Here are Stephanie’s 5 steps to almost FREE family travel.
1. Research - Research, research, research. Which airlines fly to your desired destination
and how many miles will you need to buy award tickets. The number may be staggering,
but don’t let that scare you.
2. Plan - Figure out which credit cards you can open to maximize the bonus for that particular
airline or airline partners. Partners are key because sometimes it will actually cost less miles
to book your flight through a partner airline or it may be easier to collect those miles through
shared partners or you may have to book two tickets with one airline’s miles and 3 tickets
with another. Same flight, you are just booking it with different miles.
3. Action - Put the plan in motion so that you have the miles in your account a year in
advance of the trip. Charge everything to those credit cards. Leverage your spending! If you
buy it, charge it. BUT pay off all the cards every month. In fact, put all the cards on auto pay
so you don’t pay any interest or late charges.
4. Book - When the airline releases award seats, approximately 335 days prior to the travel
date, know which flights you want and call the airline customer service center. You may have
to call multiple times to get an operator who is willing to help you. You may have to call the
airline partner at the same time to make certain you are booking the same flight.
5. Be Flexible - Even with that plan, I was able to book 5 flights to Bangkok from LAX, but I
could only book flights back from Tokyo. The Bangkok to Tokyo route was already sold out!
Even checking other dates, we could not get it to work. I checked other airlines that fly from
Bangkok to Tokyo and was able to book one way tickets with miles on a different airline.
Bonus, we extended our layover in Tokyo and enjoyed the weekend in Japan!
Additional Insights and Tips...
*Using points for those flights saved me about $7,000 off the cost of this trip. Once you
have secured your flights, you can move onto hotels. I use awardmapper.com to figure out
which hotel brands and how many points we will need in each city. In Bangkok, we used
Starwood points to stay at the Sheraton. For the rest of the trip, we stayed at homestays and
paid for them with the Barclays Arrival Plus, a cash back travel rebate card.
*We paid for train and bus travel with the travel rebate card as well which was a $625
value.
*Once in Thailand, food and tours were super cheap so it’s a great place to take the family.
And we did it all while there - ziplining, canoeing around the islands, tigers, elephants, tours
and more. We could eat dinner as a family of 5 with wine at a restaurant for about $10. If
we ate at the local outdoor market, our dinner cost about $5.
*Then the final step, we rented out our home while we were in Thailand.
At first, the thought of renting our home seemed foreign. How would it feel to have a stranger
sleeping in our beds and touching our stuff? During the trip, my daughter commented “I’m
thinking about the family in our house and it weirds me out.” I told her “I understand, but look
where we are. Playing with baby tigers outside of Bangkok and laughing together as a
family knowing that the trip is FREE and we won’t come home to a mountain of bills. That
makes it all worth it.”
Start your journey! Feel free to reach out to Stephanie and her team if you need help with
your travel plans at;
[email protected]
www.almostFREEfamilytravel.com