Travel for (Almost) Free in 2024
Tl;dr: There are cards that can get you free flights, and there are cards that can get you a week or more worth of hotel stays; combine them, and you’ve got an easy international trip .
We did pretty well for ourselves traveling the world last year, flying to Chile, Japan, and Italy for about $250 total out of pocket per person. In the case of the trips to Chile and Italy, however, we jumped on sale fares on the spur of the moment and happened to have the cash or points on hand to take advantage of the deals. But, as in our trip to Japan, there are some consistently-available deals that can help you fairly reliably (devaluations can always come at any moment) translate one or two new credit cards into a bit of easy world travel. Here’s two examples:
Japan
How does a round trip flight and 10 nights in a hotel in Tokyo or Osaka for under $300 sound? Depending on where you live, this might be very doable.
Option 1: Alaska and IHG
The Alaska Airlines Visa Signature regularly offers 70k bonus points after meeting the $3,000 minimum spend requirement within 90 days. That alone is enough to get you to Osaka for under $100 in taxes and fees. (But beware the coming devaluation.)
Once there, you’ll find a ton of very affordable Japanese hotels… or you could open up an IHG Premier. It’s one of my favorite cards, and it offers 140,000 bonus points after spending $3,000 within 3 months of card opening. That will be enough for the nine-night Osaka stay from the flights above, with plenty left over (enough for a night in Seoul, which would be necessary with the long layover in the DC example above).
For a roundtrip and lodging for the entire stay, the cost would be the $95 fee for each of the credit cards and $75-92 for taxes and fees: $265-282 out of pocket.
Option 2: AA and Choice
AA also offers consistently good mileage redemptions to Japan, for example this flight from Charlotte to Tokyo for 70k points:
As I write this, the only AA card publicly offering a 70k-plus welcome offer is the $595-fee Executive World Elite card. But the AA Aviator is currently offering 60k miles with a single purchase, no minimum spend, and no annual fee for the first year. You could earn the remaining miles with card spend, shopping portal use, the AA dining program, or Bilt points. Alternatively, you could use our referral link, which offers up to 75k points if you add a trusted authorized user and pay the $99 annual fee during the first year.
Once you’re in Tokyo, you could pass the days in a Choice hotel. You can earn 60,000 Choice points with the Choice Privileges Select Mastercard after spending $3,000 in the first 3 months, or 75,000 Capital One miles (transferrable at a 1:1 ratio to Choice) after spending $4,000 in the first three months after opening a Venture card. With Tokyo hotels being available for 8,000 points, those welcome bonuses could net you 8 or 10 free nights, respectively, factoring in the points you would earn from spending to claim the welcome bonus.
If you paid the $99 fee for the Aviator, the $95 fee for the Venture, and $50-75 in taxes and fees for the flight, this trip would cost you $244-269.
Europe
The easy way: Venture Miles
If Japan is not your speed, why not jet off to Europe instead? I haven’t found consistently reliable mileage flights to Europe, but with Capital One, you don’t need them. Simply open a Capital One Venture or Venture X to earn 75,000 bonus miles after spending $4,000 on the card in the first three months after opening.
You can “erase” travel purchases at a 1 mile:1¢ ratio, so those welcome miles (75,000 plus the minimum 8,000 miles from spending to earn the bonus) can net you any flight up to $830; and there’s plenty of affordable flights to Europe from most larger US airports, including on the West Coast:
If you economize on the flight, you should have plenty left over for an affordable AirBnb (and you can earn bonus miles back on that) or hotel.
The hard way: transferring points
As I said, in my experience you have to dig around to find mileage deals to Europe. But you rarely have to dig too deeply. For example, I found this after roughly 4 minutes of searching the ANA mileage redemption search engine:
That’s a flight to Paris for $88 and the points you can typically earn from signing up for an Amex Gold. I wouldn’t consider this a spectacular deal, but it’s not bad either. You could even have plenty of MR points left to transfer to book a hotel if you catch Amex at the right time:
Conclusion
As always, the most important thing when it comes to credit cards is to use them responsibly and only take on the cards that you can manage comfortably and pay off fully each month. But if you have the capacity to add a new card or two to your wallet, you could pretty quickly turn them into free flights and lodging for a dream trip to Japan, Europe, or elsewhere.