Planning for vacations well in advance has a benefit. In my experience, the costs of flights and hotels are less expensive than if you were to make reservations closer to your travel date. For example, I’ve reserved airline flights 6 months in advance and I noticed as my travel date gets closer the price tends to go up. Reserving hotel rooms well in advance will have a similar experience. This is something I’ve known about and have practiced this for a number of years. Recently, I accidentally came across an unknown travel benefit for card members while I was looking to reserve airline flights for my next vacation.  

I am planning a family vacation to Asia and just the flight costs alone is a lot. I love travel hacks with credit card points and bonuses so I had started planning this a year ago. The one thing I want to point out that I never experienced before is with redeeming an award flight with United Airlines. My wife just opened a United Airlines credit card which is great because of the bonus miles you can earn. I already have United miles built up but I don’t have their credit card.  

When I was looking for flights using my United account, the shortest and convenient flights were 100K miles or more for a one way flight. For a family of 4, that’s 400K miles one way. Then I used my wife’s United account to look up flights and I got a different experience. The same flights that would cost 100K miles per ticket was discounted for 55K miles per ticket. Why was she getting a different price than me? Then I realized it was because she had the United credit card. 

It’s like a buy one get one (BOGO) sale. I was getting 2 tickets for the price of one. I didn’t realize this was a benefit for having a United card and I never had this experience with other airline cards. I did a search for other destinations such as cities in Europe to see if this benefit was consistent. I didn’t see the discount so it was just with this particular destination and time period.  

Looking for ways to reduce your costs is always a goal of mine. Travel hacking with credit card airline bonuses is one way especially if you like to travel. I never experienced discounted tickets from having an airline card which is a great unknown travel benefit for card members. I was able to redeem airline tickets for 4 people for the price of 2. The lesson here is to know what all your credit card benefits are. If you are interested in following my journey and their journey, follow them on Instagram and email subscribe to get alerts of latest posts or follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.