Unlock affordable family travel using credit card points and miles!
In this episode of the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast, host Justin Vacula sits down with Kate from Kate’s On A Plane to break down practical strategies for low-cost travel with kids using points, miles, credit card benefits, and loyalty programs.
We cover real-world tips for booking trips, saving on dining, planning family-friendly itineraries, and making award travel simpler (even when juggling school schedules and picky eaters).
If you’re trying to travel more for less in 2025 (and beyond), this episode is packed with actionable takeaways.
Topics include:
Family travel strategies with points & miles
Managing award bookings and travel planning with kids
Vegetarian-friendly travel and food tips on the road
Cruise travel tips and what families should know
Staycations, local travel, and maximizing shorter trips
Building a points strategy your whole family can understand
Community events, meetups, and what’s ahead in 2026
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro – Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast
00:45 Guest Intro – Kate (Kate’s On A Plane)
01:48 Upcoming Travel Plans & Destinations
03:24 Vegetarian Travel Tips
04:35 Cruise Travel Tips for Families
05:48 Family Travel Strategy & Planning
10:54 Local Trips, Weekend Getaways, Staycations
16:02 Credit Card Points, Miles, and Benefits
21:56 Getting Family Involved in Points & Miles
22:56 Events, Conferences, and Community
24:42 CardPointers
25:46 Points & Miles Meetups
27:25 Travel Stories – Portugal & More
32:16 Award Travel Strategy Lessons
35:18 Listener Questions & What’s Next
42:31 Predictions and Trends for 2026
47:04 Wrap-Up + Contact Info
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Rough Transcript:
Travel at low cost with points and miles. Credit card rewards bring the smiles. Many adventures tales to be told, make and save money, the world will unfold.
Fight the war on happiness. Pick up the gold. Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks the mold.
You’re listening to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast, I’m your host, Justin Vacula, here to help you make money, save money, and travel the world, and next to no cost with credit card points, miles, benefits, and loyalty programs. Kate from Kate’s on a plane, joins me to talk about family travel, dining, favorite redemptions of 2025, booking with miles and points and much more.
Visit meetup.com/philly [00:01:00] miles and points to RSVP for monthly Greater Philadelphia Travel Credit Miles and Points meetups I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The next 2026 meetups are February 22nd and March 22nd. Find a link in the show notes. For more content between shows, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on Facebook and x.
Follow Justin Vacula on Instagram. Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on YouTube for daily content including travel videos, podcast clips, and posts. Find more information including select episode transcripts at HurdyGurdyTravel.com. On with today’s episode recorded January 21st, 2026. Welcome to the show, Kate of Kate’s on a plane.
Hi Justin. How are you? Good. I’m excited to dodge the snowstorm coming this weekend. I’m going to be leaving to Las Vegas on Friday. We’re recording today, Wednesday, January 21st, so I’m eager to [00:02:00] leave potential five to 10 inches of snow, a nice benefit of miles and points. Las Vegas sounds like a good place to be.
Wish I could say the same. Nights at Rio towards re-qualifying for Hyatt Globalist status meeting fans of the show and lots of opportunities using benefits. Las Vegas, a frequent destination for me and others. We met and chatted in Chicago in 2025 already last year, which is funny to say. Now it’s January of 2026, but that was definitely last year in Chicago.
Yes. That’s crazy. That was my very first Chicago seminars, so it was a super fun and informative weekend. We chatted there. I connected with you on Instagram afterward. You’ve been posting regularly on Instagram. Can you share your Instagram with listeners and where people can find you online? Yes, you can find me on Instagram and Facebook under award travel with Kates on a plane, and I also have a good old fashioned blog at Kates on a [00:03:00] plane.com.
You have an apostrophe, or the username is just Kates, K-A-T-E-S on a plane, right? That’s correct. For Facebook and Instagram? Yes. My website is just Kate’s on a plane.com. No underscores. And no apostrophe and URLs. I don’t think that’s possible yet. I think that, yeah. All right, great. So people can find you online there.
And on Instagram, I post a lot of food pictures. You mentioned this, some other listeners, oh, you post all this vegetarian options, where’s the meat? What’s going on? Why all the veggie options? And for you, you’re also getting lots of vegetarian food during travels. Yeah, I love connecting with other vegetarian travelers because I think food is just such a big part of travel.
It’s such a big part of the experiences that we have when we are in new places and trying new things. And I am vegetarian. My whole family’s vegetarian. I’ve been vegetarian for over 25 years at this point, and I just love [00:04:00] seeing posts from you and other vegetarian travelers about new and interesting foods that we can get in other parts of the world and other parts of the country.
I think it’s very easy in 2026 to find the veggie options. Maybe 10, 15 years ago it was more difficult. But now I think a lot of restaurants, especially cruise ships have been wonderful about that. Finding options like stir fry stations, Asian food, Indian food, and much more heard. I haven’t done a virgin voyages cruise, but I really would like to.
I hear that they have an entire plant-based restaurant on their ships. Have you? Have you done a virgin voyage? Oh, yes. It was an offer match that I did an early 2025 on the Scarlet Ladyship and yes, many veggie options throughout. I missed the whole cruise offer match merry-go-round situation, unfortunately, so I do not have any free cruises under my belt just yet.
