Planning travel is fun-especially when it’s free! I just booked our tickets for our trip to Peru next year- and I didn’t spend a single penny. This is all thanks to my little friend the Citi AAdvantage Executive MasterCard! It’s an American Airlines credit card that gave me 100,000 bonus miles for signing up. For those of you new to the miles game, that’s HUGE- in fact it’s the biggest bonus I’ve gotten from any credit card to date. Needless to say I was thrilled when hearing about this offer back in May and getting approved for the card.
The card did have a $10,000 spending minimum that needed to be met within the first three months. However, thanks to my Bluebird tactics, we “spend” way more than that each month by buying Visa gift cards and then uploading them to our Bluebird account for the cash. So while I’m putting all this spending on MasterCard, it’s really not costing me anything with the help of Bluebird and UPromise. I know this confusing, so if you’re interested in starting in on the free miles that are available let me know and I’m happy to walk you through it.
The last piece for this particular card bonus was that it comes with an annual fee of $450. I paid that back in May, but was quickly refunded $200 for meeting the spending. So in essence, it still cost me $250 for the card, but the amount of miles it provided FAR outweighed the $250 price tag. And obviously I’ll be cancelling this card next April before getting hit with another $450 annual fee that does not provide any additional miles.
So, with our 125,000 miles that we had in our account, I knew we would be flying on American Airlines for our trip next year. Our aim was to do the 4 Day Inca Trail Trek to Machu Picchu and spend time in the Amazon Jungle. The only trick is that when booking with rewards miles, you have to plan far ahead in order to get the particular dates you want. Due to our school schedules, we were looking at next summer, though a bit flexible in our exact dates. I aimed for beginning of August so that it would give us the whole summer to train for the Trek, and still get us back in time to recuperate for a few days before the fall semester began. I’ve been checking flight availability on a daily basis waiting for the right tickets to become available- and they did.
Thanks to our plethora of miles, we’re even flying first class on the way home (an overnight flight)! I’m pretty excited for that, maybe we’ll actually sleep well! With both Pablo and I in school right now, and only one of us working full time, there’s no way we could afford all of this travel without deals like this. I’m thrilled that we’re able to make a trip like this without hurting our wallets. We even have enough miles left over to use for our flights within Peru (Lima to Cusco, Cusco to Iquitos and Iquitos back to Lima), so we literally won’t be spending anything on our airfare for this trip.
For those of you interested in the last nitty gritty details, here’s some final tips. When booking award space travel, the miles you have do not cover the cost of taxes on the flights. For our flights to Peru, it came to a total of $148.88 for both of us- definitely worth it for an international flight, but I still didn’t want to pay that :-). So, I used my Barclay Card to cover this. This card gives me 2 points per dollar spent on it and it has a unique travel reward system. It recognizes any purchases made for travel (airfare, restaurants, rental cars, hotels, excursions, etc) and gives you the option to ask for a “reimbursement” for these. This only applies to travel purchases. So, since I currently have 15,000 points on this card, I can use those points to reimburse for the $148.88 (14,900 points) I just spent on travel paying for the taxes. (P.S. I love that this card doesn’t require you to have enough points at the time of purchase- I have up to 4 months to request reimbursement! So I’ll follow the same strategy when I book our other flights within Peru, knowing that I’ll have more than enough points to pay for it within the next 4 months).
In the end the only cost I will have incurred is the $250 I paid back in May. If anyone can find me a round trip ticket in first class to Peru for less than $125 per person, please let me know 🙂
Fire Round the World 