From Miles to Smiles Stylish travel for professionals seeking luxury at affordable prices
I recently signed up for the American Express SPG card to bag a bonus of 10,000 Reward points upon spending £1,000 in the first three months after sign up. This turned out to be one of the easiest ways to earn free hotel nights, as that was enough to bag me three free nights, the first one of which I redeemed at the Nest Hotel in Seoul.
Earning additional reward points
Since then, I have accumulated more reward points from spending on the card and from referring friends and family. If you are interested in this card, sign up using my referral link. You will earn an additional 1,000 points after satisfying the minimum spend.
Each £1 you spend earns you an additional reward point. You can then redeem from as little 3,000 points (or less if there are any special offers available at the time of booking) for free nights.
Even after redeeming for the Nest Hotel and another free night in Liverpool at the Aloft, I still had a balance of over 8,000 points which includes 5,000 points that I received for a referral in August.
Free night redemptions
I managed to bag the Aloft Beijing for just 2,666 points a night paying 8,000 total for three free hotel nights. Now that is a sweet deal, especially as I am flying to Beijing in First class using this travel hack.
The super easy way to bag eight free nights
So I guess, I’m reiterating that this has to be one of the easiest ways to reduce your travel costs. All you have to do is sign up using this referral link.
- Satisfy the minimum spend and earn 10,000 reward points
- Then, refer your partner to earn another 5,000
- Your partner achieves qualifying spend and earns another 11,000 (remember that extra 1,000 points my referral link got you?)
Between you, you have earned a total of 26,000 points.
Assuming a redemption of 3,000 per night, you have just earned eight free nights and still have change!
Concerned about credit card spend?
You may wish to check out my golden rules of credit cards in this easy to follow infographic.
My advice is to apply for the cards just before a big purchase to ensure you can easily satisfy the spend. Flights to Beijing for instance?
What do you think?
Do you have a card that rewards your spending? Share the benefits as I definitely don’t want to miss out. I will even use your referral code if you are in the UK and it is a card that I haven’t already got. Win Win!
wow… a complete trip purely using reward points. Tgis sounds like stuff that dreams are made of!
But this really great planning on your part. I have never applied so much thought on my reward points. In fact, I wish there was a way to bring all the reward points from different platforms together!
Wow, never really though about those reward points. Good to know, will check into this card soon !
I use the Chase Sapphire Reserve card for the majority of my spending. I get 3x the points for all my travel expenses as well 1x for all other expense. I got it for the 100,000 pts to use for travel (about 1500 USD). I think I have made almost 3k in points this year alone.
Wow, free accommodation is the best. You won’t have to worry about the money plus that hotel looks very classy. Thank you for sharing with us how!
It looks like a great referral programme but honestly, I am not good with the timely payments of credit cards. Those who are can actually take a leap of advantage to avail so many points and free nights. which is simply cool!
Yes I don’t recommend credit cards for those who are not great at managing them. I have got a bunch of cards and it can be hard keeping on top of them all. I have a spreadsheet which allows me to track what is due when and how much is outstanding.
This sounds like a cool deal. We are never good at using this kind of cards. We have never been able to amass points on cards, whether it is for hotels or airlines frequent flyers. The reason being we never fly the same airline or stay at the same chain of hotels frequently. But this is something that we definitely need to give a try.
I highly recommend using a firm such as hotels.com and then you can still benefit from staying at different chains
I always appreciate breakdowns and recommendations like this. Even better is that this looks like a really solid program (unlike a lot of others). Plus, the minimum redemption level is nice, in that it’s not super high. Thanks for the recos!
Great recommendation to get free nights, looks like a really great referral programme in terms of racking those points up!