The good news is that 2026 can be your year. If you get the MGM rewards iconic credit card, you can get [00:05:00] MGM Gold status and enter the game of cruises. Yeah, I’m gonna have to look into that and watch some of your YouTube tutorials to learn more about how I can make that happen. I booked a cruise out of China.
It was unexpected to see that on the list, but using my MGM status, a comp cruise, I got a four night cruise out of China. There was also an option for five, but it was too close to my Australia trip. So the travel hackers dilemma strikes, once again, good problems. They had the cruise at around $2,000, at least on the invoice.
It might be an inflated price. Maybe there were other promo codes. I think it’s a really awesome benefit for a credit card to just get a complimentary cruise every year, and then being able to match that to other programs. Yeah, for sure. You travel a lot with family. Have you gone on any cruises with family members?
We have not done any cruises as a family yet. Just to tell you a little bit about my family, I live in Raleigh, North [00:06:00] Carolina, so not exactly close to any cruise ports of call. Unfortunately, with my player two and our two kids who are almost five and eight years old, and my player two, unfortunately, has gotten some seasickness in the past.
So we have not yet ventured out onto a cruise ship as a family, but I’m hoping that I can persuade him one of these days because like I said, I really wanna try one of those virgin voyages. Maybe a midship lower deck would be better. Maybe that. Maybe some Dramamine. I’m feeling good about it. I think we can make it happen.
You could use your CVS formerly Care Pass now Extra Care Plus to get the motion sickness relief. That’s been one of the redemptions for me, the $10 CVS credit every month. I feel like the CVS ExtraCare Plus program is like such an underrated program. I am a CVS ExtraCare Plus member, and I love my $10 extra bucks every month and all the gift card specials that CVS has where you can buy gift cards and get [00:07:00] them discounted via extra bucks rewards, I’m a huge fan. Lots of stacking opportunities and sometimes quarterly rotating categories. Discover it had the five x drug store, I believe, quarter four of last year. Other cards will have that as options. Some chase cards as well. I actually have the Freedom Unlimited with the double cash back offer for the first year.
I dunno if you saw it or if you remember, but back in late February, early March, I wanna say, of 2025, this offer was available for a hot second. I think it was like 24 to 36 hours. I’m currently enjoying six x chase points at drugstore through March of this year. I’ve been visiting CVS as much as possible this year.
America loves math. It’s multiplicative rather than additive. Sure. Three plus two. Three times two. Yes. Three x times two. Six x. There we go. Still a good one. It could be a vocabulary word for the listeners, I suppose, for today. [00:08:00] Multiplicative. Hopefully I can get right. I didn’t study for this Justin.
You didn’t tell me there would be math. Oh no. There’s always math. You gotta know there’s always math. America loves math. Right on the podcast for sure. And how’s the math been going with family travel? Trying to book multiple seats and trying to have enough points to do that. How’s it been finding travel? Maybe two seats in business class, three seats in business class.
Surely it gets more difficult on average with more people flying. I’m very fortunate to have a cooperative and supportive player two. We do have two players in the household earning for the four seats that we have to buy. We do hold two Southwest companion passes, and we try to use that as much as we can for our domestic travel.
Southwest redemption values have really gotten not so great over the last year, but when it’s two for one, it’s still just really hard to beat that, especially since they serve a lot of destinations where we have family, so we travel. We travel Southwest a lot too domestically. I’ve also [00:09:00] gotten fantastic redemptions through Atmos, just really coming in clutch for times when we really needed four seats and be able to get them at that Flat Partner Award chart rate has been just so awesome.
We flew home from Cancun on January 1st from Cancun to Miami. My player two’s family lives in South Florida. We were able to get those seats for just 4,500 points each when the cash price would’ve been like $1,500. It was bananas. Huge fan of the Atmos program. We haven’t done a ton of international travel as a family yet.
To be honest. One of the ways that I have approached traveling with my children is doing a lot of sort of one-on-one travel. One of my first actually big redemption that I did was I took my son, who was seven at the time to Paris. He really wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and so I took him there and we flew business class on Air France, which has a direct flight from Raleigh.
I was able to book that through Virgin, love my [00:10:00] partner redemptions. A part of what makes family travel work is just being really flexible about who’s going on which trips. Not all of our travel is as a family. My youngest is only four. I’m not sure that I want to be on an airplane with her for more than four or five hours just yet.
We haven’t done a big trip with her yet, although we do have a trip to Hawaii coming up this summer. There are some weekends where I’ll take my son somewhere and then my partner will take our daughter somewhere and they’re two totally separate and different trips. Just being responsive to our kids in terms of where they are in their development and what their interests are.
Taking turns with the travel rather than trying to bring everyone on the same trip, it sounds like. We have done some trips as a family of four. We went to a Dreams property in Cancun over the winter break, and we do travel as a family, like I said, to go visit our respective families. But yeah, we divide and conquer any particular North Carolina properties.
Maybe you would go elsewhere in the state, driving an hour or two, finding somewhere like a [00:11:00] fine hotels and resorts stay a very nice Hilton hotel using a Hilton certificate or maybe other instruments. Yes, I have. I have two here in the great state of North Carolina, so I redeemed one of my fine hotels and resorts credits at the Umstead Hotel and Resort, which is actually only about 10 minutes from my house.
