Nate Buchanan breaks down how he funded a multi-country trip using credit card points and miles. He redeemed 25,000 AAdvantage miles to Japan, 20,000 British Airways Avios for Tokyo to Cebu, and used a Barclay Arrival card to erase a $300 Airbnb charge.
Are you almost packed up? Almost done. When we very first got here, I thought they had given us towels for blankets. After absolutely freezing our butts off the first night, I did a little closer investigation.
It appears that they gave us airplane blankets. This is a nice one. Yeah, I'd say this is like first class blanket right now. Ah, maybe like business class quality blanket.
It's gonna be us then. That lunch makes me a little nervous partying with her bags for the day. Just checked out of our hotel. Off to a pretty late start this morning. Going to find some coffee and some breakfast here you can eat two eggs, bacon, ham, sausage and Brad and wash it down with coffee and tea for only 90 bucks. It's like three bucks. Hello Brad. Hello.
Mango sticky rice.
I'll take that. Mango.
The breakfast of champions. Can't beat mango sticky rice for a dollar for breakfast. I love this stuff.
Time for coffee and we're gonna die. Bye. That.
Judge us all you want. It's our second day at McDonald's.
They had free WI fi and air conditioning and good coffee.
Out of a soda cup mug. Kara and I checked out of our hotel around lunchtime today. We have to catch a bus down to the island of hotel tonight at 6pm so we've been killing some time working. While we're here, I thought I would explain how we're using miles and points to pay for this trip that we're taking around the world. There's a lot of background noise. I'm sorry, I'm at McDonald's, it's kind of loud. So. A few weeks ago we shot a video about how we stayed at the Doubletree in Kuala Lumpur completely free for six nights. If you haven't seen that one yet, check it out right here. After we published this video, a lot of people asked me to explain more about how we're using miles and points to pay for this trip. So I'll give you an overview of all the miles and points that we've used in the first two months of this trip.
We started our trip at home in Nashville, Tennessee. From there we used 25,000American Airline miles apiece to fly to Japan. Normally it costs 32,500 miles in points, but we booked during the off peak season. So we were able to save 7,500 miles apiece while flying to Japan. We earned the 50,000American Airline miles needed to fly to Japan by signing up for this credit card, the American Airlines platinum card, by signing up for this credit card and spending the $3,000 needed to meet the minimum Spend, we were able to earn a 50,000 point sign up bonus which was the exact amount of miles and points we needed to fly to Japan. After spending a week in Japan, we flew to Cebu in the Philippines. To do that, we used 20,000 British AVOs apiece to fly business class from Tokyo to Cebu. Cebu on Japan Airlines. This was a great deal because it would have cost almost exactly the same to fly this route in economy if we would have used our American or our United models. It's because British Airways has what's called a distance based award charge. We'll get into that another day. Oh, I almost forgot. While we were in Tokyo, we stayed in an Airbnb that cost $300. This Airbnb was completely free thanks to our Barclay arrival card. By signing up for this credit card were able to earn 40,000 arrival miles. Arrival miles are really unique because you can use those miles to erase travel expenses inside of your account. So essentially one arrival mile equals $0.01 worth of free travel. So to make our Airbnb completely free, we redeemed 30,000 arrival miles to erase the $300 expense from the Airbnb. So thanks to the Barclay arrival card, our stay in Tokyo was completely free. Back to the Philipp after the Philippines, we flew to Singapore. And we did that by booking a cheap flight on Cebu Airlines. It cost us each about $100 a piece. We used our remaining 10,000 arrival miles to pay for one of the flights. From Singapore, we traveled north to Hong Kong. We booked the flights from Singapore to Hong Kong on a budget airline called Jetstar. We just paid for that outright. It was pretty cheap, I think like somewhere around $100. After Hong Kong, we went to Singapore. We used our British Airway miles and it cost 4,500 miles apiece. Again, British Airways distance based award chart came in extremely handy. For this flight, we earned our British Airway miles by signing up for the American Express Platinum card. Signing up for this card gave us 100,000 membership reward points. The cool thing about membership reward points is that they're transfer. So we transferred our membership reward points to British Airways. After a few days in Taiwan, we headed south again to go to Kuala Lumpur. To get to Kuala Lumpur, we used 15,000American airline miles each. In order to earn an additional 30,000American Airline miles, we signed up for the Starwood Preferred Guest card. Signing up for this credit card, we earned 25,000 SPG points. SPG points are 6 similar to membership reward points in the fact that they can be transferred to airlines. So we transferred our 20,000 points to American Airlines. The cool thing about Starwood Preferred Guest Points is that when you transfer them to American Airlines you get a 5,000 point bonus when you transfer 20,000 points. So our 25,000 point transfer actually gave us 30,000American Airline miles which was conveniently at zero. Exactly what we needed to fly from Taiwan to Kuala Lumpur Again, after arriving in Kuala Lumpur, we spent six nights in the Doubletree absolutely free using our Hilton points. And again, if you want to know more details about that, you can check out the video right here. After leaving Kuala Lumpur, we bought a cheap flight on AirAsia to Siem Reap, Cambodia. AirAsia is a budget airline and this flight flight only cost us about $80 so it didn't make sense to use miles and points so we just paid out of pocket. Our hotel in Siem reap only cost $27 a night so we didn't need to use miles and points there. And from Siem Reap we headed to Bangkok via bus. The bus was not near as luxurious as flying, but it did only cost $14 a person.
The bus is like as big as Siem Reap to Bangkok. So yeah, the bus ride only cost $14 but it took 12 hours and Bangkok is where we are currently. So that is a complete wrap up of how we've used miles and points to help pay for the first two months of our trip around. The.
Bus is picking us up in an hour so we are going to get some food. Hope you enjoyed the miles and points illustration. If you want me to continue shooting videos about miles and points, let me know in the comments below.
We've been working inside McDonald's all morning, but we didn't actually want to eat here so we're taking turns going to the pad thai stand right outside.
So we don't lose our seats.
Sorry for these annoying shadow. Looks like while with 20 miles and points, Carrie used the rest of her birthday money.
What'd you get? I got a necklace with a camera on it. All right.
