Category: strategy

  • My favorite ways to earn points during the winter holiday season

    Some people love to shop. But I’m not one of those people. So when I do have to shop, like during the holiday season, I want to give myself a little incentive to make it more fun! My incentive is trying to earn the most points I can. Then each purchase isn’t just a gift—each…

  • The Flying Blue Award Map and the Case of the Missing Business-Class Saver Awards

    Flying Blue is a really useful award program for lots of reasons—it’s easy to earn their miles because they’re transfer partners with all the major banks, they usually have a solid amount of economy saver award availability to and from Europe, and kids get a 25% discount on award fares. I find Flying Blue to…

  • When to book family award travel

    This is it: the shortest blog post I’ll ever publish. Because it’s all you need to know. This is when you should ideally book family award travel when your travel dates aren’t flexible and you need flights and hotel rooms for 3+ people.

  • How new airline routes can supercharge your award travel

    The story Let’s go back in time to 2017, when I was in the process of booking business-class award flights for my family of four from Houston to Australia for a trip celebrating my husband’s 40th birthday the next year. Australia was his dream trip for decades, and we were finally going to make it…

  • How to skip to the front of the airport security line for free

    If you don’t want to wait in a potentially long security line at the airport, you have a couple of options you can get for “free” by having the right credit card—going in the (hopefully) shorter TSA PreCheck line or going through the CLEAR line. (I say “free” because you did pay an annual fee…

  • Deciding which Chase Sapphire card you need, in two easy questions

    I think this decision tree speaks for itself, so here you go: Both the Chase Sapphire Preferred and the Chase Sapphire Reserve have some benefits that are really similar, slightly different, or greatly different, and lounge access versus no lounge access is the one “greatly different” benefit I think this all really boils down to.…

  • How the Hyatt Privé program can get you extra hotel benefits

    If you ever do the points vs. cash calculations and figure out that the stay you want to book makes more sense to book with cash rather than with points, remember the Hyatt Privé program! (It’s like “Remember the Alamo,” but with free breakfast instead of a bloody battle and lots of death. . .…

  • How to figure out if a Hyatt award stay is a good redemption

    Most of the time, booking a hotel stay with points instead of paying out of pocket is going to be the best option. For Hyatts, I usually just have a sense for whether a stay is a solid redemption or not, but if you want more guidance than “Traci’s intuition just knows,” a solid redemption…

  • All about the 5/24 rule

    If you’ve been following miles & points talk even for just a short time, you’ve probably heard people refer to the “5/24 rule” or “5/24 status.” And if you’re wondering what that means or need some confirmation that it means what you think it means, here’s a simple breakdown. What is the 5/24 rule? The…

  • How to find affordable lodging for families of 4+ in Europe and beyond

    In this post, I’ll lay out all the options that a family of four or more might want to try when booking a trip outside of North America, including a detailed discussion of the Hyatt Family Plan rate. And if you’re already wondering why this topic merits an explanation, here’s something that comes as a…