This is my monthly recap where I look at what reward programs we were able to add miles or points to over the previous period. While we continue to be all about ways to earn really cheap or free airline miles and hotel reward points, we have shifted our “collecting” mindset into spending over the past month. What fun is earning all these rewards if you never spend them. With all the really great credit card rewards being offered for signing up for new cards, airlines have slowly been increasing their redemption rates and/or making it more difficult to spend those rewards. So we are trying to use some of our stash to help plan the next family vacation. To read proof how collecting miles/points can work for your family, read our post on how we are going to Hawaii (and Disneyland) for $30 in total cost for the flights.
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The following is a brief summary of the things we have done in the past month to build up our accounts.
Delta SkyMiles– Audience Rewards trivia questions in all three of our accounts.
United Mileage Plus- There was a major reduction in our United accounts because we transferred them to Continental to be able to pull together our reward tickets to Hawaii next summer. There was also a small addition of miles from use of the United credit card while dining.
Continental OnePass- All of our Continental accounts now are depleted, again because of using the miles towards our Hawaii trip. We combined multiple accounts, and created a new account for our toddler. Since we are getting down to the end of the year, and the Continental program, we will be pulling the plug to get Continental credit cards very shortly so hopefully we can turn around and close them before the conversion to United, and thus be able to take advantage of the new United Explorer cards in the future.
US Airways Dividend Miles– We are pulling together all of our last-minute hits for the Grand Slam promotion, and our accounts will be stocked nicely be really cheap and free miles earned from all sorts of activity in both my wife and my account. We will easily pull off 30,000 miles between both of our accounts with very little out-of-pocket expenses because of smart planning. Lots of the miles will not show up until November though, so look for this number to grow again next month.
American Airlines AAdvantage– My 2,500 compensation prize for purchasing the now famous “hockey pucks” from the shopping portals finally credited. Even though Cartera offered an additional 2,500 miles for a new purchase in their shopping mall, I elected not to participate as they really turned me off from the process over this incident.
Hilton HHonors– For once we had an easy Facebook promotion of 250 miles just show up in our account, and we did not need to chase after the points. Thanks Hilton!
Priority Club Rewards- No change. Our Priority Club points were going to be the rockstar of our Hawaii trip next summer. We have enough to stay almost for free the entire trip depending on whether we use the point and cash options. The only problem now, there are only Intercontinental Group hotels on Oahu, and we are planning on spending time on the other islands. IHG does allow point redemption toward other brand hotels, which is something we may consider on the other islands.
Starwood Preferred Guest– For some reason none of our Audience Rewards points have been showing up in our account for the past month despite them actually showing credit in our Audience Rewards account. Considering all these points were earned within the last week or so of October, I am hoping they are just in the process of migrating over into our SPG account. I have had no luck getting Audience Rewards to answer phone calls or emails, so tracking down missing points will probably be impossible.
Note, we also have reward accounts with AirTran, Southwest, Frontier, Choice Hotels, Wyndham Rewards, and various other programs, but since we do not really use them, there is little advantage in including them in this list.
The point of showing these reports each month is to show you that every little bit of miles and point collecting can really add up to big rewards. It is never to late to sign-up and start collecting for your future travel needs. Thanks for reading! Save Money, Travel More.