Why You Should Sign Up for Airline Rewards Even If You Don’t Travel Much

Author: Carrie Kirby / Source: Wise Bread

So you’ve got a busy job that never sends you on trips. Or you’re terrified of flying. Or you have small kids whom you dread dragging onto an airplane. Sign up for some frequent flyer accounts anyway. (See also: Best Travel Rewards Credit Cards)

Why bother if you’re not going to be earning miles by buying airplane tickets?

Because there are a lot of ways you can accumulate miles besides flying. Once you have all those miles, you can save up for a dream trip or one amazing vacation per year. And if you truly plan to never fly, you can even spend your miles on stuff other than flights.

How to earn miles without flying

My friends say they can’t understand how I travel for free through frequent flyer miles, when they have never flown enough times to earn a single free flight. My answer is that I haven’t bought enough plane tickets to earn free flights either. I earn the bulk of my miles right here on the ground. There are so many ways to earn frequent flyer miles without flying.

Credit cards

The fastest and easiest way to accumulate frequent flyer miles is by getting a new credit card. Just today, I signed up for a card that will pay me 40,000 miles after my first purchase of any amount. Typically, a new card will pay a similar or larger bonus after you meet a required minimum spend in the range of $1,000 to $5,000.

These cards will also pay you one or more mile per dollar you spend. If you are responsible for running a household of multiple people, like I am, you may find it easy to accumulate 3,000 or more miles per month paying for things such as groceries, kids’ day care or activities, gas, etc.

Even without the sign-up bonus, that would amount to more than 30,000 miles per year — enough for a round-trip domestic flight on most airlines or a one-way ticket to Europe. (See also: How to Use Travel Rewards Cards to Get Free Trips)

By combining bonuses and points for my monthly spend, I’ve been able to get my whole family to Australia and back, among other trips — with few of those points coming from actual flights.

You may find it more rewarding to use an airline shopping portal than a rebate site, such as eBates, when making online purchases. During the past two years, I earned about 5,000 miles each year through online purchases, and I am not a big shopper.