107. Skill Stacking Your Way to Better Points Redemptions

Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devon Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. I have a question for you all today. How good are you at using your credit card points for travel? On a scale of 1 to 4, where would you rate your points redemption skills and confidence with 1 being the lowest and 4 being the highest?

Now, I'm intentionally picking a scale of 1 to 4 and not 1 to 5, because I don't want you to have the opportunity to be completely neutral about this. You have to ultimately choose whether you feel like you're not yet quite at an average level with your skills and confidence, or you've passed the completely subjective and arbitrary halfway mark and feel more confident and skilled at using points than just neutral. So where do you fall on that spectrum? And I think more interestingly, why do you think you fall there? What are you basing your answer on?

When it comes to evaluating your skills at using your points to book travel, you could look at some concrete piece of data, like the average redemption value you tend to get from your points and if it exceeds a certain threshold, or whether you've booked $10,000, $100,000, or more in travel using your points? Or you could be basing your answer on more intangible metrics like when you sit down to plan a points trip, do you know where to start? Do you feel like you know what you're doing? Do you have a process for booking award trips that actually yields results? Or do you instead have the feeling that whatever your points redemption attempts have looked like, you're somehow missing something important or not using your points well, or even just completely doing it wrong?

Now, I wanted to talk about this today because in the world of points travel, there are two core aspects to master if your goal is to get outsized value from your points. Number 1, earning points and number 2, using them to book travel. And on the surface, that sounds really simple. But simple doesn't always mean easy. In my experience, many people tend to get the hang of earning points faster and earlier than they get the hang of using their points.

The points redemption side of the points equation is also where so many people unfortunately give up learning when they inevitably hit some obstacles. Either because it's not immediately straightforward how to find great points deals, because it can be time consuming or it seems confusing or overwhelming trying to find deals like ones maybe you've heard other people talk about, or maybe because you've had a bad experience with one of your first attempted award bookings. Whatever the reasons that learning to redeem your points can be challenging, here are two things that remain true about becoming as proficient using your points as you are at earning them.

First, if it doesn't seem obvious to you how to easily find and book travel using points that allows you to take the trips that you want when you want and get outsized value from your points, you're not doing anything wrong. No, really, I think it is so important that you hear this, especially if you're currently struggling to use your points to book travel, or if you've tried searching for award flights or dream hotel stays in the past and come up empty handed. You are not doing anything wrong.

Knowing where to look for specific awards and how to look for them is not obvious. And truthfully, I don't think I want it to be. If using your points to book incredibly high value travel was as easy as logging into your credit card account and typing in where you want to go and when you want to go there, then I don't think there would be that many incredible points deals and opportunities available.

The second thing that's true about becoming proficient at using points is this, it is not impossible to get better. In fact, using your points and getting tremendous value from them just entails learning a discrete set of skills and practicing them until you get better. What are those skills? And which ones make sense to learn first? And which ones make sense to learn after you've established a foundation and have your feet under you a bit.

What progression of points redemption skills allows you to get more and more value from your points, but doesn't require that you start with the most advanced tactics that are likely to leave you confused or overwhelmed? And for folks who already have the basics down, what are the opportunities to expand your skills and what kinds of redemptions are available if you do? That is what I want to focus on in today's episode, specifically points redemption skill stacking.

Now, if you think of any particular thing that you’re proficient in now, but at some point you had no clue how to do, you've already been through a skill stacking process probably many, many times before, whether it's something that involves motor coordination, like learning to ride a bike or drive a car or something intellectual like learning to speak a language or earn a medical degree. You did not go from incapable to skilled overnight. No, you sequentially learned and practiced discrete skills, stacked those skills together and over time went from being not so great to improving, to having maybe intermediate level skills to likely becoming experienced enough that was once tedious and hard to do actually has become second nature.

In medical school, at least when I went through it billions of years ago, they didn't let us examine or operate on or treat patients our very first week of school. That probably would have been a disaster. They didn't even start by teaching us all the diseases and disorders that a human body could encounter and what to do about that. No, we started with the structure and function of the healthy human body.

Basic anatomy, basic physiology, how cells and organs are organized. How do they function when they're working properly? And only after we understood that, did we finally start to learn about their opposite. Once we understood normal anatomy and physiology, what did perturbations or disturbances of that look like in the form of disease or dysfunction?

