As many of you know, we just returned from an absolutely INCREDIBLE trip to London and Paris. We really wanted to be able to travel, but it has never been in our budget. My sister has lived in London for years now, and we have been dying to visit, so we started looking into options to be able to make the trip. In addition to the expenses, there was also the fact that we have a one and a half year old child who would be traveling with us, and he has never done more than a couple of hours in a car, so we had to make sure that this was very well planned, with non stop flights and larger accommodations to give our family the space that we needed for playing in the hotel, baby naps in the hotel, etc. What we found is that there are incredible introductory offers available to be able to make this possible! Just like anything else that I recommend, always check and see what benefits you will get just for signing up for something; companies WANT your business. This is how we were able to travel to London, Paris, and Manchester, with $1,000 in spending cash, for FREE!!!!
First of all, we signed up for several offers. We only had about 6 months to prepare for our trip, but if possible I would recommend making sure that you are able to plan this a year out. Second, a lot of the benefits that I am about to discuss are related to credit cards. We did NOT pay a penny in interest, and were mostly just using these for our everyday expenses, bills, mortgage, etc. If you are not good with credit cards, this is probably NOT the post for you; the last thing that I would want is to not put you in the best position to win. There are TONS of offers available, but I will go over the ones that we used for this trip specifically. There is also the new Travel & Cards section on the blog, where I will be publishing more posts related to this trip (and MANY more to come!), so make sure to check that out as well! Another VERY important note is that all of the offers below can be done by you AND your spouse, DOUBLING your earning potential!
Flights + Travel
In order to get our flights for free, we needed to get a card that would give us a high value sign up bonus. The Chase Business Ink card was PERFECT for this. We signed up for this one, and earned 80,000 points for spending $5,000 on our card within the first 3 months. We used this card to pay our mortgage (more on how to do this later!), so this was super simple to finish. In addition to the 1-5% earning potential for all of our purchases, that meant that we had either $1,000 cash to spend, OR roughly $1200 on travel expenses booked through Chase. As a side note, you can merge any and all Ultimate Rewards earning cards into one account, so another place to get some great Ultimate Rewards points is the Chase Freedom card. You will get another 17,500 points ($175) for signing up with them as well. We were able to purchase our tickets for Delta/Virgin Air to fly to London and back with this deal. We later decided that we would start our first week in Paris instead of London, so we booked a 45 minute flight a few weeks later (of course, using miles/points), so we could have saved money here. That’s an important point though; make sure you know where you are going before booking your travel; that could have saved us about $200.
The next card that we used for our travel expenses was the Barclay Arrival Plus Card. This card offers a $500 travel credit (actually ended up at $600 because of all of the cash back that they offered for our purchases; 2% back on everything!) when you purchase $3,000 within the first 3 months. We were able to use this travel credit to pay for our flight from London to Paris, then Paris to Manchester, and then our express train from Manchester to London. That meant that the only thing that we had to worry about during the trip was the day to day transportation, which was SO much cheaper than we had anticipated! In both Paris and London we traveled via public transportation, which meant that trips were about $2 for each of us. If you max out the daily cap of travel ($8 I think?) in London, the remaining trips for the day were free. We never hit that threshold, as most things were within walking distance, and we would plan out our sight seeing so that everything was within the same area.
When using public transportation there are also usually deals where you can save money by purchasing multiple open ended tickets at the same time. In London, they use an Oyster Card, which you can load with funds and it will automatically deduct when you travel. This saves time, and can be used across their trains, boats, buses, and underground system as well. Most of our trips would also save money by booking online, which was very simple and meant that we weren’t trying to figure it out on the train platform in a different language with a line building up behind us (yes, this happened)! Their trains are about 30% cheaper when booking online, and it was so much easier to get to the station and have our travel handled than try to figure it out on the fly.
Hotels
So you have arrived at your destination, with your free flights; now what? We were able to book our hotels with a couple of great hotel cards. I had always thought that hotel branded cards were just for spending money on or at hotels; that isn’t the case! There are a couple of awesome ones that I absolutely love. First of all, my FAVORITE of all of the cards is my SPG American Express card. This card has SO many great benefits, like super high value cash back offers (like $10 back on a $10 purchase!), as well as great deals when transferring points. SPG and Marriott have a great relationship that will allow you to transfer points between the cards, making this one super valuable. The SPG card offers 25,000 Starwood Points as a bonus when you spend $3,000 within the first 3 months. In addition, when you book travel with them you will pay for four nights and get the fifth free. We booked a suite in London by transferring these points to Marriott (which TRIPLES their value btw!), paid for four nights, and got the fifth free! I would say that most places are around 5,000 points a night as an average figure, so you are looking at roughly a week of travel. Of course this number will fluctuate depending on where you are traveling and what kind of places you are looking at, but covering a week in London is a pretty big deal for us!