It’s here in Cary, North Carolina, where super staycation. Yes, it was very much a staycation. I am very fortunate to have a mother-in-law who kindly offers to watch our children overnight from time to time so that my partner and I can get away. We drove all of 10 minutes to the Umstead, which was very fancy, very decadent.
We felt very spoiled and that was just really lovely. I don’t often stay in, get to stay in places that have turn down service, like coming back from dinner and finding like that. They’d actually turn down the covers and there was a chocolate on my pillow. I felt so spoiled. Ah, that’s common with the cruises.
I found a lot of really ambitious housekeepers. They would come [00:12:00] during the day, which would be pretty typical for housekeeping, but then they would come again. I’d come back from dinner and they came and everything’s changed out. So it’s pretty cool when that happens. It’s so nice. As a parent, I just spent so much time cleaning up after small people and having someone come and clean up after me for a change was really nice.
Points and miles saving money on travel, but also making the experience better with different benefits and then redeeming for. Luxury or higher. Yeah. And we would never have stayed here. I hear that the spa at this property also is fantastic, although we didn’t get a chance to sample the spa, but there’s absolutely no way that we would have spent over $400 to stay at a hotel in our home city without that FHR credit.
If you’re looking for a place to burn an FHR credit in the Carolinas, can’t go wrong with the umstead. Other property that I will suggest is one that is definitely under the radar, off the beaten path, but this is a timely time to talk about it because the boundless, the Chase Marriott bonvoy boundless card has the five free night offer once [00:13:00] again.
My Player two opened that card last summer, but when they changed the guest lounge access policy on the Venture X, that was like devastating for me. War on happiness. Yes. Lounges are like such a huge part of where I derive pleasure in travel. Oh my gosh, if you’re traveling with kids, you can’t just leave them in the terminal to go into the lounge by yourself.
You know you’ll be here. Yeah. That’s not an option. Unfortunately, no one will babysit them for you. It’s a sort of timeout. You don’t get to have the fun in the lounge. Yes. So when they announced that change, I was like, oh my gosh, we need a solution here. We opened the Boundless with the plan to product change it to the Ritz card this summer, which hopefully will not be nerfed any further.
But as a byproduct of that decision, we got the five Marriott 50 K free night certificates. And I was like, what are we gonna do with these? Because that really wasn’t even the reason that I opened the card. But then we had them. We wound up redeeming them at a property called the Courtyard, Carolina Beach Oceanfront, [00:14:00] which is, as the name suggests, an oceanfront hotel in Carolina Beach, which is just south of Wilmington, North Carolina.
And what I did not know before we got there, I don’t know how I like missed this, looking at pictures of the property and looking at the map. I did not realize that this hotel is directly next door to an amusement park. Like from our balcony, we could see the Ferris wheel going around and around. Oh, cool.
It was really a terrific stay for the kids. Yeah. Being so close. We were right, right there on the water. Super easy to just walk out to the beach. Indoor pool, outdoor pool, amusement Park. Park next door. We were set. Nice. That reminds me of the harbor area in Washington, DC. Lots of views from the hotel there and the MGM, national Harbor Casino, so lots of cool things.
One time the view matters. Sometimes it’s an obstructed view, or sometimes you’re next to a parking lot, but it’s cool to have a nicer view in a room. Yeah. And that property, actually every single room has an ocean [00:15:00] view. They designed the hotel so that there’s only rooms. On one side of the building, so every single room has a balcony overlooking the ocean.
It is not a luxury property by any stretch of the imagination, but if you are a family with kids needing an easy beach vacation for 50 K Marriott points, I recommend Hyatt Regency O’Hare was cool as right outside of this suite that I got upgraded to. Thanks to Hyatt status, I saw many of the trains going by and the airplanes, so trains and planes from the view.
There were many of y’all globalists who got some pretty killer upgrade at that property. Sounded like you have to come early because there were so many. Yes. Breaking the attendance records perhaps for consecutive globalists, or the most globalists at one property. I don’t know. They had pretty good vegetarian food at that hotel.
I felt like I was impressed with what they served us for the conference made to order breakfast. Always good for that. You can even just go with just the veggies or if you eat the eggs, certainly making [00:16:00] omelets and. Other possibilities there? You’ve had lots of success and I think you’ve been in this game for maybe two years, or was it longer than that?
Yeah, it’s been almost two years now. I opened my first, my old, my oldest card actually was a point, the mild card, although I didn’t really realize it or use it that way. But I intentionally opened a point, the mild card for the first time in March of 2024. And how did you find out about miles and points?
How did you get started? I traveled a lot when I was a young adult and a young professional in college. I studied abroad when I was in my twenties. I did a lot of traveling. I traveled for work all the time, and then I went through a season of life where I didn’t travel very much. I was in grad school, I was broke.
I didn’t have any money to travel. I started having kids, and then COVID happened. There was just this stretch of several years where I didn’t really go anywhere other than to visit family. And then when my daughter turned, my youngest child, my daughter turned three, I thought, okay, she is finally potty trained.
She’s sleeping [00:17:00] through the night pretty much like it is time for us to become a traveling family. Let’s do this. And then I went and looked at how much it cost to book four tickets to pretty much anywhere in the United States. And I was like, are you kidding me? We flew just one domestic trip to visit some friends for my, for a milestone birthday that I had, and it was like $2,000 round trip in airfare just for a domestic trip because when you’re traveling with kids, you don’t want the itinerary with two stops.