I know not all of you listening have a background in medicine, but I know you have tons of skills now that you didn't always have. And whatever those skills are, you went through a progressive process of acquiring, building, and refining those skills. It's the same exact thing with learning how to become skilled at using your points.

I think about it very much like a stairway. Most of us don't expect to leap 30 feet in the air all at once, although that would be pretty fantastic if we could. Instead, we have stairs that we climb one at a time or even a few at a time to get to where we're going. Having steps or stairs breaks down the process of climbing 30 feet into more easily attainable segments.

Similarly, you're not supposed to go from hearing someone explain that you can theoretically get five cents per point or even 15 cents per point or more in value from your points to automatically knowing exactly how to do that yourself. It just means that maybe you don't know the steps to take in which order or the skills to stack to get as good at using points as you want to be. That's what we're going to talk about today, specifically what points redemption skill stacking looks like.

I want to walk you through the sequential and increasing levels of skills that many people go through on their way to becoming fluent and getting tons of value from points when booking travel. Along the way, I'm going to point out how to know what step of points redemption skill stacking you're currently in, the key indicators of that skill level, and how to reach the next step if you want to.

My hope is that whether you're brand new to using points to book travel or you've been at this a little while, today's episode will help you understand exactly where you are right now in the points redemption skill process, normalize that it makes sense why you're there, and lay out a path so that you know where to go and what to expect so you can continue to get better at redeeming points.

If you've struggled to redeem your points in the past, I hope that what you hear today will help break down what can seem like an intimidating process to learn into actionable steps. And for those of you with a bit more experience redeeming your points, you might just be surprised to hear that you're far more skilled at this than you are actually giving yourself credit for.

As always, use today's episode to the extent that it's helpful and useful for you. This is not intended to represent some absolute truth of the points world, but rather to lay out a framework that I hope will help you in your points journey.

All right, let's start with the first level in points redemption skill stacking, and that is redeeming your points directly through your credit card account's travel portal to book flights, hotel stays, or rental cars. There's a couple things that I want to point out about this level of points redemption skill.

First, I don't usually advocate that you only use your points this way. I do actually think it represents a positive step forward when compared to the alternative options most credit card issuers offer for redeeming your points directly through your credit card account. If you're going to redeem your points directly through your credit card account, you likely will get more value from them by using them to book travel than by redeeming them for other available options like turning them in for gift cards, using them for discounted shopping purchases, or for statement credits. In that sense, it's the least bad option available from a value perspective.

Second, I think redeeming points through your credit cards travel portal is a rite of passage in the world of points travel. So if this is the only way you've ever used your points, or if it's how you used your points before you knew of any other options, welcome to the club. I honestly don't know that many people who skip this step entirely and immediately graduated to getting better value for their first points redemption. I know I didn't.

Your credit card company does not go out of its way to tell you when you use your points to book travel through their travel portal that the most value you're ever going to get from those points is somewhere between about 1 and 1 and a half cents per point. But you could potentially do so much better, which is why I don't recommend that you only redeem points this way.

In fact, for the most part, I think it's better to avoid redeeming your points for travel booked directly through your credit card account’s travel portal if your main objective is to get higher value from your points. It might surprise you to hear that I think there are actually a few scenarios where it can make sense to use your points to book travel through your card’s travel portal. So please don't think I'm suggesting that you should never do this.

I just don't want you to be redeeming your points through your cards travel portal because it's the only way you know how to use them. And in the beginning, most of us are redeeming our points for travel directly through our card’s travel portal because that is the only way we know how to use them. Hence why this is the first step in points redemption skill stacking.

But once you understand how else you can redeem your points and the benefits and costs of those options, please by all means book travel through your credit card’s travel portal if you've determined that's the best option for you for any given trip.

So while this is the step that the vast majority of us start out with when we first learn about redeeming points, it's certainly not where you'll end up if you want to get increased value from your points, because here is the first critical threshold that you'll pass over in your points redemption skill stacking.

The difference between getting low value from your points and potentially getting significantly more value from your points is learning how to transfer your points out of your credit card account to an airline or hotel transfer partner instead of redeeming them directly through your credit card account.

All of the major transferable points currencies, that is, BILT, Capital One, Citi, Chase, and American Express offer a menu of airline and hotel transfer partners that you can send your points to instead of using them to book travel directly from your credit card account. And it's this one simple thing, transferring your credit card points out of your account and into an airline or hotel transfer partner account that unlocks the massive value you can get from them.

