Does anyone else feel a little bit like the art kid attempting to ace a math class when learning about miles and points strategies?
When I go to points and miles conferences or even listen to the Frequent Miler on the Air podcast from week to week, I often find myself enthralled by the attention to detail and granular focus that seems to come naturally to points and miles enthusiasts, but also quite aware that those aren’t skills I relate to personally. I’m not the kind of person who remembers to bring coupons with me to the grocery store, for example. And I admit – sometimes I just get gas at the nearest gas station instead of taking the extra step to find the cheapest gas station en route. So some of these multi-step efforts boggle my mind and feel nearly impossible for my scatter-brain nature.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not motivated and intrigued. I’m having a lot of fun with my baby-steps version of this hobby, and I intend to keep going and push past the learning curve.
Can you relate to any of these learning curves?
Remembering to pay with the right card is hard
Even though my wallet is only 3 cards deep so far, I still have a hard time remembering which cards I’m supposed to use for which expenses. My intention is to use my Wells Fargo Autograph℠ Card for 3X on gas, dining, and travel expenses, my Savor card for 3% back on grocery stores (but not big box stores like Walmart), and my Spark Miles for 1.5X on everything else. But…the card case I keep on the back of my phone only has space for two credit cards, and digital payments don’t always work. So 9 times out of 10, I default to whichever card is near at hand for those “everywhere else” expenses and just leave the Spark Miles at home.
I’m trying to remedy this by putting my various recurring payments and digital payments onto my Spark Miles card so that even if I’m slipping up with my purchases out in the wild, at least my digital expenses will get captured on the right card. (The exception to this will be my phone bill and streaming services, which I put on my Wells Fargo card for 3X.)
Eventually I’d like to get a better everywhere-else card (more on that later) which I’ll then carry in my real-life wallet, and then my grocery shopping with the Savor card will be the only expense which requires me to pay with my digital wallet. I do a lot of my grocery shopping at Walmart anyway, which technically would be an “everywhere else” expense and not a “grocery expense”. And if the digital wallet payment fails like it is apt to do at some checkout terminals, then at least I’ll be getting a decent return using my everywhere-else card.
I’ve had no luck with travel portals yet
Because I’m just now getting back into this hobby, I don’t have very many hotel points yet and would like to save my transferable points for a future trip to Japan. That means I still pay for hotels and Airbnbs with cash a fair amount of the time.
This has felt very haphazard, and I constantly wonder if I’m missing something. I try to check rates on travel portals like Rove or even my Capital One Business Travel portal in hopes of earning transferable Rove miles or 5X for travel portal expenses with my Spark Miles card, but I haven’t had a single success yet.
A site called Super.com (which shows up in Google Hotels’ search results and which I learned about from a friend) seems to beat out almost every other option every time. While there are supposedly bigger discounts for paid members of Super.com, the price still seems to beat out other paid options with the free membership as well, and using the portal accumulates cashback rewards too. So in addition to getting the cheapest cash rate, I can also accumulate a little cash back. I’ve never heard any discussion in the miles and points space about Super.com (formerly SnapTravel), and the friend who told me about it is not really a points-and-miles person. Which makes me wonder, why is no one in this space talking about Super.com as an option for paid travel? Is it because none of you are paying for hotels with cash, or busy using your paid nights to meet status requirements with a particular brand?
I can’t seem to get the hang of shopping portals either
My shopping portal journey has been rife with rookie mistakes too. I missed out on my Rakuten sign-on bonus because I accidentally let my Capital One Shopping Chrome plugin automatically apply a competing coupon, which made my Rakuten purchase ineligible. To make matters worse, I haven’t gotten value from my Capital One Shopping Chrome plugin because I went too long without opening their emails, and now Google screens them so that they don’t even show up in my spam folder. Even updating the email address on the account requires clicking a verification in an email…which I’ll never receive.
The only shopping program I seem to make use of is the Capital One shopping offers from my actual Capital One account. Pretty much any time I need something from eBay, I click through from my Capital One shopping offers (currently offering 3% back, for example.) And I use Capital One shopping offers to indulge my addiction to Zenni Optical glasses (currently offering 7% back, for example).
