The Power of Pooling Points with Family & Friends

On your own, you can earn and redeem hundreds of thousands of travel points each year for flights, hotels, cruises, resorts, rental cars, and vacation packages. But when you move beyond Travel Hacking all by yourself, you can actually achieve so much more when you team up with family and friends in pursuit of some amazing vacations through pooling your points together.

Two-Player Mode

Many people in the Travel Hacking community like to gamify this strategic process. They will often refer to pooling your points with someone as "Two-Player Mode". Two Player mode is when you get your spouse, significant other, or a friend to team up with you as a "Player 2" to earn and pool points for vacation redemptions. 

Referral Bonuses

One of the ways that you get a points boost is through referrals. What many married people miss is that you and your spouse can refer each other to sign up separately for the same cards, then pool your points together with an added referral bonus mixed in. For instance, my wife signed up for a Chase Credit Card that earned 1.5% back on all purchases and earned a 90,000 point welcome bonus after spending $6,000 in three months. After she was about to earn her welcome bonus, she then referred me to get that card, and she received a 40,000 point referral bonus. Then I went on to earn a 90,000 point welcome bonus after I spent $6,000 in three months. That means that we earned a combined 238,000 points from just $12,000 of spending in Two-Player Mode! (That's also 19.8% Back from that spending!)

Pooling Points

What many credit card, airline, and hotel programs allow you to do is to transfer points to others so that you can pool points together with other household members, extended family, or even friends. It's important to know that the rules for each individual program vary, but I teach more of the specifics of maximizing Two-Player mode in my Launch Into Travel Hacking Course. If you're following the direction that this can lead, you can quickly identify that in some cases you could get two or three generations of family members to pool points or you could get a group of friends to all go all in together on a trip - and enjoy it all for free!

Vacationing with Our Friends

For a number of years, my family of four has vacationed with some of our best friends. We were in this couple's wedding, they were in ours, and we love vacationing with them! Prior to Travel Hacking, we used to split the costs on vacations that we would take together. The great thing is that now that both of our families have started Travel Hacking, we don't have to split our money, now we can pool our points and split the "cost" with our points. We referred them to cards and received a referral bonus, and they've received referral bonuses off of referring each other as well. In that case, it's like we're playing this game in Four-Player Mode, when each of the four of us referred each other to all separately sign up for the same card, each earned the Welcome Bonuses, and then pool our points together for our next vacation.

The Next Vacation We're Planning

Let me show you how this tangibly plays out. We are currently looking at booking this 4-Bedroom, 4 Bathroom Oceanfront Beach House in North Carolina for a week in August. The retail cost of the rental for the week is $7,085, but we aren't paying a penny for it - We're booking it by pooling together 590,000 Hyatt points to book it for free! 

Oh The Places You'll Go

Beyond vacationing with our friends, I recruited my parents into Travel Hacking, referred them to some of the best cards, and we've talked about how that will enable us to take future trips with them and our kids to some memorable places. I hope you're seeing the power and potential of pooling your points with family and friends. You can enjoy incredible, memorable, and luxurious trips with your family or friends without everyone involved having to spend a combined hundreds or thousands of dollars.