How to Get $8,210 in Free Travel: Travel Rewards as a Couple
Leveraging travel rewards as a couple is arguably the world’s most fantastic money-saving loophole.
I’ve isolated two things that lead Tom and I to bicker:
When we don’t have a TV series to watch together. Without Netflix, our relationship hits the skids. (I kid, I kid.)
When we stay home for too long.
That second one is mostly because it makes me grumpy so I subconsciously start acting out as a subliminal signal that I need to get out of town. Thomas, the mindreader, actually noticed this in June and (surprise!) we went to Zion. Problems solved!
The point is, traveling as a couple is great. (Ironically, it’ll also reveal cracks in your relationship or differences in your personalities that may not come up in “real life” – you see someone in a million different states of mind in a very short window. Relaxed, stressed, crunched for time, faced with choices… you learn a lot about someone.)
And if you know what you’re doing in the magical world of credit card points, your effort goes twice as far (and then a little further). You know the old saying about romance: Two credit reports are better than one!
Step #1: Establish your overall strategy.
Lucky for you, I have established your strategy for you (to some extent) under the Travel Rewards tab on this site. Even if you choose different co-branded options than the ones I selected, the overall logic of the flow holds up:
A good cash back card that matches the premium card (e.g., the Chase Freedom card if you choose the Chase Sapphire), although honestly, in the age of COVID, this is less important because a lot of premium cards are adding bonus categories for supermarkets and gas stations, which are the main spend categories that you’d typically put on a cash back card – really, this one serves more of a utilitarian function in the sense that it establishes your credit if you don’t have any already and opens the floodgates for premium cards later. If you have no credit cards now, you’ll have to start here to establish credit then wait six months to proceed.
A low annual fee, high acquisition bonus premium card (there is really no competition for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card here).
Your airline card (I chose Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Priority Card, for these reasons.
Your hotel card (I chose the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless Card, for these reasons).
Your really premium card (if you go for the Preferred for its sign-up bonus, you’d almost definitely choose The Platinum Card from American Express at this point).
And if you already have the cash back card and you can skip the first one, the card you’d get next would be a high-value business card like the Chase Ink Business Preferred.
Dubious about spending $695 per year on a travel card? What about how the Platinum stacks up against the Chase Sapphire Reserve? The Platinum has offerings that I believe, in the end, make it more valuable overall than the Reserve, but it’s really dependent on how you like to travel. If you’re interested in hearing more about why I love the Platinum, check out this post for a full review.
The point is, even if you’re a Delta flyer and a Hilton loyalist, the overall strategy order still applies – if you want to travel for free as a couple, you need to leverage the full stack of options: hotel cards, airline cards, and the best “agnostic” cards in the game.
Now here’s the tricky part… adding in another person to the mix. This is what allows you to move more quickly and more than double your sign-up bonuses.
Step #2. Adding bae to the equation.
Assuming you’re both candidates for premium credit cards (e.g., you have no credit card debt, neither of you have spending problems, and you both have credit scores over 700), welcome to the next phase of your relationship: scalping credit issuers for free vacations. Ah, romance.
You may be coming to the table with different cards already. If you both already have cash back cards, fantastic – that knocks an easy one out. But if either of you already have some of the premium cards listed above, I’d ask you this:
When did you get them? Most of these cards have a dead period where reapplying won’t earn the acquisition bonus again (for example, the Sapphire family of cards has a 48-month turnover, increased from its previous 24-month waiting period – American Express has a haughty “once in a lifetime” situation, meaning you can only earn a sign-up bonus for each card one time, even if you cancel the card and reapply later).
If you’ve had a Chase Sapphire Reserve for more than four years, for example, you could downgrade it to a Chase Freedom or Chase Freedom Unlimited card (thereby eliminating the annual fee and adding another cash back card to your arsenal) and then reapply for another one and get the sign-up bonus again.
If you’re within that four-year window, no matter. Just start somewhere else (e.g., airline or hotel).
