How I Travel Hacked Eastern Europe | brokeGIRLrich
I love reading credit card reward stories.
Saving hundreds of dollars traveling is super easy if you have good credit and you pay off your credit cards every month.
If those things don’t apply to you, travel reward card hacking is not for you – though it could be someday.
I’ve done a few trips over the years with some significant savings thanks to credit card rewards. The first was a long weekend trip to FinCon in New Orleans in 2014. I saved on my flight and hotel thanks to some careful spending. My most recent was saving on my flight to New Orleans in 2019 with my best friend by using an older rewards card and buying some points, so my $620 flight turned into a $63 flight.
I went to Iceland last summer with not much notice and still managed to travel rewards my flight.
And my coup de grace so far, how I went to Hawaii for $2,000. It involved some crazier travel reward hacking ideas, like opening bank accounts to churn money. The end result was worth it, but the headache when it came time to close those things was pretty intense. The PNC account was a piece of cake and I do totally recommend using that hack to churn $2,000 quickly, as long as you have enough saved up to also pay off that $2,000.
Santander Bank was easy enough to close the account with.
Do not use First Niagara/Keystone bank to churn any money. That was a major headache from beginning to end.
For my Hawaii churning, I opened 4 different travel cards with a variety of minimum spends and racked up $1239.84 in rewards in 3 months with a total of $6100.00 in spending over that time. $4000 of that spending went into new savings accounts I opened and three of those cards let me redeem the reward against the balance of the card, so I reached the spend on three of the cards with Hawaii purchases.
I had about 3 months notice to pull all that off.
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This trip to Eastern Europe was a little different. I only had about a month’s notice, so the odds of making a big dent in the cost were slim. That being said, it never hurts to do what you can do, right?
Since we went the AirBnB route, I started out by going to Raise.com and buying discounted gift cards for AirBnB. That saved us $20 with that move. It took about 10 minutes.
I opened a Wells Fargo Propel card to redeem that $300 credit after spending $3,000.
Overall the trip came in at a little over $2,100 for 12 days in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, which included all the lodging, flights, trains, food, city passes, a trip to the opera, and a day tour. It sure didn’t hurt that Prague and Budapest often show up on those lists of extremely cheap places to travel (Vienna sure doesn’t).
All of that also includes a last minute hotel change when we got bed bugs in Budapest and a Supermarket sweep-stype shopping trip at H&M to get pajamas and enough clothes for 2 days so we could not touch our bed bugged luggage.
While these hacks weren’t my most impressive, they do sort of encompass my general feelings about travel – save what you can, when you can.
Even if credit card hacking freaks you out, you can totally still buy discounted gift cards on Raise. They have them for AirBnB, tons of hotel chains, even airlines. They also have them for Groupon and Living Social, if you’re looking at tours there.
Another trick is to put a lot of the trip on a card that will let you redeem your rewards as a statement credit. If you can’t hit the spends with your regular spending in advance, the odds of you being able to save $100-200 with the reward from the trip itself is pretty good and only requires 5 minutes of effort to apply for a new card and another 10-15 minutes to cancel the card within a year before any fees are due.
As I learned from previous experiments, with a short time frame, it’s very difficult to maximize your travel hacking, but in the 6-9 month time frame, you can make some significant choices to up your savings.
