Last year I used credit card points to pay for about half of our honeymoon flight. It saved us about $650. Not bad for doing basically nothing. This year, we would like to return to our honeymoon spot for our anniversary. The problem is, with gas prices up and food prices up our flight ticket price is up about $100 per person and our all inclusive hotel rate is up $350 per person, per week. So, we are looking to our credit card points to once again save on this trip.
I mainly use 2 rewards credit cards:
-
Citi Professional Card with Thank You Network.
With this card I get 3 Thank you points per dollar at restaurants, gas stations, and office supply. Everywhere else I get 1 point per dollar. Zero annual fee. -
American Express Business Rewards Gold Card.
With this card I get 1 point per dollar. But there are other benefits to this card including travel options and higher point to reward conversion. Also, I don’t pay an annual fee on this card.
When it comes to travel rewards, the American Express wins hands down. Why? Well it actually requires slightly more points to buy the same flight through American Express than through Thank you Network. However, it is highly unlikely and close to impossible that we will accumulate the 300,000 some odd points to purchase our flight tickets. So, we will need to partially pay with points. This is where American Express is awesome.
Partially pay with points. American Express lets you use up your points and then pay for the rest with your American Express card. The amount you pay is pretty comparable to what you’ll find on the internet. So we can easily set a goal to pay for 1/2 with points and 1/2 with card that is paid in full at end of month. On the other hand, with Thank You Network, you must purchase Thank You points to fill the difference between what you have and what the flight costs in points. And these points aren’t cheap. So we would be paying much more than the face value of the tickets to purchase additional points required.
But you may be wondering about 3:1 ratio for restaurants, gas stations, and office supply with the Citi card. Since we already have a sizable balance of Thank You points we are going to use this ratio to our advantage. We will use the Citi card for purchases that fall into this category. In the end, we will use these points to partially pay for our hotel. But we will get around the partial point fiasco by using a Statement Credit. We will put the hotel room on this card, and use Thank You points to get a statement credit toward the hotel room. The statement credit is only a .07% reward, but with the 3:1 ratio, it works out in our favor.
By using these 2 cards to our advantage we are hoping to save about $850 on our trip.
If you aren’t interested in travel rewards, The Digerati Life has a great post on Cash Back Credit Cards