Let me give you an example of what this could look like just in case you haven't heard this before. So let's pretend I want to fly my pretend family of five business class from Washington DC to London. And let's say I have American Express Membership Rewards points.

If I log into my AMEX account and I look for a flight for five people in business class from DC to London to book directly through AMEX, AMEX will tell me those flights cost around $2,200 per person. And if I don't want to pay cash, I can use 220,000 AMEX points per person or a little over a million AMEX points total to fly my family of five one way to London.

Now that's a lot of points, but it beats paying $11,000 in cash, right? Well, here's the amazing thing about learning about airline transfer partners. I could book that business class flight for my family of five for a million AMEX points directly through American Express, or I could transfer my AMEX points out of my credit card account and into the frequent flyer account of one of AMEX's airline transfer partners, Virgin Atlantic, and book the same exact flight for my family of five in Business Class for just 145,000 points total. That's not 145,000 points per person.

It's 145,000 points total for five people. That's fewer points for five one-way business class tickets than AMEX was quoting for a single ticket. And we're not talking about two different airlines or two different itineraries here. This is the exact same flight. The only difference is whether you book it through the AMEX portal or through Virgin Atlantic's website using the same exact AMEX points once you have transferred them out of your AMEX account.

Now you do have to pay taxes and fees and cash to book those award flights through Virgin Atlantic, but we're talking about needing 13% as many points as AMEX wanted to book the same exact flight. This is what it looks like to get 6.7 cents per point in value instead of just one cent per point in value, all just from transferring your points out of your credit card account.

So this brings us to the second step in points redemption skill stacking, which is transferring your points out of your credit card account into an airline or hotel loyalty account of one of your credit card's transfer partners, and then booking your travel directly through that travel partner.

In this step of skill building, this often looks like transferring points to an airline loyalty program and then using your points to book a flight operated by that airline. So an example of this is transferring your Capital One miles to transfer partner Singapore Airlines, and then booking a Singapore Airlines award flight using those miles or transferring your Chase points from your Chase account to your Air France Flying Blue account and using those points to book a flight on Air France.

And the thing that I want to emphasize about this step of skill stacking is that it's just one step past using your points to book travel directly through your credit card account. It doesn't require an extraordinary amount of time to do, and many people can learn the basics of how to do this in an hour.

But even though this is just a little step of the skill stacking staircase, it can have an extraordinary effect on the amount of value you get from your points. Because transferring your points out of your credit card account can double the value of your points, or triple the value of your points, or quintuple or more the value of your points. And again, this is just the second stage of points redemption skill stacking.

But it's the stage that the vast majority of people who have points earning credit cards never even learn exists and never take advantage of. Just the fact that you know this option exists puts you in a tiny group of people compared to the number of folks who have transferable points earning credit cards but have no idea how to use those points. So please hear me when I say you could literally never learn anything else about points redemptions or award search strategies, and you could still book tens of thousands of dollars’ worth in travel annually doing this one thing. But if you listen to this podcast, chances are you don't want to stop here.

Before we move on to the third step of points redemption skill stacking, here's my piece of advice if you're just starting to move from booking travel strictly through your credit card account to wanting to get more experience transferring your points to transfer partners.

First, know which types of transferable points currencies you're currently earning with your rewards credit cards. And second, for each transferable points currency that you're earning, become familiar with what specific airlines and hotels are transfer partners of that currency. This is as simple as running a Google search like AMEX points transfer partners or Citi points transfer partners. This is a great time to know exactly what you're working with and what transfer partners you have access to with each specific points ecosystem you're in. Because remember, they're not identical amongst all of the five major transferable points currencies.

Once you understand the basics of transferring points from your credit card account to one of its transfer partners, now you have tons of options for flights and hotels that you can book using your points. So where do people go next? And what's the third step up the points redemption skill stacking stairway?

So the third step up the skill stacking stairway is one that didn't even exist a few years ago and that represents a big leap forward for points enthusiasts and that is using award search platforms online to run searches for you. It used to be that if you didn't want to redeem your points directly through your credit card account but instead wanted to leverage airline and hotel transfer partners in order to get outsized value from your points, you had one option. Search for those awards yourself. You could also pay someone else to do it, but let's assume you want to do it yourself. You had one option. This is what I refer to as manual award searching.

You go to individual airline websites, you type in where you want to go and when you want to go there, and you look for options available on that website. If you wanted to find potential award options for more than one airline, or if you wanted to compare options, or you wanted to look at more than one transfer partner of your points currencies, you would repeat this step over and over again on different individual airline websites when searching for an award for a single trip.

