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Can you make the most of points and miles to cover the cost of a road trip?
Why not fly?
A lot of travel hackers don’t touch road trip travel hacking because flying is far easier to travel hack. However, there are often times that we have lived in places that were far from an airport, and times that holiday travel makes more sense by car than burning a million points. Also, because of those years in hard to reach destinations, we are very accustomed to, and actually ENJOY road trips.
Earning Points on Road Trips
Never fear, we will talk about using points on road trips next, but first, the easier, how to earn points on road trips.
Credit Cards
Credit Cards that earn points on Gas are your golden tickets for earning on a Road Trip.
Citi Custom Cash Card – This card automatically gives you 5% back on your highest spend category that month(up to $500 in spending). If this is your designated gas card, it will be throwing back 5% at you for all your gas and convenience store purchases. This should make that $10 Slim Jim hurt just a little less.
AMEX Blue Cash Preferred – This card is not a super popular one in the points and miles community because it is cash back, rather than points back. However, with 6% cash back at grocery stores and 3% back at gas stations, this will be a family favorite as long as those are both top spending categories in our house.
Capital One Venture or Venture X – These cards earn 2x points on every purchase, and therefore are a great card to have around if you don’t have anything to earn a high amount of points for gas, or just for the weird miscellaneous spend a road trip inevitably takes you to.
Bonuses
If you read our post about Multipliers, Stacking, and Bonuses, you know that by stacking we can add a lot of value to our spending. One of the best ways to do this for gas is by looking at your cards bonuses and seeing if there is a gas station bonus to add to your card. (i.e. 10% back at Shell stations) If you do have one of these to add to a Chase card, this will be a big winner for gas purchases. These are also often available for hotels, so it pays to pay attention to them.
Upside
The upside app is an app that pays you back for gas purchases. You input your payment cards, and then claim an offer for the gas station you are at and they will pay you back for your purchase. When you download the app, enter promo code ERIN67334 and you will get an extra 15 cents back on your first purchase.
Hotels
Road trip hotels are often “you get what you get” sort of experiences. If you need to pay for a hotel that you don’t have rewards with, make sure you sign up for their rewards program. Each little bit helps.
Hotels.com – For every 10 hotels you book with hotels.com, you get a free night. This is one way to build towards free nights when you need to pay.
Rakuten – Rakuten frequently has deals for cash back or AMEX points back from a variety of hotels and travel partners. Look here before booking and it could be advantageous to you.
Using Points on Road Trips
This is somewhat of a black hole in the points and miles world. People just don’t touch it. I hope you come away with some creative solutions to help this work for you.
Gas Stations
Chase Pay yourself Back
Many Chase cards have acquired the “pay yourself back” feature in recent years. As of this writing, gas is one of these categories for the Chase Sapphire cards. You can pay yourself back at a 1 cent per point rate. Not the best rate, but if you’re looking to cut costs, this is one way to do that.
Upside – See Above
Discover It Miles
The Discover it Miles card has a $0 annual fee, and allows you to pay yourself back for travel purchases, including gas. It will not earn a signup bonus, but rather you will earn 1.5% back on all purchases, and after the first year they will double what you have made. If you are not looking to garner a ton of points but just to pay for road trips, this may be a good option for your family.
Hotels
Now this is where we shine as travel hackers. Here are my favorite options:
Free Night Certificates
We love a good free night certificate. Specifically the Marriott cards for a 35,000 point certificate. These are often very usable at airport and road trip hotels. It also allows us to pay $95 (the card’s annual fee each year) and get an exceedingly better hotel than the other $100 options in most places.
Chase Points
Have Chase points? You are able to transfer those Chase points to Hyatt, Marriott, and IHG to use for your roadside stop. However, we recommend comparing the price in the Chase Travel Portal with points, to the price in the hotel website with points. Our findings have been that Hyatt is always cheaper when transferred to the hotel. Marriott has been a 50/50 toss up on the cheapest points prices, so it is worth checking!
Other Cards
Amex Points transfer to Choice, Hilton, and Marriott.
Citi Points Transfer to Choice and Wyndham.
Capital One Points transfer to Accor(luxury), Choice, and Wyndham.
When you get to a town that has one choice hotel or a National Park that only has a Wyndham, it really comes in handy to have diversified your points balances a bit and not have all your points in one card’s basket.
Remember to ALWAYS check the points price on the hotel website and the points price in the credit card portal and compare them.
Conclusion
Feeling Confused? Check out our getting started guide HERE
Ready to Road Trip? What other questions can we answer? What aspects of a road trip do you need help covering?