You don’t want the flight that departs at five 30 in the morning. This is not gonna work. We can’t do this if it’s gonna cost this much every time I was like, there’s gotta be a better way. And someone in one of my mom groups on Facebook mentioned something about, oh yeah, like you should really look into points and miles travel.
And I was like, oh yeah, I have this Citi Premier card that I’ve been using since 2007 that accrues these points that I’ve just been redeeming on Amazon. Oh no. I wonder what else I could be doing [00:18:00] with those. And I just went head first down the rabbit hole from there. And just once I realized how much potential there was, I’ve always been like a person who really gets dopamine hits from free stuff.
Even though award travel, as we all know is not like exactly free stuff, like you’re always still paying some money. I was always someone who, I’m very active in my local buy nothing group, and I like to clip coupons and that sort of thing. And when I realized that I could apply that approach to travel, it just lit me up.
I’ve been just fascinated with the world of credit card rewards and points in miles ever since. Certainly a way to level up and maybe that personality or the previous persona of looking to save was an easy transition from couponing or saving money on various items to miles and points into a similar mindset, perhaps trying to maximize, trying to find the value, understand the [00:19:00] terms and maximize reward programs.
Yeah, absolutely. When you have kids and when you have a family, there are so many expenses and it can be really stressful and upsetting sometimes to get an unexpected bill for something that happens, something that breaks or something a child needs, not to say that it’s not still distressing and upsetting when those things happen, but it really changed the way that I thought about our household expenses.
Our household expenses became an asset that I could leverage instead of just this thing that I was battling against. It’s a mindset shift in some cases where people would think of, I only use credit if I need it. Oh, I’m just gonna put stuff on a credit card because it’s convenient. But they’re not looking to optimize the rewards or earn great value on the spending that they’re doing anyway.
It’s also really forced me to educate myself on credit and finance and how credit scores work. I was always a person who paid off my credit card [00:20:00] bills every month. It wasn’t that I was just blindly tanking my credit all the time, but I did not truly understand the factors that went into a credit score and how credit scores work.
And I feel like a much more educated consumer of financial products now that I’ve been in this space. But what happened though, because Dave Ramsey says that you need to go in debt and you have to make the banks rich. In order to earn these rewards and that you have to spend a hundred thousand dollars on Discover to make a thousand dollars.
So you’re saying that he’s wrong? Yeah. I don’t think Dave Ramsey would do very well in the points and Miles Space. It sounds like he has some fundamental misunderstandings about how this whole thing works. Just fundamental, that’s all. Yeah. He wanted people to spend something like. $1,800 to go on a cruise.
And I took eight cruises last year, paying next to nothing. So which plan do you want the Dave Ramsey plan of he said just increase your income and work more and just pay for travel. What do you think about that? Are you gonna pay for travel for four kids? Oh man, it is [00:21:00] so hard now to pay. It is so hard now to think about paying cash for travel.
Someone was telling me about a really fabulous resort that they were at that sounds great, but what do you mean I have to pay money? Yeah. How about somewhere else? Can’t we just somewhere travel Hyatt? I mean, meet at a Hyatt. Yes. Podcast listener, Heidi and past guest was talking about a situation where she had access to all these comp rooms on the Las Vegas strip. She had Hilton Free Night Certs, FHR credits and much more. And people were pressuring her perhaps, or wanting her to stay at one location outside of the strip. That would’ve been even like $200 a night. And she said, I don’t want to pay that.
I could just ride share from the strip and get there if I really had to, or rent a car. I do think it makes it a little bit harder to coordinate and plan with people who are not in the space because they don’t always understand like that you need to start booking the trip 11 months out or that it needs to be a Hyatt.
But at the same time, I have been very fortunate to be able to [00:22:00] bring in some of our extended family into this. We live in raleigh, North Carolina. I am from the west coast. I’m from Southern California and my partner is from New York. Our family is not local by any stretch of the imagination. Our family is scattered all the way across the country, but I’ve been able to help our parents open their own credit cards and start earning their own points for when they come to visit us.
And I’ve also been able to start creating opportunities for my kids to have travel experiences with their grandparents. Next month I’m taking my son and my mother-in-law on a trip to London. And so they’ll get to have this experience together of flying business class and visiting a new city in a foreign city and being abroad together.
And then in the summer, I’m taking both of the kids to Hawaii with my mom. They’ll get to have that experience together. It’s been really just really a great new way for us to see family and spend time together and maybe a trip to Texas in 2026. We’ll take a short break for announcements and then return to the [00:23:00] conversation I’ll be speaking at and helping organize Frequent Traveler University conference in Irving, Texas near the DFW airport.
Join me from May 1st through the third 2026 at the Nylo Las Colinas Hotel by Hilton for social events and educational sessions. Ticket sales are live, $200 for FTU members and $249 for non-members. You can also grab an FTU annual membership for online courses, seminars, member perks, event discounts, and more.
Please use my affiliate link in the show notes for membership and conference tickets. Kate, will you be at the FTU conference? May 1st through third in Texas. Alas, I cannot be there due to a work conflict, but I am jealous. All the people who will be the Jelly School is calling. Yes, I love face-to-face points and miles events.
