Buy airline miles with a subscription

Good morning from somewhere in the sky. I’m so exhausted I’m not even going to look at the flight map to see where.

Since I’m feeling lazy, I’m going to tell you about the laziest (but still valuable) way to get discounted flights: buying points and miles and booking premium awards at a steep discount.

• ✈️ Flying Blue’s new subscription service

• 👀 This should be your next card combo

• 🎥 Book a free trip to Alaska using miles and points

✈️ Flying Blue’s new subscription service

As I said in the intro, buying miles to book flights and hotels for cheaper than you’d pay with cash is a great, lazy way to save money on travel.

I do it all the time with programs like IHG (more on that later), and it’s a great way to play the points and miles game without much fuss.

Now, Flying Blue has launched an interesting way to buy miles for flights… but with a monthly subscription service.

Here’s the basic gist:

If you sign up for a monthly membership, you will pay a monthly fee in exchange for a certain number of miles at a fixed rate.

The more expensive the plan, the better value per point.

Here are the tiers:

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a great deal… Signing up for a service to buy 2,000 miles a month isn’t going to get you anywhere.

But the highest tier ($227.80 per month for 17,000 miles) is actually a pretty solid deal.

At a rate of 1.34 cents per point, this is much cheaper than what Flying Blue usually sells their miles for.

To make things even better, you can cancel the subscription at any time - so you could literally use this to simply make a one-time purchase of miles at a pretty good rate.

Over the course of 12 months, you’d spend $2,734 and rack up 204,000 miles.

One of Flying Blue’s best sweet spots is flying from the U.S. to Europe for 50,000 miles one-way… if you can find availability. 😬

But even if you just make use of their monthly Promo Rewards, this could save you some cash on a nice and comfy flight to Europe on a good airline.

With this deal, you could effectively buy four business-class flights like that at a rate of $683 per flight, which is really solid when you look at it that way.

Anyway, this deal isn’t for everyone - but if you need to top up your balance with some fairly cheap miles or you’re a power user of Flying Blue, there are definitely ways to leverage this program to your advantage.

Of course, the much easier way to get Flying Blue miles is by transferring them from basically every bank program after signing up for an elevated credit card offer.

[The information about the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card has expired.]

👀 This should be your next card combo

I’ve got a SUPER fun tip to tell you guys about today. But it’s a little tedious, so pay attention. 👨‍🏫

In case you didn’t know, the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card is currently offering a unique and valuable welcome offer of 60,000 Chase points and a $300 Chase Travel^SM credit after spending $4,000 in the first three months of being a cardholder.

In my opinion, this is the best offer we’ve seen on the card all year (read more about why here).

It’s pretty freakin’ solid. I mean, the $300 Chase Travel credit alone pays for this card for a few years…

But what about those of you who already have this card? 🤔

Well, there’s a way that you can effectively MULTIPLY your rewards in certain categories.

This is all thanks to another unique offer on the Chase Freedom Unlimited® card that we told you about a loooong while back… We haven’t talked about it often because, on its own, it’s not that exciting.

But when you pair it with the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, it’s a match made in heaven 😍

Here’s how the Chase Freedom Unlimited® works 👇

This is a cash-back card that earns the following rates:

• 5% cash back on purchases made through the Chase Travel portal

• 3% cash back on drugstore purchases and dining at restaurants, including takeout and eligible delivery service

• 1.5% cash back on all other purchases

Sounds boring, right?

Well, here’s where the welcome offer comes into play… 😏

The current welcome offer will add an EXTRA 1.5% back to ALL of the rates above, worth up to $300 cash back.

BUT…

If you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, that cash back turns into Chase points.

That means that by holding these two cards, you’ll be earning THREE Chase points per dollar on all non-categorized spending and 4.5 Chase points per dollar on some easy everyday categories like drugstores and dining 🙌

By having these two cards (which have combined annual fees of just $95, btw), you’re unlocking premium earning rates that could take you around the world.

For example, spending the full $20,000 on non-categorized spending would yield a total of 60,000 Chase points.

Those points can be transferred to partners like Virgin Atlantic, which currently has a 40% transfer bonus from Chase.

With that bonus, those 84,000 Virgin miles are enough to easily book you round-trip flights from the U.S. to Europe in business class, which cost as few as 29,000 miles each 👇

In fact, you’d still have 24,000 miles left over after that…

Those 24,000 miles are enough to book you two MORE freaking ROUND TRIPS to Europe in Economy.

Anyway, here’s the bottom line:

These two cards have excellent welcome offers right now. If you have either one of them, getting the other will drastically increase the value you get from each one.

If you don’t have either of them… well… you can always just get both. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Ah yes, the wild, expansiveness of Alaska is… wild and expansive (and beautiful).

But it can also be expensiiiiive to travel there—unless you use miles and points to do the job 😎

In this week’s Youtube video, Brendan takes us along on his trip up to Alaska that he booked FOR FREE thanks to miles and points.

Want to learn how you can do the same? Check it out! 👇

That’s all for today folks!

While credit cards are definitely the optimal way to play the points and miles game (like our new favorite combo 👀), I love the concept of buying miles in the right situations.

Take care and see you tomorrow. ❤️

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