I haven’t redeemed any points yet
Even though I don’t have to worry about my points and miles expiring with either Capital One or Wells Fargo, sometimes I still feel a little funny about the fact that I haven’t yet made a single award booking with my points. And it’s not as though I haven’t been traveling – I do quite a bit of regional travel to visit different state parks, which often requires hotel or Airbnb bookings. But as I said above, I’m hoping to save my points for flights to Japan sometime next year, aiming for premium flights if I can accumulate enough points. When that time comes, I’ll lean heavily on the award search tools we’ve written about here. I’ve really liked how Points Yeah allows me to do some introductory searching without any kind of paid account, and allows filtering by bank points program and percent of itinerary in a premium cabin. I’ll look forward to using these features once I am ready for that first award booking.
What have been your biggest learning curves?
Surely I’m not alone in feeling like this hobby interests me despite not coming naturally to me. So what have some of your biggest learning curves been?
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Japan tip: Choice Privileges. Take a look at hotel locations and redemption rates and you will see why. Rooms are small and basic but good for the budget traveller and usually free breakfast too. Wells Fargo Choice Card is good and has no annual fee version. Grab the one that gets you the points needed to make rooms free and enjoy!
Three cards!? Pick up the pace, Carrie! 🙂 I’ve been doing this for about 30 years (yes, before Frequent Miler and OMAAT even existed), and we have literally dozens of active cards and several hundred closed cards in our household. I am about at my wit’s end at this point with keeping track of everything in this age of couponing. The entire house of cards has grown too complicated, so I am slowing shedding accounts as the AFs come due. Of course, this will be inevitably followed in mid-2027 by a whole new batch of applications and churns…
Carrie, thanks for the article and perspective. I’m not as deep into the hobby as some so I really appreciate your perspective and experience. I just finally did one international booking. I got points.me and that helped. I got it cause Nick sounded so authentic and natural when he talked about it helping newbies with international bookings. Looking forward to hearing about more of your experiences.
I would be curious to see a review of Super.com, as I also noticed it was pumping out absurd cash rates. However, I haven’t used it yet because it feels a little suspect to me.
The hotel searches are hard. No portals seem to have reliable low rates on specific inventory — it is very much a guessing game. I find the largest plurality of my bookings go to Hotels dot com and Priceline (both of which usually have decent cashback rates with C1 Shopping). I do find that the C1 Shopping interface for hotel searches checks a few sites and automatically gives upgraded Cashback offers (like 14% on Priceline instead of the advertised 2%). But nearly every portal to which I have access has had low pricing and has been a place to book at least once or twice (even Rove and AA Hotels).
More than anything, whether you are using points or cash, fair price discovery in the hotel and the airline market is designed to be off-putting. Those that do the easy thing (“I’m just going to search the Hilton site/ the Delta site”) often pay a price for their loyalty to a brand.
So far my Super.com bookings have all gone smooth-as-can-be, so, at least for me, I’m comfortable assuming it’s not a scam. No complaints so far!
Great post. Not everyone in the game is at the master level like Greg. You should have your own podcast segment!
You haven’t redeemed your points because you have two of the most difficult ecosystems to use points (C1 and Wells), it’s either high CPP J cabin redeem or bust. If you are holding Chase or Citi, you would have a much better time redeeming points for good value.
Though, I’m probably more at the serious hobbyist end (though certainly a step down from the likes of Greg, Nick, etc.), I find this post so refreshing. You’re a gem, Carrie, and just the kind of voice that helps us all be more OK with wherever we’re at in our points journey.
What a home run of a hire you were for FM!
Just saying that I appreciate this content chain as a good diversification from the other voices on the blog–who I also read and appreciate very much. Thanks, Carrie (and everyone).
Even people who are more comfortable with certain aspects of points and miles will have a moment when they’re learning a new play, card, or ecosystem, so I think these feelings aren’t just relevant for “newbies.” I just picked up my first CSR within the last month and while I’ll be happy enough with the SUB, I’ve spent hours trying to strategize about maximizing the Edit credits. I’ll get value out of them eventually, but the learning curve can be both exhilarating and exhausting.
Re: Edit credits: https://www.awardhelper.com/csr-hotels
So confused… you have Drew who is far more of an expert at this stuff than anyone ar FM. Why don’t you develop a plan with him if you actually want to learn this stuff?
This appears to be a series of blog posts of someone starting from scratch and learning the ropes. I imagine it will be valuable to a lot of people getting started.
When I started collecting points and miles, I chose cards with high category multiples so I could get the highest earning card for every spending situation. I had an Amex for gas and groceries, a Chase for dining, etc. I focused on getting optimal points earning on each and every transaction. It wasn’t until many credit card applications later that I realized something.