I’ve been fortunate to go to one every year since I started this, and it’s just, you just learn so much [00:24:00] and make such great connections. Do you know about the Jelly School? Are you a South Park fan? No, I do not know about the Jelly School. Tell me they were saying one of the characters, Wendy was jealous.
They were saying she was jelly and they had a news reporter outside of the Dunkin’ Donuts was claiming it was the Jelly School, and she said, that’s not the Jelly School. It’s Dunkin’ Donuts where you can use your $7 Amex credit. Right? Ooh, yes. Yes. I’ve been buying the Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards, that’s for sure.
Mm, yes. Come on Amex. Can we at least have 10 a month at Dunkin’? What was with the $7? At least make it someplace with good coffee. Ah, but you can always sell the gift cards to past podcast guests at CardCenter.cc. That is, in my opinion, the only good use for that credit. Ah, nice. Nice. I’m also an affiliate with CardPointers.
If you have multiple credit cards like me, CardPointers automatically activates bank offers and knows which card to use for maximum rewards. CardPointers saves me time and money. Use my link CardPointers.com/HurdyGurdyTravel for a discount on annual and lifetime plans. [00:25:00] I had a CardPointers offer come up.
Recently I was using my Amex credit for GrubHub for a pickup order and it stacked the $10 monthly credit and additional benefits from GrubHub. I think I got two or $3 off for something I was doing anyway. CardPointers activated the offer. A small win there. There had been bigger wins in the past $50 off at Lowe’s on a purchase.
I think it was $200 or more, and that was a tremendous win right there. How about you? Have you used the CardPointers app or browser? Yes, I am a big fan of CardPointers. I always go in and search in the app anytime I’m gonna buy anything, if I’m not working on minimum spend, if I can just use whatever card.
I go in the app and I search for that store to see if I have any offers. But my favorite are the surprise offers where you get the email that you’ve redeemed an offer you never even knew you had. Finally, I host monthly Travel and points meetups in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Our next meetups in 2026 are February 22nd and March 22nd.
If you’re local or wanna make the trip, it’s a fun, casual way to talk point strategies. [00:26:00] Meet like-minded travelers and share ideas. RSVP at meetup.com/philly miles and points. Do you have any upcoming plans to travel to Willow Grove, Pennsylvania? I don’t know. Tell me about what’s going on at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.
Ooh, that’s the monthly meetups. So you can always come and do some online gambling as well. Liquidate some gift cards. Get some spend in. Get some MGM status with MGM credit cards. It could be fun. And we have the Super Hong Kong Chef Chinese restaurant. A unique option you could redeem giant grocery rewards for freshly made Chinese food.
Help me in, is there a CVS there? There are a lot of CVS in the area, but certainly not in the same parking lot as giant. Close enough. We’ll make it work. All right. Perhaps we’ll see you in Willow Grove. Are there any meetup groups in your area in North Carolina? One that I’m a part of, at least here in the Raleigh area.
We were actually supposed to meet tomorrow, but while you are jetting off to Vegas, not tomorrow, I’m sorry. Saturday, [00:27:00] we were supposed to meet this Saturday, but while you are jetting off to Vegas to enjoy the sun, we here in the south will be preparing for some sort of catastrophic ice storm, so I don’t think it’s gonna happen.
Yeah. It’s a nice thing to just be able to flee because my trip was originally gonna be Sunday, as I think I mentioned, so I’m just gonna jet, I’m leaving. I’m done. I’m not dealing with it. Yeah. Get outta Dodge. Just get outta town. All right. We’ll return to the conversation. I’m chatting with Kate of Kate’s on a plane, talking about award travel, family travel, and much more.
We’re recording in January of 2026. We completed lots of travel in 2025. Do you have a particular favorite trip or one of your favorite trips in 2025? I took so many amazing trips in 2025 that it’s hard to choose, but I think the one that I wanna talk about now is a trip to Portugal that I took with my player two in June.
We had not been away together, just the [00:28:00] two of us since 2018. So this was really special. My mother-in-law, my, my in-laws, once again, hats off to them, volunteered to keep our children for a week so that we could run off to Europe for a little bit. It was a little bit insane though, because we live in Raleigh.
My in-laws are in New York, in the space of, I think 11 days. We wound up taking nine flights or something crazy like that because we had to fly the whole family up to New York to drop off the kids. And then our transatlantic redemption was on Iberia, so we had to fly from to position from New York to Boston because God forbid I find it something out of JFK, only one of the biggest international airports in the country.
But no, I booked something outta Boston. We positioned to Boston and we flew on Iberia on the new A 3 21 XLR in their new business class. And I have to say I was impressed. I really liked it. And the vegetarian meal that they served me on that flight, and granted, I’m [00:29:00] like, I’m still new with this, so it’s not like I’ve done 8 million business class flights, but the vegetarian meal they served me on that flight was so good.
Like I could not make vegetables taste like that in my house. I don’t know how they did it. Magic. Yes, it was fantastic. And we flew to Madrid, had a layover in Madrid and went to Lisbon. We stayed at the Hyatt Regency Lisbon, which is right outside. It’s not in the sort of historic, I dunno if you’re familiar with that property, but it’s not in the historic downtown part of Lisbon.