Normally, when you use travel rewards alone, you’d typically wait 90 days between applying for new cards since the spend thresholds occur in 3-month increments (generally speaking) and applying for too much new credit too quickly can send up flares to the credit issuers that you don’t want to deal with.
Unless you have crazy high monthly spend or an expense account and you’re able to hit multiple $3,000 or $5,000 thresholds simultaneously, this is going to necessarily slow you down. There are even methods out there (using services like Plastiq) to pay yourself the entire balance in one sitting for a low fee, but since I’ve never vetted those strategies I don’t feel comfortable recommending them just yet.
But when you’re doing with a partner… my friends, everything changes. Consider this example scenario in which a couple who has not yet started travel rewards enters #TheGame at the same time, a blank slate of free shit potential:
Month 1
Person A (let’s call her Katie, for no reason at all) would get the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. Person B (let’s call him Thomas) would get the Southwest Priority Card.
Both of them would work toward their respective sign-up bonuses:
60,000 Ultimate Rewards for the Preferred card for Katie, and (right now) 40,000 Rapid Rewards points for Thomas. The timing matters for the Southwest card if you’re going to go for Companion Pass; more on that at the bottom of this article.
Great! Are you keeping track? Things are about to get interesting.
Month 4
(Months 2 and 3 were spent earning the sign-up bonus by chipping away at the spend thresholds. It goes without saying that spending a bunch of money you wouldn’t normally spend defeats the purpose of travel rewards, so… don’t do that.)
Now, in Month 4, we experience the #magic for the first time: Katie would refer Thomas to the Preferred card and Thomas would refer Katie to the Priority card (i.e., they’re referring one another to the cards they just got).
Now, Katie will earn 20,000 more points for referring Thomas, and he’ll earn 60,000 points for signing up, and Thomas will earn 20,000 more Rapid Rewards points for referring Katie to the Priority card, who will earn 40,000 points for signing up.
That nets them, as a couple:
140,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points
100,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards points
Of course, these are spread across two accounts, but in some cases (Southwest, Marriott, etc.) you’re allowed to transfer your points to someone else. This means if you wanted to bank all your points for one particular co-branded card in one person’s account, you could just transfer them, making the other member of the couple the proxy line of credit.
If you’re married, or “members of the same household,” you can transfer Ultimate Rewards points, too.
So now, months 5 & 6 will be eaten up earning the next round of bonuses. We’ll check back in with them Month 7.
Month 7
With the Sapphire Preferred and Southwest cards out of the way, we’ll move on to hotels and premium cards.
This gets a little hairier with more personal preference, so strap in.
Katie will get the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card for a sign-up bonus (right now) of three free nights (worth up to 150,000 points) and Thomas will get the American Express Platinum card for the sign-up bonus of 100,000 points.
Months 8 and 9 will involve them hitting their individual spend thresholds, so you know the drill.
Month 10
Referral party, and you’re invited! Katie invites Thomas to the Bonvoy card and earns 20,000 bonus points. The Bonvoy referral bonus for Thomas is the same; 3 free nights at 50,000 points each. This means Thomas nets an award valued at 150,000 points, but in practice, he’ll just use the free night certificates to get them three free nights at Bonvoy properties.
Here’s where the personal preference comes in with the premium cards – some couples (especially those who really only travel together) don’t see the need in getting two premium cards with high annual fees like the Platinum, because a lot of the benefits of the Platinum card extend to cover the entire couple while traveling (e.g., elite status at hotels, airport lounge access, the Fine Hotels & Resorts Collection, etc.).
This is totally dependent upon your threshold for acceptable annual fees. Let’s say Thomas refers Katie to the American Express Platinum card.
Thomas earns 15,000 points for referring her, and she earns 100,000 points for signing up.
With this next set of cards, they’ve collectively netted:
215,000 American Express Membership Rewards points
320,000 Marriott Bonvoy points
Are you keeping track? That’s…
140,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points ($2,100 in travel*)
*An Ultimate Rewards point is valued at approximately 1.5 cents per point.
