Over the years, we’ve had many readers share their success stories with us. Folks for whom traveling domestically once a year was a luxury are now traveling the world with just a few credit card sign-up bonuses. And the best part? They are sharing their stories with us and others who benefit from knowing that it is possible to see the world at prices we can all afford.

If you have your own success story to share, please email us and if it gets published, we’ll send you a $25 Amazon gift card as a thank you.

Dear FrugalTravelGuy,

First, thanks so much for your blog and all the wonderful information you regularly post! It has been a real benefit.I wanted to share a story that isn’t dramatic, but really quite simple, but I suspect it may reassure travelers with modest goals that this hobby can help them, too.

In past careers, I had traveled a considerable amount for work, and had status on a couple of different airlines (all from travel mileage), and had later built up enough miles and points via credit card usage (running a small business, and basically doing all spending via an airline card). Having sold the small business and gone to a stage we’ll call semi-retired, we still had a need to travel – for personal holidays, and to visit grandchildren who are not within driving distance.In looking for information and good fares, I stumbled across several good blogs on miles and points, including FTG.

Reading through these, I realized we could keep our travel costs down significantly (perhaps even to very small amounts), if only we could get some good credit card bonuses (we have excellent credit), targeted toward our objectives. The biggest hurdle, for us, would be that our (relatively) fixed income makes it challenging to meet minimum spending requirements, as we do not spend as much as we did when we were employed, let alone when we owned our business.

Taking some excellent advice from the blog, I realized that we really have two goals for miles and points, though this story is only about one of them. The first is domestic travel to see the grandchildren (and their parents). The second is to be able to make trips to Europe – ideally every other year. Having settled this focus, I decided on two airline programs, one for each goal. American Airlines/OneWorld for domestic, and United/Star Alliance for European.

Beginning with the domestic goal, a few months ago I began by taking advantage of the Citibusiness AAdvantage Platinum Mastercard for 50,000 miles because I do still have a small, very part-time, business. I also signed up for the AAdvantage shopping portal and made several purchases through the Christmas season for increased mileage bonuses.

After doing a bit more research, I decided to use British Airways Avios for additional domestic travel. I took out a Chase BA Visa with its incredible 50K offer for $3K spend in 3 months, which extends to 75K for $10K spend in a year, or 100K miles for $20K spend in a year. We won’t spend $20K, but we are likely to spend $10K, so, the 50K should be sure as the $3K has been spent, we hope to hit the $10K mark and get 75K miles (plus another 10K or more for the spend).Meanwhile, thanks to another blog post on American’s discounted reward flights, I began searching for a destination near one of our children.

The normal destination city wasn’t included, but another destination, not too far away, was listed, and with a bit of arranging, scored discounted reward tickets for two in coach to visit the grandchildren (one ticket couldn’t be discounted, as it was on a partner airline, but thanks to the credit card bonuses, we had the miles to do it anyway). Also, the last time we visited them, we paid almost $100/day for a rental car – I wanted to reduce that! A blog post recommended rentalcars.com, and I was thrilled to find a rental for under $125 for the week. Even better, when we arrived, the agent offered us a free upgrade, so we drove an Audi around all week!

Total cost:
Flights and fees: $11 each
Rental car: $119 + taxes
Thanks for your help in making this work for us! Now on to those European trips!

-Scott T.

[Image via Getty]