It’s a neighborhood outside the historic downtown area called Beem, and it’s just such a beautiful property. It’s overlooking the river and the, I dunno how to say it in Portuguese, but the 25th day Ale Bridge, which looks exactly like the Golden Gate Bridge. I was showing my friend a picture from the rooftop of that hotel and she was like.
When were you in San Francisco? I was like, no, it’s not San Francisco, it’s This is Portugal. And she’s like, no, stop. It’s not, you’re wrong. And the nice thing about being in Bellm is you can, Ubers are super [00:30:00] cheap and the food there was just so good. We had such good and cheap food and so many just like fresh and flavorful vegetarian dishes.
It was amazing. The nice thing about being in Bell M is you were right on the train and the train line, and so we were able to ride the train into Kash Geis. And it was really nice to be able to do that because you can go on by ado and book a day trip into Kishke, but it’s several hundred dollars to do it that way.
And riding the train was like five euros or something. And we just had the most like magical day wandering around this seaside, Portuguese town where it was just so quaint and so beautiful. And every time we turned a corner, we just stumbled upon something that was just like impossibly cute, like we were walking to see.
Where there’s like waves crashing into a cave along the ocean front, and we stumbled into this park that just had like chickens roaming around and I was like, are you kidding me? Is snow white gonna come out and start singing to these animals? It was just like impossibly perfect [00:31:00] and we just had the greatest day.
We went to this restaurant where they had what was called a visual menu. Can’t remember if it was all vegetarian. It might have been, or maybe not. I’m not sure. Instead of sitting down at the table and having server bring you a menu and you order off the menu, you had to go inside to the restaurant. And every dish that they were serving that day, they had a sample out on the counter and there was a person there who would just tell you about each dish and you had to look at them and just pick based on how they looked.
And again, just the vegetables were just like so fresh, so amazing, so delicious. I don’t know what they do to vegetables over there, but they were so good and it was just the most perfect day. The rest of our trip. We visited Barcelona, which was great, and then we also did a long layover in Amsterdam. We were positioning to Frankfurt.
This is how I got to nine flights in 11 days. But we scheduled ourselves a day long layover in Amsterdam, and so got to roam around the city for eight or nine hours and then spend the night in Frankfurt before we caught the Singapore [00:32:00] Airlines fifth Freedom Flight from Frankfurt back to JFK. The world tour, and I imagine that you never would’ve done this if you had to pay full cash rates, but miles and points made it possible.
Absolutely not. Would never in a million years have paid for any of this. When I started with this and learned the initial information, had success with a few credit cards, I started to tell some friends, maybe acquaintances and other people about the hobby. And it was dispiriting to hear people say things like, oh, I don’t think it’s worth the effort.
Oh, sounds like a lot of work. And then the same people would then complain about travel being expensive. I found it surprising that it’s difficult to get people into the hobby.
It’s so worth it. It has unlocked this whole world of experiences that I would just would not have access to otherwise, and I’m just really grateful. It’s a big payoff and certainly when you start with just one card and you’re early in the game.
It can’t be as [00:33:00] complicated if people are taking the view of, oh, I don’t know how I’d manage 15 credit cards. We’re not even at 15 credit cards. If you’re at one or two random Amazon store card or Victoria’s Secret card or some random card just earning 1% cash back, they’re thinking that the end game is too difficult when they’re not even taking those beginner steps.
It would be like, I don’t think I could play like a chess Grandmaster. Therefore I should just never even learn the basic rules of the game of chess. Yeah. That’s what I tell people, and that’s what I told my mom and my mother-in-law when I helped them get started earning points for their travel is it doesn’t, you don’t have to do it the way I do it.
You don’t have to make it a whole hobby and start an Instagram and start a blog. You can just open one AA card and just use that to fly down to see us and just see how it goes. And if you don’t wanna open any more cards after that, you don’t have to. Then you can go back to paying cash for your flights.
And it’s fine. This opportunity is here and why not take advantage of it? And I don’t think the travel is going to [00:34:00] just come for free because people are working and then trading their time for money. So how many hours would they need to work to afford these business class flights? Or they would just have to sit at home and not take the flights at all.
They say, miles and points sounds like some effort or some work as they call it. But I think that work sounds like a lot of work, and one way or another you’re gonna have to put in some effort to afford the travel. It’s true. I can confirm work is a lot of work, and the statuses and the benefits that we get are often unique to miles and points or otherwise they would be cost prohibitive.
I had some really great opportunities last year, and if you had told me when I first started in this hobby that I would achieve these things, I would never have believed you. But I recently attained a Hyatt Globalist status, so I’m a newly minted globalist and very much enjoying that.
Looking forward to my first stay as a globalist in London next month, and that was made possible by a combination of all of the award travel that we did last year and some [00:35:00] fortuitously timed and located work travel, but also the Double Elite night offer on the Hyatt card that came out last fall. When that offer came out, it made it possible for me because I had a bunch of stays already planned for November and December, and so that is what helped me get over the edge to achieve that globalist milestone.
Nice. As we’re coming to the end, I have some listener questions. If you subscribe on my subscribe star.com page. You can search for Hurdy Gurdy Travel on subscribe star.com. We have listener questions for the guests or even for me. One listener question, have your booking or travel strategies changed as kids get older, or how do you think they will change as the kids get even older?
