After landing in Taiwan at the cusp of the pandemic in 2020 we had to sloooooow down our travel significantly and spent most of the past 2 years on this wonderful island. Now that we feel more comfortable to travel internationally again, we’ve been back on the travel rewards train to score amazing deals.
In this blog post, we want to share the latest bookings we made to show you how inexpensive travel can be if you leverage travel rewards. If you are new to travel rewards, please make sure to refer to our guide to travel rewards and check our redemptions since 2018 on our travel rewards page.
Are travel rewards worth the hassle?
If you need convincing on whether or not accumulating travel rewards is worth it, here is a quick recap of what we’ve claimed:
- In 2019, we booked 12 international one way tickets, for 340,000 travel rewards and saved about $6,150 USD (check out all the details on our 2019 EOY Travel Rewards Report)
- In 2020, we booked 8 international one way tickets, for 144,000 travel rewards and saved about $3,180 USD (check out all the details on our 2020 EOY Travel Rewards Report)
- In 2021, we booked 6 international one way tickets, for 200,000 travel rewards and saved about $2,297 USD (check out all the details on our 2021 EOY Travel Rewards Report)
This means that between July 2018 and the end of 2021, we have been redeeming 26 international one way tickets that represented a conservative savings of nearly $12K by using 684,000 travel reward points that we earned for FREE.
What did we book?
First of all we were looking to visit family in California, so we started looking at buying a flight from France to the USA. It turns out that while this was pretty last minute booking, we stumble upon a great deal (which was 50% off the average 70K United Airlines miles per one way ticket)
After booking our flight from Europe to the USA we decided to book our next destination: Australia.
As we looked at our flight options, we realized that most flights from California have a connection to Fiji. We then thought that it would be cool to stay in Fiji for a while.
This is where our Marriott Bonvoy points become super handy. As it allowed us to book a 6 days / 5 nights stay at a 5 star hotel and another flight from Fiji to Australia – all using travel reward points.
Beside that stay at Fiji we had to book two more set of international one-way ticket to and from Fiji.
How much did we save?
Here is the breakdown of our redemptions with the rewards we spent and the estimated savings
| Description | Program/Travel rewards used | Any additional cash cost to purchase the item | Estimated savings (*) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 one way tickets from France to California | 66,000 United MileagePlus award miles | $186.14 | $1,617 |
| 2 one way tickets from California to Fiji | 80,000 American AAdvantage | $11.20 | $1,701 |
| 5 days at Fiji Marriott Resort | 141,000 Marriott Bonvoy | $0 | $1,421 |
| 2 one way tickets from Fiji to Australia | 30,000 American AAdvantage | $181,60 | $497 |
(*) Note: estimated savings, would be booking the same flight at the same date using cash instead of travel rewards.
If you sum it all up, this represents a total saving of $5,236 in which we paid $379 in fees for a total net saving of $4,847. Not bad, huh?
Our bottom line
If you live in the US and spend a large amount of money on credit cards, it can be quite useful to open credit cards that provide you with great sign-up bonuses that you can accumulate and later redeem. The most useful redemption for us is towards airfare and hotels. You can also redeem them towards car rentals, statement credit or even cash (based on the type of credit card you sign up for).
As we hopefully showed in this short post, you can really enjoy some nice treats for practically nothing by using points. And now that travel is reopening again, today might be the best time to start accumulating these points.
If you do not know where to get started, please check out our latest credit cards deals page where we keep up to date, dedicated deals we’ve been using that you can also benefit from!
And as always, if you have any questions about this post, please feel free to leave us a comment in the comment section below!
4 Comments
Cynthia · May 22, 2022 at 12:16 pm
How far in advance do you generally book flights on points? I know you said one of these flights was last-minute, but typically? We’re just getting started collecting points via CC SUBs, and our first trip we’d like to use points for is Canada to Mexico in January 2024. Would you book two one-way flights when the booking window opens and then another two one-ways to get home when those flights open up? Can’t wait to get one trip under our belts to figure some of this stuff out! Thanks for your post, it was very helpful. 🙂
Mr. Nomad Numbers · May 22, 2022 at 2:29 pm
Hi Cynthia,
Congrats on getting started with accumulating points with CC and glad you’ve been enjoying this post. Check out our previous travel rewards report to give a sense of the type of booking we made in the past!
All of these booking indicated on this post were made in early May 2022 so quite late minute in our opinion, especially for late summer dates. I think there isn’t much value to book 2 way ticket if you plan to travel for an extended period of time as we do, since we can then decide when to return. If you are planning a 1-2 weeks trip, then yeah better to get a round trip ticket to save a bit, otherwise it is more a contraint that anything else IMHO. I think you still have time for January 2024, as it should be off season (after NYE crazyness). Definitely start taking a look and if you get these juicy early booking deals (which are usually way below the average) you should go for them. It is hard however to know what are usually good deals as they do vary per destination and time of the year. So as you said, getting your first trip under your belt would be a great way to learn and improve over time. This first one might not be the best redemption you guys will be able to get but well… it should be free right? 🙂
Are you guys traveling a lot? How many weeks a year do you usually spend on international travel?
Moe (Moementum Finance) · May 23, 2022 at 4:55 pm
This is amazing! Do you have to spend a lot on your daily expenses on these credit cards to continue to accumulate and build a large rewards points balance? I understand the sign-up bonus on these cards can be insane but imagine those rewards points will run put after you use them so there must a be a way you earn new rewards points quickly.
Mr. Nomad Numbers · May 25, 2022 at 12:53 pm
Hi Moe. We usually use these cards for our largest expenses which are Airbnb that we book for a month at a time. We usually reach the sign-up bonus of the card we open within the first month of using the card (as we timed it to receive the card by the time we need to plan the next season of our travels). As for running out of card, well there are SO many cards (https://www.nomadnumbers.com/ressources/cards/), that we have never been in a situation where there wasn’t a card we could open. Most card let you re-open them after a 24-48 months window so we’ve already been cycling through all of the one we open already once.
Another hack for us who used to be most of the time outside of the USA, it to use Traveling Mailbox (https://www.nomadnumbers.com/traveling-mailbox-review/) to receive the card and then use Apple pay to use it for our daily expenses while oversea (make sure to get a card with no foreign transaction fees though).