Travel credit cards?

[ahisma]

We are all about travel credit card "hacking". We don't have business purchases, but run most of our personal expenses through them. We take 2-3 international trips per year as a family of 4 and almost always use points for airfare - often for at least some of our lodging too.

If you're going to use one and don't have a staunch loyalty to a hotel / airline (we'd pay far more for travel if we went that route), the Chase Sapphire cards are a great place to start.

[marinkitty]

We have Chase Sapphire (our kids and my assistant use this one), Chase Sapphire Reserve (DH uses this for work expenses), a Chase United Mileage Plus Club Card (the one I mainly use), and another one that I think is called Mileage Plus Quest (also a Chase/United product) that is just a backup. We also have a Marriott Bonvoy card that our housekeeper in Portugal uses. So pretty much all our credit cards earn us travel related perks and we have several just so that we can track our kids and staff spending more easily than having it all show up on one big bill I have to go through super carefully. The Chase Sapphire Reserve has special access/rates to a catalog of hotels worldwide, which we have used here and there when we stay in hotels and it has been nice to have but I don't feel like we use it all that often. We have been swimming in miles post-pandemic and started to use our Sapphire rewards points to reimburse our expenses rather than redeem them for travel (which I don't feel like is the easiest process). I prefer the United cards that just dump points into our Mileage Plus accounts, but we are fairly rigid United flyers due to DH's status, and only book other airlines if United isn't an option or the pricing/routing is just super ridiculous on United. If we weren't so tied to United, I think I'd prefer the Sapphire cards' flexibility. We also travel extensively - so for us paying these fees makes sense. If we traveled less, I would only have one of these, for sure.

[dogmom]

Another vote for Chase Sapphire Reserve. It is pricy @ $500/year, but you can easily get $300 back right away in travel credit. During the pandemic they extended travel to restaurant take out. I've always used the credit even when I wasn't traveling much. They have good benefits. I got $120 off my Peleton membership this year, free enhanced memberships in things like DoorDash and Instacart that normally run $100/year. Discounts of $5 on month on some streaming services for X months. I love the Premium Club thing in the airports now that you really have to get there early. You can do the "pay yourself back" think which gives you credit with your purchases. So the last two years I wasn't really traveling I did that and got about $500 dollars back just through that. You finance big purchases with pay over time functions. So it's X months for X fee a month (winds up being about 3% interest) and it is divided up in your credit card payment so I still pay everything off and don't incur interest on your other purchases. I wound up putting 30K on it in the last 5 months to get my mother's property in her estate ready to sell, I'll get all the points on that. The travel insurance benefit is pretty good. Their app and customer service is above average. I think it's a great card for travel and overall everyday card.