When we think about what a typical business class cabin looks like, I need to be able to see her and touch her and get to her and help her. As she gets older, I think it’s gonna open up more opportunities for me to do those kinds of trips with her and for us to do those kinds of trips as a family.[00:36:00]
Having kids age out of car seats, man, I’m really looking forward to that. That is one thing that definitely hampers travel when you have to log a car seat around, it’s great when you can make it work so that you don’t need one. We did a trip to Washington DC last year and that was wonderful. ’cause public transportation there is so great.
I just didn’t even bring one. I knew we weren’t gonna drive anywhere. I didn’t need it. Or on our trip to Cancun, the airport shuttle I booked at, I was able to rent a car seat for that. But just as kids get older, they need a lot less stuff. And so that makes it easier to travel a lot lighter. We are, for the most part, a carry on, only family.
And one time we even did personal items only and that was really challenging. But we pulled it off. Yes. Public transit. I took MBTA transit when in Boston you mentioned that. And I’m going to be taking Amtrak from Philadelphia to Washington DC for a fine hotels and resorts stay. I’ll be taking the next gen Acela train in business class using Amtrak points from Amtrak [00:37:00] credit card with one of my favorite banks, the first National Bank of Omaha, who also issues the MGM credit cards for some reason. Lots of winning with FNBO and I look forward to more train travel to DC back to Philly and then in China. Public transit has been pretty cool part of travel.
That sounds lovely. I love train travel. It’s so civilized. The Europe train travel. You had success with that? I took trains in Italy. I uploaded some of those videos to my YouTube channel. In addition to the podcast, listeners can see some of the travel videos. How was your train experience in Europe that you mentioned earlier?
It was terrific. I think the only place that we really did any substantial amount of Ubering was in Lisbon. Just being located outside the city center and Ubers were so cheap there that it just didn’t make sense to do anything else. But yeah, we took that train into K Barcelona. People complain that the Grand High Barcelona is too far out of the city, that it’s not centrally located.
Which [00:38:00] is funny to me because I studied abroad in Barcelona. I was in college at my apartment was actually like right around the corner from where the Grand Hyatt is. The subway system there is so good that we had no problem. We stayed there and we were able to get wherever we wanted in the city within 20 minutes.
It’s terrific being able to leverage public transportation when you travel. How about upcoming cards for 2026? Will you be applying for new cards soon or later in the year? Maybe the BILT palladium, or I just got denied for the Bank of America Alaska business card. Ah. Which I’m sad about. I’m hoping I can make that happen at some point.
I am completely out of Atmos points, so I need to replenish. That’s on my radar. But to that end, I certainly have been thinking about the BILT cards since they were announced because. 50,000 BILT points would go a long way. Yeah. Towards partner redemptions through atmos. Yeah. So I’m thinking about it.
I’m not sure that I need another $500 priority pass [00:39:00] card in my life right now, but honestly fee, but then the signup bonus, and then all the points earning, I think it can make sense. At least there is the signup bonus. The thing, honestly, that I find compelling about that card is the built gold status, because I’ll be very sad when my Rakuten earning rate for BILT points drops to half a point per dollar.
Instead of one point, I may have to pick up one of the BILT cards to try to secure some BILT points in BILT status. What about. Yes, bank of America is also on my radar. I got denied last year as well, and I think part of that denial had to do with not having a checking account with them. But I’ve been in timeout for checking accounts because I’ve had multiple personal checking accounts over time and multiple business checking accounts over time.
Tomorrow, we’re recording on the 21st of January, I’m going to apply for a BOA business checking. Tomorrow because there’s a new bonus, or at least new to me, they’re giving I believe, a $500 cash bonus for parking, I believe [00:40:00] $5,000 in there for 60 or 90 days.
I’ll get a signup bonus or a cash bonus on investing money with BOA for that short time, and then that should improve my approval chances. A little bit of a tongue twister there. To go for an Atmos card, maybe midyear, maybe in July. Some time has passed since my recent inquiries and new accounts. Yeah.
Best of luck to you. See, I’ve had a Bank of America. I have banked with bank. I have put up with Bank of America’s terrible interface. Oh, the payment screen for three years now. And they still had the nerve to deny me said about it. Yes, war on happiness once again, but I think the business checking should help with the approval chances and maybe time will heal the wounds of the recently opened accounts, the inquiries.
I’m looking forward to that because there are a lot of AA code shared flights, as you mentioned, out of Philadelphia for me, so that could be very valuable, especially getting to Las [00:41:00] Vegas, and I could use AA to get to Bahamas for 2027. I had a really nice trip there a few weeks ago. How about upcoming trips for 2026?
We are pretty much booked out for all of 2026 already, which is another thing that I think I did not anticipate about award travel is how much of a planner it would make me. We’re going to London next month and I did book that with Atmos points 50 5K for the direct flight from Raleigh to London Heathrow.
I’m very excited about that and appreciate the convenience of that. We don’t have a ton of transatlantic flights coming out of Raleigh, but. I’m grateful for the ones we have. Spring break we are going to the Hyatt Regency Tamaya in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have heard a lot of great things about that property and I’m excited to give it a try.
Going back to the Courtyard, Carolina Beach, ocean Front when school gets out. And then the big trip for the summer is Hawaii. I grew up on the West Coast, but I haven’t been back to Hawaii since I was in high school. Looking [00:42:00] forward to taking the kids there. And then I’m currently booking our winter break trip for next year, which I am hoping will be Panama.
