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In order to accumulate these miles and points for cheap travel, you need to sign up for the airline and hotel loyalty programs first. Can’t win the lottery without buying a ticket right? So who should you sign up for? I recommend signing up for these major airline and hotel loyalty programs.
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Airlines
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(You may never have flown some of these airlines but I’ll give you a hint, you can redeem miles from one airline to fly another airline through alliances and partnerships. This is more advanced and will be covered later)
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Hotels
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Ok these are a lot of loyalty programs to keep track of. Luckily this brilliant guy who I met developed a website to keep track of it all. Its called AwardWallet and its free.
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This website will store your log-in information for these programs and will keep track of balances and even expiration dates (up to 3 programs) for free. (Oh I forgot to mention miles and points have an expiration date but there are ways to keep them from expiring). Award Wallet does offer a Plus version where you can “donate” any amount, usually $5, for a 6 month period. This will keep track of more account expirations. What’s also great about this program is that it keeps track of other loyalty programs like Best.Buy, Starbucks, your credit card rewards like Discover, etc,
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One more quirk I need to mention, It doesn’t keep track of Southwest points but I still Luv them non the less. You can manually enter the rewards number and points anyways. Also United and Delta are persnickety and they won’t let you keep your log in info on there but you can direct your monthly statements to Award Wallet and it will update your points for you or you can manually enter them as well.
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After you have signed up for Loyalty programs, its now time to look at your Credit Health.
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