I failed to consider was how I was going to use the points.
Most of my travel stays domestic, and usually involves driving rather than flying, but I’m always looking for great places to stay. Yet here I was earning lots and lots of Amex points. When I consider that Amex points can be used for booking a nice place to stay, where they really shine is when they’re transferred to an airline for premium cabins. Chase was a little better for me because points can be transferred to Hyatt for great value in many cases, but the places I stay rarely have a Hyatt. So there I was, collecting so many points that were great for lots of other people – but not necessarily for me.
Lately I began taking a different approach. I think more about what I want to do and where I want to go. Then I figure out what points can make that happen. Instead of obsessing over the earning multiples, I’m following the sign up bonuses. And when I think back at all the FM posts I’ve read and podcasts I’ve listened to, I realize that wisdom’s been in there all along.
The Dirty Little Secret of this game: Getting the points is the easy part.
Of course, the way blogs make their money off of you is getting the clicks and the credit card referrals, so that’s what they push. Actually redeeming points for what you want? Largely ignored. Because that’s hard. That’s complicated, requires a lot of time, effort, research, and stamina – far more than most people are wiling to invest – and is largely unappreciated. So most of the points that people collect go unused.
In fairness, FM talks a lot about redeeming and how to find awards. And they don’t hide that it can be hard to find a “dream” redemption.
I smiled when I got to the “art kid” part because it reminded me of high school. I was the humanities kid who, somewhat by chance, ended up at an artsy school (any fellow Waldorf kids?) surrounded by classmates with more artistic talent in their pinky than I had in my whole body. It taught me a good lesson: don’t compare yourself to the person for whom something is their thing. I’ll never be a great artist, but once I stopped worrying about what came naturally to everyone else and focused on what was teachable, I improved way more than I ever expected.
I think points are the same way. You don’t need to have Greg or Nick’s brain to get a ton of value out of this hobby.
Ironically, one of the biggest learning curves for me wasn’t learning how to optimize everything—my brain is wired for that. It was learning which things were actually worth my time. Your example of comparing OTAs makes perfect sense because you book a lot of cash stays. I don’t. So when I book one, I’ll compare a few places, make sure I’m in the right ballpark, and call it good. I’d rather spend my mental energy on the parts of the hobby that I enjoy and that move the needle for my travel, but where that line is will vary for different folks.
I think that’s one of the undervalued skills in this hobby: not maximizing every decision, but figuring out which decisions are worth maximizing. So don’t think twice about using the “wrong” card at Walmart—that’s a rounding error. Instead, spend your energy on the things that really move the needle: earning a great welcome bonus (I know a great blog that can help with this!), or taking the time to compare award options before transferring points to book a flight. Those are the decisions that will save you tens of thousands of points—not whether you earned 1.5x or 1x on a miscellanous purchase.
Exactly, I’m looking for opportunities to save at least a few hundred dollars, sometimes thousands. I ignore the rest, saves lots of time and mental energy.
Carrie, thank you for this post.You’re doing just fine. I prefer to think of it as a choice: we have better things to do than to do than to think about which cards to use for small purchases!
remember my math teacher teaching us KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid
If you’re unable to process the more advanced methods, take it back a notch and just focus on the basics until you’re able to add more and more. I certainly didn’t do everything I do now when I first started off with points/miles. Maybe you just stay there as well, everybody’s points/miles journey is different.
Carrie- We’ve all been there! and Thanks for sharing! I book most of my hotels with cash because I’m a 2-3 night per stay person and the cash rate is better than a points rate ( other than when I use my FNCs from credit cards). My favorite part of this hobby is booking flight deals with miles (points)- and I’d be happy to help you find something to Japan when you’re ready to book – although I’m sure you’ve got more talented help in the FM team. Looking forward to meeting you in Chicago – we’ll have recently been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (Phantom Ranch)- although I think it will be a so. rim to so. rim trip due to limited supplies on the north rim…..
This past year I have discovered that I spend so much time chasing miles and points that I have neglected the cash sitting at my bank accounts earning virtually zero interest. Fortunately Amex and C1 have HYSAs.
If you want near-zero risk and to set-it-and-forget-it, there’ve been some decent CDs too over the past couple of years (4-5% return). No, it’s not blackjack (or the marker, or a parlay, or…), but better for your money to make money.