How to Travel Hack and Earn Points without Credit Cards
Most travel hacking tips are centered around opening credit cards. But opening a lot of credit cards isn’t something that everyone wants to or can do. If you don’t want new credit cards, but still want to learn how to travel hack, this article shows you ways to earn airline or hotel points towards free travel without relying on credit cards. Of course, if you do have travel credit cards, you can stack those rewards with the strategies listed in this article to earn even more points.
Sign up for airline and hotel loyalty programs and book direct
Instead of booking your hotel through a third party service like booking.com, book directly with the hotel and sign up for their loyalty program. You’ll usually get the best deal this way and you’ll earn points to use towards your next stay. Make sure to check if there are any promos that you can sign up for. In my recent two week stay in Japan, I earned over 30,000 Hyatt points because there was a promo where I earned 3,000 points for every two nights I stayed on top of the regular points earnings. The points I earned from this two week stay is enough for 6 free nights at a Category 1 Hyatt!
The same principle holds for airlines as well. However, airlines are slightly different in that you can earn points even if you book through a third party. But I still recommend booking directly with the airline as it is easier to deal directly with the airline than with a third party booking service if something goes wrong or your flight is canceled.
Sign up for airline or hotel dining programs
Some airlines and hotels have dining programs where you can sign up, link a credit card, and then earn airline miles or hotel points whenever you dine at a participating restaurant. In addition to money earned from dining, you’ll usually earn bonus points for signing up and spending a certain amount of money in a designated time frame. It is important to note that you can usually only link your credit card to one program at a time. So if you want to sign up for multiple programs, you’ll need to use a different credit card for each one.
Some examples of dining programs:
Use airline shopping portals
Many airlines have shopping portals that allow you to earn miles on purchases you would be making anyway. Instead of shopping directly at a merchant’s website, you instead pull up the shopping portal (for example AAdvantage eShopping), find the merchant website via the shopping portal, click on the merchant website, and make your purchase like you regularly would. Once your purchase has been validated, you’ll be credited a certain amount of miles depending on what you’ve purchased. Nerd Wallet has a good detailed article about it here.
(Bonus): Use Rakuten
Now you won’t earn points with this method (unless you have an American Express credit card), but you can earn cash back which you can use towards travel. Rakuten is a shopping portal that is an alternative to the airline portals. Like with the airline portals, you go to Rakuten’s website and search for the merchant you want to purchase from. Say you want to purchase something from Macy’s. At the time of writing this article, you can earn 10% cash back from Macy’s through Rakuten. So you click on the link for Macy’s and are redirected to the Macy’s website. From there, you make your purchase as usual and when it is complete, you’ll get 10% of the purchase credited to your account. You can either get this in the form of money or AMEX points. You can use this to stack rewards. Say for example, you want to purchase a hotel room for your next trip through Marriott. You want to use the tip from the first section and book directly with Marriott and link your Marriott rewards account. By accessing the Marriott website through Rakuten, you’ll earn an additional 4% cashback (accurate at the time of writing) on top of the rewards you earn from booking directly with your Marriott rewards account.
If you’re interested in signing up for Rakuten, you can use this link and you will get $30 off your first purchase of $30 or more (and I will also get $30 at no additional cost to you).
Link your airline or hotel account with programs like Lyft or Starbucks
Some rewards programs allow you to link your airline or hotel account to earn miles with both programs. For example, Lyft allows you to link your Delta Skymiles, Hilton Honors, Alaska Mileage Plan, or BILT accounts to earn points for every dollar you spend. You can also link your Starbucks account with your Delta Skymiles account and earn 1 Delta mile for every $1 you spend at Starbucks. If you book your Airbnb through delta.com/airbnb and enter your Skymiles number prior to booking, you’ll earn 1 mile for every $1 spent.
Use BILT rewards
BILT is known for having the first credit card that you can use to pay rent without any additional fees. But did you know you can join their rewards program without getting a credit card? You likely won’t earn a lot of points this way, but BILT has some of the most valuable transfer partners, so it’s worth signing up. Especially pay attention to their rent day promotions because this is where you might have the opportunity to earn a lot of points. Last month you could earn up to 100,000 points or various other prizes including round trip Virgin Atlantic Upper Class tickets to London by playing their puzzle game. That’s a lot of points just for doing a puzzle! Sadly, I didn’t win big on this one. But another month, I was able to get free Hyatt elite status from one of their promotions. It’s definitely a program that’s worth keeping your eye on.
As you can see there are plenty of ways to earn points for travel hacking even without a travel credit card! And if you do have a travel credit card, you can stack these rewards on top of each other to earn even more points. Let me know in the comments if you’ve used any of these strategies and which is your favorite.