As I touched on above, the Chase Marriott card is another one that we booked for our trip. The Marriott card offered 80,000 points when purchasing $3,000 within 3 months, plus 7,500 for adding an authorized user! Make sure that your spouse is NOT the authorized user, so that they can get the card as well to double up on your points! IN ADDITION to these points offers, you will also earn a FREE night to spend every year on your card’s anniversary as well! Between these points and the SPG transferred points, we were able to book our suite in London. I was SO excited about this location, as we were right in the middle of the city, and we had a separate living room and bedroom, so it made it significantly easier with the baby. The living room also had a foldout in the couch, so my sister was able to spend a night with us to be our travel guide for a couple of days when we first arrived.
Another place that we booked was through hubby’s Chase Business Ink card; since he was able to sign up for a card in addition to mine, we received another 80,000 points here too! We booked the suite in Paris with these points, which totally covered us here as well. The suite had a separate living room and bedroom here as well, so the baby was able to nap or go to bed early, and we had enough space to let him play a bit. The suite in Paris actually had bunk beds, and the bed in the bedroom was bigger than a king; very rare for Europe!
Finally, our “splurge” for the trip was taking hubby to go see his favorite soccer team; Manchester United. They were playing in Manchester, a couple of hours away, and we signed up for the Manchester United VIP experience. This included padded seats a few rows up from the pitch, a four course lunch service with champagne/full bar and appetizers, snacks during the game, and food/drinks after the game. The whole thing was absolutely incredible, and I would HIGHLY recommend it if you are able to do a VIP experience with any of your sports teams. This is another benefit with both the Marriott and SPG cards; they allow you to use points to pay for sporting events, spa packages, concert tickets, and other experiences! They even have local events like Dodger/Giants games, football games, and more, as well. Unfortunately this match was not covered by these cards, but since it was hubby’s favorite team, it was well worth it for us!
While we were in Manchester, we used our Marriott card to cover our room. As this one was only for two nights, we opted for a nicer room instead of more space. We were on the TOP floor, overlooking the docks and the whole city, and could even SEE the stadium from our hotel room! This was perfect, and meant that we didn’t have any transportation costs while we were in this leg of our trip.
Another thing to consider when traveling is that if you are a member of the hotel, you can get things like free internet (we didn’t pay for internet at any location), points for your stay, late checkout, and other forms of preferential treatment. We also loved being able to get all of our day trips planned with the help of the concierge desk, with everything from calling local places to figuring out the transportation system and more. This saved us loads of time and headaches for sure!
As you can see these spending requirements are all very reasonable for the 3 month period of time, but using them to pay your rent/mortgage/property taxes is a super easy way to quickly hit these requirements. Since most companies charge for a credit card, or usually don’t accept one in the first place, I used Plastiq to spend most of our requirements. They have a great intro offer for $500 in fee-free dollars, so that you don’t have to pay their fee, but even with a fee is worth it for some of these since you are talking about thousands of dollars in rewards back.
Spending Cash
In addition to the $500 in travel credit that we used for the trip from Barclay, we also had another $500 in spending cash during the trip from two debit card offers. The first was a Chase Business Card checking account. For opening the card and keeping a $1500 minimum balance for 6 months, they gave us $200 cash! That’s a 13% rate of return, so way more than you are going to make anywhere else, and you are under no obligation to keep the account open after that. Hubby signed up for a regular Chase Personal checking account with one of those flyers that you get in the mail. If you don’t get the flyer, there are sometimes offers for these available online as well, so keep an eye out. His offer was for $300 when you open an account, and only needs to have a $500 minimum and direct deposit for 6 months on this one. There are SO many offers when setting up new bank accounts, and you can do these each once every 12-24 months from the date you close your account. If there is a direct deposit option, most jobs have the ability to put money in multiple accounts, so we didn’t even have to change the regular bank account that we use; just changed the amounts going to each account. The reason that I chose the account I did is that I do not have direct deposit, which limits the number of offers that are available. We used this cash to cover our food expenses during the trip, and almost everything was completely covered with these offers!
