The flight I paid for

I love free travel almost as much as I love to travel. We have paid cash for about 5 flights in the last 6 years. I will plot to figure out not to pay for days. I have booked 27 free domestic and 2 international flights for taxes and fees just this year. Then I paid for one.

My husband has Glacier National Park on his list. I have traveled a lot without him this year thanks to all my cruise deals. Cruising is not his favorite but I am hoping to change that later this year. Anyway, I booked a fantastic trip to Glacier for us earlier this year for next month. Since it was us two, I used our delta miles and decided to splurge and use our miles and fly directly to Kalispell. I have booked this trip before for the whole family using Southwest and we were going to have to fly into Spokane and drive 4 hours after flying. Wildfires prevented us from going on that trip so fingers-crossed this year is successful.

My youngest is a senior but we homeschool so all his classes this year are dual-enrolled. He decided he wanted to do them all online. Then he asked if he could go on this trip with us. He wanted to see Glacier National Park. He pointed out he could do his schoolwork in the hotel. I didn’t have enough Delta miles to get him a free ticket. I could have transferred the points from my American Express rewards but it was so many points and I knew I had European trips in mind for those so I bought a plane ticket. It pained me for a moment. Then I remembered I was lucky to have a 16-year-old son who still wants to travel with us.

I maximized my points by booking an almost $600 plane ticket on my American Express Platinum card. It gives me 5 points per dollar on plane tickets. I paid extra for a refundable ticket. It is fire season in Montana after all.

We had already booked our hotel when we added our youngest. Last year, the Chase Marriott card had a signup bonus of 5 free night certificates (50k certificates). The certificates were for 50k points or below rooms. I used four of these for our trip to Kalispell so our stay will be free. I have done this sign-up bonus before. You can get a sign-up bonus on the Chase Marriott card every two years. The last time we got them we used them for a wonderful trip to the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country for free. I had to top off those certificates with my points but it was well worth it for a fabulous water park resort. You can use up to 15,000 points with a certificate to get a room worth more points than the certificate.

The Chase Marriott card is $95 a year. It comes with a free night certificate after the first year.