
Premium Cards
There are three ultra-premium cards, and I would recommend most people who travel hold at least one of them.
Capital One Venture X (75,000 miles, includes access to Capital One lounges)
Chase Sapphire Reserve (60,000 miles, includes access to Chase lounges)
American Express Platinum (includes access to Amex Centurion lounges and Delta Sky Club lounges when flying Delta.)
All of these cards have significant (~$500/yr) annual fees, a huge suite of “Visa Infinite” or Amex benefits including concierge access, and access to the Priority Pass lounge network along with specific premium lounges. Each maintains its own points currency which can be transferred to a wide variety of airline and hotel programs just before use. They tend to have 5-10x bonuses for booking flights, hotels, and rental cards using their travel portals, which is huge but situationally a good deal. I like the Venture X because it comes with an easy to use $300 travel credit and 10,000 mile a year bonus which pay off the $395 annual fee alone; the Amex has a wide range of benefits but they’re not in categories I would use anyway so it would cost me to hold it.
Oneworld / American Airlines / Alaska Airlines (South America! Japan! Asia!)
Citibank and Barclays have a range of cards offering 50-70,000 American Airlines miles apiece, both personal and business. These are great deals, but many travel bloggers won’t focus on them because they don’t offer referral links. Bank of America also has even better offers of 70,000 incredibly valuable Alaska Airlines miles each on their personal and business cards.
Southwest note
Chase-affiliated Southwest Airlines offers a “Companion Pass” which allows you to designate one individual as your companion to fly with you for free on any Southwest flights you take regardless of whether you yourself got that flight for free with the miles you earned through this guide.
To earn a Companion Pass, you need to get 135,000 miles in one year from card applications, referrals, and purchased flights. Sound tough? You might be able to get these miles from just one business and one personal card, which you can then use to fly yourself for free without even having to spend miles on your companion. The Companion Pass will be valid through the remainder of that year and the next, so if earned in January will be valid for two years.
Pitfalls
The most common mistake I see is people applying for bad credit cards worth less than about a thousand dollars. Why would you waste the chance?
Being too greedy is another. Maybe don’t get six cards from the same bank in six months. Give them a bit of a breather.
Another is spending airline miles on anything that isn’t a transfer to an airline partner to book a flight. Those gift cards are NOT a good value.
Why does this exist?
Banks get 2-3% of everything you spend using a premium credit card - in the form of increased prices by merchants which you pay regardless of what card you use (or not). If their algorithm incorrectly says you are likely to spend hundreds of thousands over a lifetime relationship, they think it’s worth bribing you to signup. Airlines get cash in advance from banks for seats that may not sell anyway and award miles which might never be used.
What’s the catch?
Every issuer has some sort of limit to prevent abuse of the system.
Chase will stop approving you if you've had more than four personal card applications in the last 2 years. Business cards don't count. Because Chase has the best portfolio of cards in the business, it's often best to make every personal application really count.
American Express has a once-in-a-lifetime limit for sign up bonuses, though there are targeted offers which bypass it and other occasional exceptions.
Citibank, Barclays, Capitol One, and Bank of America will only let you get a sign up bonus so often on each card type.
Success is about playing the long game (especially counting up business cards, which don't violate Chase's limits) and going back and forth between issuers as good offers appear.
Which points do I want?
There are three main airline networks: Sky Team (Delta), Star Alliance (United), and One World (American Airlines.)
In addition, Chase, Capital One, and American Express all operate their own award systems which are transferable to numerous airlines. Having a vague idea of what airline alliances fly where you want to go will be helpful, but in the long term just collecting hundreds of thousands or millions of miles in the award programs of the banks above will be helpful.
Resources:
FlightConnections: All flights worldwide on a map!
Why am I writing this?
It feels weird and bad to see people with a lot of smarts, talent, and flexibility paying for flights unnecessarily. I think meeting friends in person can be life-changing and I would like to see more real world connection between my Twitter friends. And I’m hoping for referral points. If this guide does benefit you, please use my links to apply!