Sounds good. Lots on the horizon. Any other thoughts as we close out the episode? I am just thinking about how much change I saw in the award travel space in 2025, and it’s already January 21st, so it’s probably a little late in the game to be making predictions, but I am curious, Justin. Justin, if you have any predictions for 2026?
Ooh, predictions for 2026. I like it. Chase had adjusted some things earlier in the year that people were getting a popup saying they weren’t allowed to get welcome offers on the cards for whatever reason. I think there might be a slight chance that they’ll loosen the 5 24 rule. If you’ve gotten five or more cards appearing on personal credit in the last 24 months, you’re not eligible for Chase cards.
Maybe there’s a [00:43:00] chance that they’ll loosen the 5 24 rule and allow people to get new chase cards, but just not get the signup bonus. I think that’d be very interesting. Increase their approvals, but unfortunately they’ve been guarding their cards with that 5 24 rule for a few years, but I’d absolutely apply for another card with Chase sacrificing a signup bonus, but still getting benefits for travel and still getting qualifying points towards statuses.
That’d be interesting. I feel like I have seen some data points lately of people who claim to have been approved lately for Chase cards over 5 24. Maybe you’re onto something there and I think we’ll see more from American Express. They’ve always been upping their game, offering no lifetime language offers, employee card bonuses, some new credit cards.
A survey went out recently about a revamped or a possible revamped business gold card. I think it’s gonna go in the direction of more credits with higher annual fees. But a [00:44:00] business goal refresh I think would be really nice. And in one of the possible revamps, they were talking about adding credits for chat GPT, adding high spend goals on cards, and some synergy with the American Express Business Checking account that if you were to pay a certain threshold of bills with the American Express Business checking account.
Then you got bonus points on the credit card side, so that’d be really cool to see some more bonuses for that. That’s interesting. Let’s see, a refresh of the business Gold. That could be my prediction for 2026. The only thing certain in this life are death taxes and coupons. Some of ’em I think could be useful.
I like the business gold, $20 a month office supply credit, that’s super easy and some lament the coupon application, but I like it when the credits are useful and they’re easy to use. And for office supply, store credit, I can just go to my local Staples, get a $20 gift card or split tender into another gift card, charging something like $20 and [00:45:00] change to the business gold, and then using the chasing cash for the rest of it.
That’s pretty easy to use. There’s some organization, but I think very easy wins with the credits. Agreed. Maybe in some way the couponification keeps the game alive, that they know there’s gonna be breakage, that people are paying the higher annual fees. It’s a benefit for us keeping track and using those benefits.
Chat GPT is interesting. That would be interesting. The US Bank triple cash allegedly refunds or rebates, a hundred dollars in statement credits per year on eligible software subscriptions. I’m waiting for that because I changed my payment for ChatGPT over to the US Bank triple cash card. Getting an extra a hundred from that is cool.
But if an Amex card gave a $200 credit, I think that would be really interesting. And a final question for you. When you go to grocery stores or other places and buy gift cards, do you think having kids with you increases your success rather than cashiers being [00:46:00] difficult, making up rules, changing rules, or not letting you buy anything?
Justin, I go to great lengths to avoid going into a grocery store with my children. There is no way I would be successful purchasing anything with my children in tow. Oh no. Let alone gift card. Okay. Maybe a year or two from now, I don’t, maybe you get some bonus points for bringing the kids and the cashiers are happier and they don’t give you a hard time.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Some of my older podcast guests, older in age, podcast guests. Heidi and Beth, I remember GameStop used to be a big thing and they’d try to buy gift cards at GameStop, and they would think that they were getting scammed because the average GameStop customer isn’t like 40, 50-year-old woman, and they had some hard times at GameStop, but Heidi has mentioned, oh my gosh.
Oh, I bring the grandkids with me to Giant and the cashiers, oh, they’re asking the kids questions. They’re happier, and she could usually get purchases through bringing the kids. If I’m buying gift cards, my goal is [00:47:00] to be as forgettable as possible. That’s my objective. All right. Thanks for coming on today.
Thanks so much for having me. It was fun talking. Hopefully listeners won’t forget this episode and if you’ve been listening for about 50 minutes, hopefully you had a good time with us and learn some valuable tips. Thanks everyone for listening and stay tuned for future shows. For more content between episodes, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on Facebook and x.
Follow Justin Vacula on Instagram. Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on YouTube for daily content, including travel videos, podcast clips and posts. Find more information including select episode transcripts at HurdyGurdyTravel.com. And Kate, can you share your information again where people can find you online?
Yes. So you can find my website at http://www.katesonaplane.com and on Instagram. Kate’s on a plane. And [00:48:00] that’s Kate. Yes. Thank you. I’ve seen alternate spellings like CAIT and other others as well. That’s ’cause half of the girls born in the eighties are named some variation of Katie. And there’s the final fantasy Cait Sith, if I’m saying that correctly.
CAIT. I believe that one is. So even more confusion. So many. Search Hurdy Gurdy Travel on subscribe star.com or become a channel member on YouTube to support my efforts starting at the $5 a month tip jar level. Receive special perks at higher levels, including private one-on-one conversations about card strategy, creative credit card spending, and asking podcast guests your questions.
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