I'm still a huge fan of running manual award searches, but I understand why people might not enjoy this approach to searching for award flights. With the advent of award search platforms, you no longer have to manually search all the different airline websites yourself for potential flight awards.

Over the past few years, more and more award search platforms have popped up. Sites like Point.me, PointsYeah, Rome.travel, AwardTool, Seatsby, Seats.arrow, and that's not even all of them. In a nutshell, award search platforms do the work of running award searches for you across many different airline programs simultaneously. And as they become more robust and more comprehensive, they're getting more and more useful.

Award search platforms let you run broad searches very quickly and can pull from vast amounts of data that would otherwise take you much longer to search through or search for on your own. They can take a lot of the guesswork out of running award searches, and for many people, these platforms are just so convenient. So it makes perfect sense to me why many folks turn to these tools to locate award flights they can then book through their credit card’s airline transfer partners to get outsized value from their points.

But award search platforms aren't perfect, and I personally think it's a mistake to rely on them entirely to run award searches. Here's why. Award search platforms aren't comprehensive, they're not always completely accurate, and as they become more popular and more well-known, the number of people effectively competing for the same award space goes up and up.

At the time of this recording, there's no one single award search platform that can search all of the different airline award programs for award space. Each award search platform will tell you which specific airline programs that it supports and has access to pull results from, but you'll notice that none of them currently support every single airline program. Inherently, that means that award search platforms can't find all potentially available awards.

There are holes in every platform that some award space inevitably is going to fall through. Additionally, the search results that you get from award search platforms aren't always entirely accurate. If you've ever had the experience where you've run an award search on one of these websites and it's returned an option that you wanted to book, but you went to that airline to find the same flight, but it's just not there, then you'll know what I'm talking about.

Now this can be because of outdated or cached search results. It could be because someone else is searching for the same flight at the same time and just managed to book it before you did, or it could be something like phantom award space.

The important part here is that the hallmark of this level of points redemption skill stacking is using award search platforms as if they were the end-all be-all answer to award searches without understanding their limitations. If you currently rely on award search platforms to run award searches, no problem. I'm not going to try to pry them out of your hands. Not at all.

More than anything, what I want you to know if you're in this level of points redemption skill stacking is that if you've tried to find a great award flight for a trip and have come up empty handed, even using an award search platform or several, you haven't hit the limit of what you can do with points. Because at the end of the day, all of these award search platforms are just tools. And tools themselves can't guarantee an outcome.

Now, I could pick up a scalpel, but you sure as hell don't want me attempting to perform surgery on your face. A trained surgeon, on the other hand, can do extraordinary things with that same tool because they're not relying on the scalpel itself to do all the work. They combine the power of that tool with their understanding of anatomy and tissue repair and how to hold the scalpel and how deep to cut and a million other things to achieve a fantastic and safe surgical outcome.

And so it is when advancing up the points redemption skill stacking staircase. The key difference between folks who get some value from their points or good value from their points some of the time and folks who get a ton of value from their points reliably over and over again is that they develop the skills that enable them to wield tools like award search platforms even more powerfully and successfully.

The next step up, the points redemption skills stacking staircase, is graduating from relying primarily on award search platforms for your award searches to learning how to run manual award searches yourself. Manual award searches are where you go to individual airline websites to run searches for award flights. Now, if that sounds tedious, laborious, and or boring, hear me out. Building the skill of learning to run manual award searches yourself is worth its weight in gold. Points gold, of course.

Let's talk about how you know if you're already at this level of skill stacking, what to do if you're not, and take a look at the benefits that await you when you learn to run your own award searches, just in case you're not yet convinced that it's worth it.

Very simply, you are already at this level of points redemption skill stacking if you would know where to go and what to do if all the award search platforms disappeared overnight. You're already at this level if when you start a search for award bookings, you know what websites to check for availability and you know why you're checking those sites. This is the biggest difference between being at the fourth level of skill stacking and being at the third level.

When you're at the third level of skill stacking, once you've run award searches on a search platform, you might not know what else to do or where else to look for award availability. Once you're at the fourth level of skill stacking, award search platforms might be where you start award searches or where you end them, but you can run an entire award search without them too.

