How I Got A Free International Flight Ticket Without Using Credit Card Loyalty Points
International Flight Tickets Are Expensive. I Used These Tops & Tricks To Get A Free International Flight Ticket During This Extraordinary Inflation Period.
Let’s face it — everyone is facing the heat of inflation. Everything from groceries to flight tickets is expensive. According to St. Louis Fed data, the national savings rate has fallen below the pre-pandemic levels thanks to the rise in expenses and wage growth not keeping par with it.
I needed to travel internationally for personal reasons and while I could have just purchased the ticket with my credit card and enjoyed the 5% cash-back that I get from my Chase Freedom Unlimited card, I wanted to be creative and see where my miser mind takes me. Good thing that my travel plan wasn’t urgent and I had a good amount of time to spare.
Opening New Credit Cards Were A Strict No For Me!
While many credit card providers continue to lure new customers with generous offers ranging from $150 — $1000, I didn’t want to open a new card since it impacts the overall age of my accounts and gets reported to the credit bureaus. I didn’t want to come across as credit-hungry.
But this is definitely an option for those of you who don’t have as many cards to your name and can afford a slight, temporary dip in your credit score. This is a good way to subsidize a flight ticket or another large purchase.
New Checking Account Offers
The rule of reporting new bank accounts (checking or savings) to credit bureaus doesn’t exist, however, because well, you’re not opening a new credit account.
Given the overall volatile market, many banks (especially the newer ones) figured out that they can get new customers with offers similar to what the credit card providers offer. Hence, a number of newer and older banks came up with cash bonuses if we opened a new checking account as a new customer.
These offers keep rolling from one month to another and there are still quite a few banks running these offers. Here are some of the banks with such offers in September 2022 (I don’t get any reward if you navigate to these banks from this page. So, feel free to do so. This is not an advertisement):
- Citibank: up to $2,000 bonus
- Fifth Third Bank: $375 bonus
- BMO Harris: up to $500 bonus
- SoFi: up to $300
- TD Bank: up to $300
- M&T Bank: up to $200 bonus
- Chase Bank: $200 bonus; $100 bonus for college students
- Huntington National Bank: up to $300 bonus
- Bank of America: $100 bonus
To test the waters, I opened a couple of accounts and set up direct deposit to fulfill the criteria for receiving the reward. I earned a cumulative of $1,200 pre-tax from these offers.
Re-Investment Of The Prize Money
While $1,200 was enough to cover at least one round-trip international flight, I wanted to stretch the experiment a bit to see how much I can cover this $1,200 into.
There are a couple of company stocks that I believe in eternally — Reliance Industries and Adani Enterprises Ltd. I split the money into both of these stocks (note that these stocks are available only to those who can trade locally in India) and was able to squeeze an extra 35% over 5 months, effectively turning $1,200 into $1,620.
This was more than enough for the flight I had to take. I eventually plan to close the newly opened bank accounts for consolidation and also to avoid the account maintenance fees. But you’re obviously welcome to maintain them if you want to.