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On our year-long road trip around the US, we managed to stay 51 nights in hotels for practically FREE!!! Adding it all up, it comes to over $6,100 of free hotel stays in just one year. It didn’t take any complicated schemes or anything, just a little bit of planning beforehand.
We earned our free nights three different ways:
Hotels.com Rewards
The majority of our paid hotel stays are booked through hotels.com. We’ve found that they offer the best variety of hotels fitting our needs and locations, and you’re not locked into a specific chain. They usually have the best price, and their customer service was good, particularly if you receive Gold status. There were a few times we had to make last-minute cancellations after the deadline and hotels.com was able to negotiate on our behalf to get us a change or even a refund. For the purposes of this post, though, the most important thing is that for every 10 nights you stay, you get one free night. This definitely adds up over time. You receive a dollar amount equal to the average cost of the ten nights, so you can’t choose any hotel, but it is still a pretty good deal. This is especially true since you can use a rewards credit card to pay for your hotel stay, so you are also earning points that way, too.
Credit Card Signup Bonus Points
Before we left on our road trip, we each signed up for various credit cards that offered generous bonus points that we would save and use throughout the year. While earning points on spending does eventually add up, the real value in rewards credit cards come from the signup bonus. Most cards offer bonus points after spending a certain amount, currently as much as 125k points. That is a lot of free hotel stays.
For example, the Hilton American Express card offered 75k bonus points at the time we signed up (it currently is offering 125k, so even better). Halfway through the trip, we both received offers to upgrade to the Ascend card for another 75k points, so we had (and still have) a lot of Hilton points. We found them easiest to use during our trip since we had a great deal of flexibility with dates and locations to maximize the redemption rate. Good quality hotels (like Hampton Inns, part of the Hilton chain) in smaller towns, particularly on the East Coast and in the Midwest, can be booked for only 10,000 points a night, a great deal. IHG is another card that we have and used on our trip. Travelisfree has a handy tool for searching hotels based on points.
Credit Card Free Reward Nights
Park Hyatt Zurich
Some credit cards offer a free night stay rather than points for signing up. We each signed up for the Hyatt Chase Card, which gave us each a free night to use. There is an annual fee ($75) associated with this card, but we decided that it was worth paying to get the free hotel night. That might not seem like a great deal at first. However, you can use the free reward night at almost any Hyatt property, including high-end hotels located in prime locations in expensive cities (the kind that would wipe out your balance if you used points). This proved most valuable on our honeymoon when we used the free night to stay at the Park Hyatt in downtown Zurich, which was by far the nicest and most expensive hotel we have ever (and probably ever will!) stay in. We each used our free night reward and we spent two awesome nights in a hotel, a stay that could easily have cost over $1000 if we paid cash.