100,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards points ($1,400 in travel*)
*A Rapid Rewards point is valued at approximately 1.4 cents per point.
215,000 American Express Membership Rewards points ($2,150 in travel*)
*A Membership Rewards point is valued at approximately 1 cent per point.
320,000 Marriott Bonvoy points ($2,560 in travel*)
*A Bonvoy point is valued at approximately 0.8 cents per point.
For a total of…
775,000 points to share between them worth approximately $8,210 in travel.
…and $2,068 in annual fees, or $1,034 per person.
Effectively, you share the benefits and split the cost. The beauty of this, though, is that all the cards recommended here have enough annual repeating benefits to more than offset the annual fees (for the actual math and chart, visit the Travel Rewards tab).
The tip of the loophole iceberg
The TL;DR version of this post is simply: You refer one another to cards so you can add referral bonuses to your acquisition bonuses, and traveling with one other person means you can reap the mutual benefits of each other’s points while only paying for your own.
But the biggest benefit to traveling as a couple is Southwest Companion Pass, and we haven’t even scratched the surface with Companion Pass yet.
That post is coming, and it involves throwing business cards into the mix. It still works with the strategy above, but remember how I said the timing matters?
You’ll want to hit the spend threshold for the Southwest card early in the calendar year because the clock starts ticking on January 1 – you have one year to earn 125,000 points, and if you do, you can designate your partner as your Companion to fly free with you every time you do, paying only the taxes and fees ($5.60 each way). This is an incredibly lucrative benefit and the importance of getting it for your points strategy is hard to overstate since it effectively makes your points twice as valuable.
The referral bonuses count toward Companion Pass, so in the example above, Thomas would be the member of the couple who’s going for Companion Pass (funny, because in real life it’s the other way around and Thomas is the reluctant participant in my schemes) and he’d have 65,000 points from signing up and 10,000 points from referring Katie.
This is why going for Companion Pass when the sign-up bonus is high helps a lot – a 65,000-point sign-up bonus + 10,000 referral points gets you to 75,000 right off the bat, leaving only 50,000 to go. Unfortunately, transferring Rapid Rewards points to one another doesn’t count toward Companion Pass, otherwise we’d really be in business.
But I’ve said enough. Companion Pass post to come. In the meantime… start firing off your first round of applications and rope your spouse into it.
Summary: Your cards, in order
Remember, you can swap out other airlines or hotel programs for Southwest and Bonvoy if you need to (but truly, I believe these are the two most valuable programs).
Partner #1: Chase Sapphire Preferred
Partner #1 applies for the Chase Sapphire Preferred. At the start of month 4 or sooner, they refer Partner #2. Nets:
Partner #1: 60,000 points + 20,000 referral points
Partner #2: 60,000 points
Partner #2: Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority
Partner #2 applies for the Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority. At the start of month 4 or sooner, they refer Partner #1. Nets:
Partner #2: 40,000 points + 20,000 referral points
Partner #1: 40,000 points
Partner #1: Marriott Bonvoy Boundless
Partner #1 applies for the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless at the start of month 7. Then, in month 10, they refer Partner #2. Nets:
Partner #1: 3 free nights worth 150,000 points + 20,000 referral points
Partner #2: 3 free nights worth 150,000 points
Partner #2: American Express Platinum
Partner #2 applies for the American Express Platinum at the start of month 7. Then, at the start of month 10, they refer Partner #1.
Partner #2: 100,000 points + 15,000 referral points
Partner #1: 100,000 points
A humble ask
If you enjoyed this post and plan to implement these strategies, I would so appreciate it if you’d consider using some of the referral links for the cards listed here. I don’t get paid to write or maintain this site, so the kick backs from referral bonuses are my main ROI. No pressure, but I would appreciate it.
Groveling = done. See you next time!
