INovember was a great month here at Points With a Crew! Here were some of the top posts from the month (see also my all-time most popular posts). As always, if you aren’t following me on Twitter or Facebook, you’re missing out on some of the best tips to travel free or cheap with a family!
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Best of November!
- The Chase Freedom card released their 5% bonus categories for the first quarter of next year, and then a few days later, we found a (possible) leaked copy of their 5% bonus categories for all of 2015!!
- IHG is offering 2000 points for signing up for their IHG Rewards program. If you don’t already have an account, I’d recommend signing up as their points don’t expire.
- IHG also released their Point Breaks hotels for December 2014 – February 2015. To help visualize which hotels you can get for only 5,000 points, I made a map of all participating hotels (though some have probably sold out by now!)
- American Express Small Business Saturday was a great hit – first there was the announcement, then I came up with my plan for the day, and then a report on what I bought (I decided on $180 in gift cards to local businesses). That was the reason I kept my Amex Delta Skymiles card, despite a pretty weak retention offer.
- In the hopes of trying to escape the cold and gloomy weather, I came up with an idea for a contest to see how to get somewhere warm for the cheapest amount possible. One thing that might help is this complete list of Southwest Airlines international destinations.
- Refer a friend offers for some credit cards are back! There are links to the upgraded 20,000 point Chase Freedom card, as well as the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. See a complete list of active Chase refer-a-friend offers here. American Express looked like they were offering some referral links as well, but those don’t seem to be working currently. You can also get $30 by referring a friend to BeFrugal.com
- Air Asia announced a new ASEAN pass for unlimited travel within the 10 countries of Southeast Asia – (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Phillipines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam).
A brief introduction to hotel and airline dining programs, which let you earn miles for eating at restaurants.- Delta was in the news – first there was the question of whether you could still get a stopover on Delta in 2015, and then 5 tricks to using Delta’s improved award calendar. Then they released their complete 2015 award chart, and I also wrote some followup analysis on which regions had their mileage required go up (and down!)
- In addition to tracking my counties visited for my , I started tracking how many UNESCO World Heritage sites I’ve been to (not very many!), and added a new thing to my travel bucket list.
- Great post on the Traveler’s Triangle – the relationship between your flexibility in time, location and price. You can pick 2 of those 3 to have, but never (rarely) all 3.
- The ins and outs of Lufthansa’s 3 region awards, and also which airlines still offer “Round the World” flights.
- All Nippon Airways (ANA) is the best site out there to search Star Alliance availability – but there’s a trick to make it happen. ANA also announced a new zone-based award chart, which promises to be one of the most lucrative ones out there!
- Earlier in the month, Hyatt announced the end of their lucrative Diamond Challenge. I speculated what a new Diamond Challenge might look like, but mostly I was just annoyed that they announced that literally the day after I had written a post talking about how to status match / challenge with different hotel chains.
- If you’re like me and have a lot of Chase cards that you’ve closed, here’s how to hide the inactive ones online so they don’t clutter up your My Account page.
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
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