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How We Scored $8K Flights to Naples Italy for Just 110K travel points and $800: Our Spring Break 2025 Adventure Booked!
Last April of 2024, my wife Andrea and I took a memorable trip to Italy over Spring Break. Our adventure began with a luxurious business class flight from JFK to Florence, where we stayed for a couple of nights. From Florence, we took a scenic train ride down to Naples for a night and then moved on to Vico Equense, near Sorrento, for a two-night stay. Unexpected Changes and Highlights We had planned to spend another night in Naples before heading home, but our flight was canceled, forcing us to leave a night early. Despite this hiccup, we thoroughly enjoyed our time in this beautiful region of Italy and felt…
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Summer 2024 Family California Road Trip: 10 Free Nights with Points
A Little Background As an AAU basketball coach, I have a tournament scheduled for the last weekend of July. Perfect timing for a California road trip! We’ll be making stops in Sacramento, Burbank, and Anaheim, visiting family along the way. Planning the Trip with Marriott Points Back in March 2024, Marriott ran a promotion for their Bonvoy Boundless credit card. After spending $4,000, you receive five free night certificates (each worth up to 50,000 points per night). With property taxes due, it was an opportune time to sign up for the card. Plus, the card comes with a free night certificate (up to 35,000 points) after your one-year anniversary. Not…
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Road to 2 Million Travel Points
Reaching our first million travel points was an exciting milestone, which I detailed in a previous blog post. Now, let’s dive into how we achieved our second million points and how we utilized them to create unforgettable travel experiences. How We Earned 2 Million Travel Points To reach 2 million travel points, we continued leveraging our strategic use of credit cards: Venture X: Our primary catch-all card, earning 2x points per dollar spent, netted us around 150K points through regular spending. AMEX Cards: We accumulated about 127K points, with the AMEX Gold card being our main card for groceries and dining, earning 4x points per dollar. The AMEX Platinum card…
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First 1 Million Travel Points: My Journey
My journey into the world of travel points truly began in March 2022, thanks to an invitation from my brother Nate to sign up for the Venture X credit card. Although I had previously dabbled with an Alaska Airlines credit card and an Expedia credit card, it wasn’t until this point that I really dove into the travel points game. The Start with Venture X What sold me on the Venture X was a YouTube video highlighting its benefits: lounge access, a $300 travel credit, 10K bonus miles each year, and 2x points on every dollar spent. At the time, the sign-up bonus was 100K points after spending $4K. Within…
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Our Family Christmas Adventure: London, Paris, and NYC on Points
Traveling with a family of six is always a challenge, both financially and logistically. However, with a bit of creativity and a lot of travel points, we managed to book an incredible trip to London, Paris, and New York City during the Christmas to New Year’s season without breaking the bank. Quick Summary: Using 330,000 travel points, we booked flights for our family of six from Seattle to San Francisco, London, Paris, New York City, and back to Seattle, saving us around $17,000 in airfare. Additionally, we used 316,000 points for 12 nights of accommodation, which would have cost over $5,000, leaving us with a total out-of-pocket expense of under…
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Seattle to Madrid for 20K points
Traveling from Seattle to Madrid for only 20K points
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Unlocking Italy: Repositioning for Unbeatable Travel Deals
How we booked business class tickets one way for only 55K points Now that I figured out how to look for deals on Air France from Seattle to Europe, how about checking out deals to Italy? Florence was a city we really wanted to visit and my wife is a teacher so we had to check for flights during spring break which for us is in April. If you saw blog post about my 20K I found from Seattle to Madrid, I was using that is the baseline for how much points it would cost to fly to Europe. Since we booked a family trip in February of 2024, my…
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London Airfare Journey – Capital One Travel Portal
We started out with Venture X and after the sign up bonus and normal spend for 6 months, we had accumulated about 188K points. Being new to the travel point game and not understanding how to best redeem our travel points or how to transfer points to Airline Partners, we booked our airline tickets through the Capital One Travel since we still had our $300 travel credit to use. We wanted to travel to from Seattle to London on April 2023, and all the travel sites, Expedia, British Air, Google flights, round trip was north of $1,100 per person for the dates we were looking for. I signed up for…
