If you’ve read the first post in this series, you’ve already done the hardest part. You picked a travel rewards credit card, earned your first batch of points, and started learning how this hobby works.
So, now what?
Use Them for a Real Trip
The easiest first move is the one we made: use your bank’s travel portal.
Most banks have a portal that works a lot like Expedia. You search for a flight or hotel, book your trip, and use points instead of cash. That’s how we started. We booked with cash up front and then used Capital One’s Purchase Eraser to cover the travel afterward.
It wasn’t the best value we could have gotten from those points, and that’s okay. At that stage, the goal wasn’t to squeeze every last bit of value out of them. The goal was to take a trip, save some money, and see how the process worked.
Once you use points for a real trip, the hobby starts to make a lot more sense.
Keep Earning
One welcome bonus is enough to prove this hobby works. It usually isn’t enough to keep taking the kinds of trips most of us dream about. Bigger trips need bigger balances, and that means continuing to earn.
For most people, everyday spending alone won’t get you there quickly. That’s why people who travel regularly with points eventually open another travel rewards card and earn another welcome bonus.
That doesn’t mean opening five cards tomorrow. When I started, I didn’t have some elaborate strategy. I earned one bonus, took a trip, wanted to do it again, and looked into what card made sense next. Over time I added Chase, Amex, and a few others, not because I had a master plan, but because I wanted to keep traveling. If you don’t have a specific trip in mind yet, focus on transferable points. They keep your options open until you decide.
There’s One More Level to This Hobby
Here’s the one thing worth knowing before you go further: those same transferable points can also be moved to airline and hotel partners, not just spent through your bank’s portal. That single shift from “how much can these points erase” to “what’s the best way to use these points” is what eventually got us into business class seats and hotels that would’ve been way outside our normal budget.
We’ll walk through exactly how that works, transfer partner by transfer partner, in the next post. For now, just know it exists. You don’t need to understand it to take your first trip.
Learn From Other People’s Trips
One of the easiest ways to learn this hobby is by seeing how other people put the pieces together. Every trip we’ve booked has taught us something different. Sometimes we started with a destination and figured out what points we needed; other times we found an incredible opportunity first and built the trip around it.
That’s exactly why we’ve written about our trips to Taiwan, Tahiti, Thailand, Japan, Germany, and South Africa, plus how we’d plan a trip to Argentina from scratch. They’re not just trip reports; they’re the thought process behind each booking, what worked, what didn’t, and how the points came together.
You don’t have to copy what we did. Just start seeing how the pieces fit, and before long you’ll start spotting the same opportunities in your own trips.
Your Next Step
Keep earning when it makes sense. Take the trip. Pay attention to how other people use their points. Every redemption teaches you something new.
Eventually you’ll stop thinking of your points as a way to save money on travel, and start thinking of them as the tool that makes the trip possible in the first place.
Next up: how we actually research award flights, compare programs, and figure out what points we need before we ever transfer a single one.