At this level of points redemption skill stacking, you're not only familiar with the airline and hotel transfer partners of each of your transferable points currencies, but you also understand how to leverage airline alliances and partnerships to book even better deals, making your points stretch farther, and finding awards sweet spots like multiple business class awards on long-haul international flights.

Let's take a look at a few examples of what folks at this level can do with points and award searches. I mentioned before that in the second level of skill stacking for points redemptions, you understand how to transfer points from your credit card account to an airline partner to book an award flight. And I gave the example of transferring points to Singapore Airlines to book an award on a Singapore flight. Straightforward and a solid use of points.

Once you're at level four of skill stacking, you can potentially do even better booking that same award flight because you understand that you can sometimes book Singapore award flights through their Star Alliance partner, Air Canada Aeroplan, for fewer points than Singapore charges for the same exact flight. Whereas Singapore Airlines might charge anywhere from around 107,000 to 129,000 points for a one-way business class flight from San Francisco to Singapore, you can book the exact same flight on Aeroplan for just 88,000 points.

This is what I call award flight arbitrage, where you can book one flight for far fewer points just by understanding airline alliances and partnerships. Here's another points arbitrage opportunity that you would know to look for once you reach this level of skill stacking. British Airways is known for having relatively good award availability, but also for having pretty high taxes and fees on some of their award flights. Because they're a distance-based program, you're also going to pay more points for flights that are longer distances.

But you can potentially find a better deal booking British Airways flights by booking them not directly through BA by transferring your credit card points to your BA account, but by booking a BA flight through their One World Alliance partner Cathay Pacific. Beyond getting better deals on certain awards, understanding airline alliances and partnerships and how to run manual award searches, can also give you access to flights on airlines that you cannot otherwise directly access with your transferable points currencies.

Maybe you want to fly to Taipei on Eva Airlines, but you don't have Citi or Capital One points or miles that transfer directly to Eva. You can still book an Eva flight through their Star Alliance partner like United or Aeroplan if you have Chase points and or AMEX points respectively. Similarly, none of us can transfer any of our transferable points currencies directly to Japan Airlines to book award flights with them. But you can theoretically book award flights on Japan Airlines through American Airlines, BA, or Cathay Pacific.

Award flight arbitrage and increased access to different airlines in their award space isn't the only benefit of building the skill of running manual award searches though. Learning the fundamentals of manual award searches also gives you the advantage of finding and booking award flights that don't show up on award search platform results. It enables you to snag coveted award availability when it first becomes available before other people know when and where to even look for it, and it expands your options for constructing itineraries that make the most of the points currencies you have available to you.

I truly believe it's this one specific skill, becoming comfortable with running manual award searches, that enables me to consistently find fantastic awards for many of my trips, even when I'm booking for my family of four during high-demand travel times.

I also know it's this specific skill that is not immediately intuitive for many people to figure out, and that you may have tried running manual award searches before and not gotten anywhere with them. Now, a little bit more on that later in the episode, because I want to cover the last two levels of skill stacking for points redemptions first.

Once you've built up your skill running manual award searches, the fifth and next step on the skill stacking stairway is combining the power of using award search platforms in tandem with manual award searches. If award search platforms are great and manual award searches still represent the gold standard in finding award availability, then putting them together is like unlocking an award search superpower.

When you understand the fundamentals of how to run a manual award search, you can utilize award search platforms so much more powerfully. At this level of award search skill, you can deconstruct itineraries and use a combination of award search platforms and manual award searches to very quickly identify flight segments with great award availability and build itineraries out from there. You can mix and match airline booking programs and points currencies to create itineraries that otherwise don't exist. And you can take award searches that used to take a few hours and condense them down to just a few minutes.

But this is not the ultimate level of points redemption skill stacking, even though it's close. If you reach this fifth level of redemption skill, I would argue that you are probably already in the top 10% of points redemption ability. But I know there are more than a few overachievers in this audience. So if you wanna move to the top 1% of points redeemers out there, here is the sixth and final step of the skill stacking stairway.

I don't even have a name for this level other than experts of the exceptions. And what I mean by that is that folks who reach this level of points redemption skill not only understand all the fundamental foundational aspects of award booking programs, airline alliances, and award chart sweet spots, but they also know what and how to navigate the nuances and exceptions to all those rules.

Folks at this level know things like how to construct round-the-world award flight itineraries, how to find and book itineraries with stopovers and open jaw segments, and that you can book LATAM award flights through Finnair, but only if you call Finnair because these awards don't show up on our online searches, at least at the time of this recording.