Another note about cash is exchanging money. We paid NO exchange fees by using our bank. Our bank provides free exchanges and no foreign transaction fees (like many credit unions). This was wonderful, as we only withdrew about $100 at each of our stops for miscellaneous cash purchases, and paid nothing for the exchange. Exchange costs can vary by establishment, and also include a processing fee as well, meaning that this free option is a must have! If you don’t have this option, and you can’t get a credit union checking account that will give you this awesome benefit, I would recommend using banks or post offices to take out a small amount of cash, as those will have the best exchange rates, and the least amount of fraud or conversion issues.
Meal Savings
Another huge one for us was food expenses. There were a few things that we did to combat this. The first, and BIGGEST savings for us was breakfast. In EVERY.SINGLE.PLACE. that we stayed, the breakfast was covered. The London location also had a kitchenette as well, which was wonderful, but the breakfasts saved us literally a third and were super convenient to not have to figure out on a daily basis. Since these can be paid with your hotel points, that is a GREAT way to make sure that you are able to slash a huge chunk of your expenses.
There were a couple of other ways that we saved on food costs. The first was that there are frequently combos available, saving on a appetizer + meal option, or happy hour drinks, or lunch meal savings, similar to how you can save in America. Another thing that I loved was that the restaurants all had menus available outside of the location, so that you can see the prices (and selection of course!) before entering the location. Because public transportation is so big in Europe, we also found that delivery services are HUGE there. They all seemed to have intro offers, from a few dollars off to free delivery, and let us pick locations that were a mile or two away; further than we were willing to walk after a long day, especially with our little man. Companies like UberEats, Deliveroo, and many of the restaurants themselves are great places to start. A note on these; ALWAYS check the policy on tipping waiters, drivers, and other staff members, as these vary drastically from America. There are also many locations that already include a Service Charge (SC), which is already tipping the staff; this is a big way to save as you are already paying for your service. You can even use companies like Groupon overseas, as long as you pay with PayPal. If you pay with a credit card, we found that they would always decline it since we didn’t have a billing address within the country, but PayPal would go straight through. This was a great way to get cheap bundles, usually at locations we would have never gone to without the deal. Finally, go to the grocery store! When traveling we almost always have our breakfast from the grocery store, whether we have bagels, cereal, oatmeal, fruit, etc, but since we had full breakfasts, we used these to help with lunches mainly. There are ready made meals if you don’t have a kitchen, or even sandwich fixings to throw something together. We had one of our lunches for $3 from the grocery store, which was a huge savings from the typical $30 meal for going out to a restaurant.
Sight Seeing
There are SO many ways to save on all of the tourist stuff to do in cities! The first thing that I would recommend is mapping out all of the locations that you want to see by location and day so that you aren’t having to get all over the city each day, wasting time and travel expenses. The second is that booking online will save so much line time, and most places offer a 10-20% discount for booking your tickets online. I would also highly recommend a free walking tour. We have used Sandeman’s tours everywhere, and they are a great way to start your trip. They will tell you about local inside information, like tipping, cheaper drinks by ordering at the bar, greeting customs, and more. They also will tell you which tours to take, which attractions are worth the trip, and other really handy information, especially since you will have a very limited amount of time (regardless of the length of your stay!) to “do everything”.
The biggest discount that we found was using the travel passes, like the London Pass, at our locations. I am going to have an entire post on this one since it was such a biggie, but there are awesome package deals where you can pay for 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, or 6 days, and get into HUNDREDS of locations, included in the cost of the pass! They even offer travel passes in some locations to cover the cost of unlimited travel for those days. My favorite part was the line hopper options, which let you skip the lines in some of the busier places (like the Louvre, London Tower, and more!). If you are lucky enough to go to one of the locations that has one of these passes, check out the included attractions and I would highly recommend grabbing one!
Overall this trip was absolutely the most incredible freebie deal that we have EVER done. It took loads of planning and time to get everything to work out all together, but was SOOO worth it! We have found several areas that we need to improve (mainly trying to do too much at once, especially for new travelers and with a baby), but it also taught us a ton to be able to take with us for our next trip. If you are planning on using any (or all!) of the information above, I would highly recommend your first trip being to only ONE destination, and give yourself as MUCH time as you can to accumulate points (ideally a year), which would really help to make the process so much easier. If you do end up traveling using any of this information, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know where you go and what you do! We are very excited to start planning our next trip, and really hope that we are able to help someone to make their travel dreams more obtainable! GOOD LUCK!!!
Check out this video for more information on getting started!
