Thrifty travelers know that there are many ways to save on travel expenses in addition to purchasing cheap airplane tickets and discount hotel rooms or cheap vacation packages.
Travel costs can be reduced by proper use of credit cards:
Select a gas credit card that offers up to a five percent discount on every fill up.
Sign up for credit cards that offer exceptional sign up promotions. Almost any card will offer a 25,000 mile bonus for signing up, which is usually all that is needed for a domestic round trip ticket at the opening redemption level. Recently the British Airways Chase card offered 100,000 miles as a sign up bonus. Such promotions typically last a short period, but similar promotions are frequently on the horizon.
Sign up for credit cards that will earn you bonus miles from airlines that are about to merge. At present people can earn bonuses for signing up for credit cards from merger partners United and Continental, as well as AirTran and Southwest. Once airlines mergers are completed all of your points are placed into a single account.
Many of the most productive travel rewards credit cards offer baggage fee waivers, priority boarding and sometimes business lounge passes. You need to weigh the advantages of a cards perks against its annual fee since typically the more perks offered by a credit card the higher its annual fee.
Consider using a credit card that is not tied to any single airline frequent flier program and will either purchase your tickets outright or allows you to exchange points for miles in many different programs, such as American Expresss Membership Rewards.
Hotel credit cards are sometimes a better value than accumulating frequent flier miles. Points earned in the Starwood program can be used for hotel stays with no capacity restrictions or blackouts, same as with the ICH group and Hilton reward programs.
If you are going to travel overseas, be aware that most credit cards charge a foreign transaction fee ranging from 2 to 3 percent. Select U.S. issued credit cards no longer charge this fee.
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