Hey you. I’ve been researching and exploring ways to travel more affordably the past year. Since that time, I’ve banked hundreds of thousands of miles and more importantly, the institutional knowledge on how to use them efficiently.

Why do you care? I don’t really care if you care.

Why do I care? Free plane tickets, free hotels, livin’ like a boss.

Hence, I have (at least) 5 rules I’m going to explore in the coming weeks that pertain to traveling on the cheap.

Rule #1: Miles are more valuable in airline programs than on your credit card. (99.99% of the time).

There are lots of incentives for getting “double miles,” or “20% off” when you use your miles to book directly through your credit card company. These programs rarely benefit you. You’d fair much better placing the miles in a preferred airline program.

For example, chase has their ultimate reward system that allows you to book flights directly through them. They even offer a 20% mileage bonus.

Let’s consider two examples using this program – one flight domestic and one international. I used random dates that I thought would provide cheap flights (giving chase the benefit of the doubt), but have done this often enough to note that I’ve consistently seen the same results.

Domestic:

Inputs: Flying from Wichita (ict) to Portland (pdx). July 8, 2013, one way.

I currently live in Wichita (ict) and want to visit Portland (pdx). To fly through chase on a one way flight, I would need 14,344 points. This is actually a pretty good deal for a flight, and if you wanted to search around, you could probably find flights that cost much more and make transferring miles a necessity.

I like this example because it shows that United still has the cheapest flight available. It would seem logical to think it’s not possible to get the flight any cheaper, especially with your super special member bonus. WRONG.

Now, chase allows you to transfer your points to their affiliates, one of which is United. Looking up the identical flight through United’s system returns these results:

What’s that, the flight costs only 12,500 miles? Yes, yes it does.

Congrats champion, you just saved 1,844 miles. Transfer those miles and visit granny (Side note: If she lives in Portland, you have the coolest grandma ever).

And, again, that first flight was already a bargain. Looking around you would find that typically you will probably save much more.

Ok, so, that’s great, but what about international flights?

Great question chap.

International:

Inputs: Wichita (ict) to Barcelona, Spain (bcn). July 8th, one way.

Searching through my credit card system:

The cheapest flight would take 188,576 miles. To get a the same United flight we will search for here in a minute would cost 256,544 miles.

I searched a variety of dates, just to make sure I wasn’t missing something or there was a weird massive pilgrimage from Wichita to Barcelona that week that was increasing ticket prices.

Even flying out of Denver would cost me about 55K miles. So, in theory I could buy a ticket to Denver, and maybe get out around 75K miles.

Let’s search in United’s system directly:

Do you see that? Same flight, 30,000 miles.

MIND BLOWN.

A savings of 158,576 miles.

Pretty cool, right? Pack your speedo, rosetta stone, and get ready for some delicious wine.

Rule #1: Miles are more valuable in airline programs than on your credit card. (99.99% of the time).

Notes/exceptions:

1. There are still times you may want to book through a credit card. The biggest benefit to these programs are that they allow you to choose any flight you’d like (and some airlines have certain restrictions). However, your biggest bang for the virtual buck will always be directly from the airline.

2. Booking in advance makes using miles much more possible. If it’s a last minute flight, you might not be able to score the better deal. However, it’s still worth comparing the two programs.

3. Short flights domestically can occasionally be cheaper through your credit card. However, this is usually limited to flying between two large airports.

4. I have some exciting tips for getting EVEN BETTER deals on domestic flights in the coming weeks. You should probably subscribe.