One thing I want to emphasize about this last level of skill stacking is that the vast majority of people enthusiastic about points might never reach this final step. But more importantly, you also don't need to in order to get amazing value from your points. Getting to the sixth level of points redemption skill stacking is more about having a specific interest in going that deep into the world of awards than anything else.

I consider myself pretty enthusiastic about points and I love learning about award program nuances and I've never booked an around the world trip or secured LATAM award space by calling Finnair before. I've still managed to book well over $500,000 worth in travel using points, so I'm not beating myself up about that or losing any sleep over not being the tippy top of points redemption experts.

As we wrap up today, I just want to reiterate a few really important points about this points redemption skill stacking framework that I've proposed today. First, this skill stacking stairway is only one suggestion for how you can think about what it looks like to expand your skill redeeming points. Your experience might not mirror this exactly, and that's totally fine. These skill steps aren't entirely exclusive. They're more like a spectrum and you may find yourself floating back and forth between a few of them at any given phase of your points journey.

Similarly, you may learn or master these different skill sets in a different order than I described today based on your preferred learning style, the way that your brain works, or your particular interests for how you want to use your points. Second, and I think it's really important to be explicit about this, even though I tried to lay out points redemption skills in a linear fashion, please, please, please do not think you have to get all the way to the end of the skill stacking staircase in order to get amazing value from your points, or that if you're perfectly happy hanging out at what I've called skill level three or skill level one or skill level two, that that's not okay. It absolutely is.

I think the benefit of increasing your points redemption skills is that when you do, you have more award options available to you. You can get more value from your points if that even matters to you. And running award searches becomes easier and more successful.

As with all things when it comes to points, earn them and use them how it best suits you. You never have to learn any specific skill in this hobby just because I mention it on a podcast. You are always the ultimate arbiter of how you earn points, what you do with them, and what you want to learn in this hobby.

And finally, we all have different goals and preferences when it comes to how we want to use our points, and I think that's a beautiful thing. At the end of the day, your skill redeeming your points matters only to the extent that you're able to do what you want to do with your points to reach your personal travel goals.

Yes, that is right. I just gave you permission to totally ignore reaching any given skill stacking step that I mentioned in this episode. Not that you need my permission at all, but in case you're wondering, what should you focus on and what skills are worth dedicating some time or effort to learning of everything I covered today?

I think the two most important skills you can develop that will have the greatest impact on what you can do from your points in terms of how much value you can get from them, it would be steps number two and number four. If you've never transferred your points out of your credit card account and into an airline or hotel transfer partner account, that's the next thing to learn about when you're ready. That alone can get you exponentially more travel, or better travel, than using your points through your credit card travel portal alone.

Once you're a bit familiar with the concept of transferring your points, even if you've never actually done it before, consider getting better at running manual award searches to supplement using online award search platforms. If you've never run a manual award search before, or if you've tried but given up, this is the next most beneficial skill that you can learn to maximize your points redemptions.

And if these are the skills that after listening to today's episode you know that you want to build, especially if you want a step-by-step process to follow in order to do that and you want hands-on help from me so that you can build these skills as easily and painlessly as possible, I want to invite you to join me inside my Points Made Easy course.

Points Made Easy is a three-month online program where I teach you the fundamentals of how to earn as many points as sustainably as possible for the money that you're already spending and how to turn those points into your dream travel experiences.

I told you just a little bit ago that you don't have to master all six steps of the points redemption skill stacking that I taught today in order to get tens of thousands of dollars’ worth in travel and I meant it. All you have to do is learn an easy, repeatable process to make earning and using points simple.

You get that and my personalized, hands-on help inside Points Made Easy, including award search advice, tutorials on how to actually book the trips that you want to book, you can get trip booking help. You can get your credit card points and award travel questions answered by me as much as you need during our three months together.

I only open the course for enrollment once or twice a year and your chance to join is coming soon. Points made easy will be an open for enrollment in just a few days from when this podcast episode first airs, from March 22nd to March 30th, 2025.

Get on the waitlist now to have first dibs at joining and getting a bonus private points consultation session with me. You can go to https://pointmetofirstclass.com/points-made-easy for more course information and to join the waitlist now. That link is also going to be in the episode description and the episode show notes if you want to come back and find it later. In the meantime, happy points earning, happy points redeeming, and I will see you again next week on the Point Me to First Class podcast.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit pointmetofirstclass.com to learn more. See you next week.