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Travel deals not credit card based
Wondering if this group has recommendations on some of the best rewards or other savy ways to spend for traveling that are not credit card based?
Particular hotel chain, gas station, fast food based. My husband and I do a trip once annually plus to go back to our hometown typically via car and we already get decent credit card rewards for travel but wondering if there are other rewards we might be missing out on?
Next trip were definitely looking at what museum memberships might exist to do or get discounts on several locations during the trip. We do have a local zoo membership that gets us reciprocity when we travel.
Most of the company-specific rewards programs are only good if you use them a lot. I chose IHG as my main hotel chain because they have a wide variety of hotel options wherever you go. Delta is my airline of choice because they are the biggest where I live. But overall, unless you get to the higher level of rewards programs where you're essentially getting 2x the reward points, you're not going to save money by staying loyal to a brand.
CC rewards have the advantage of not being tied to one brand.
I just wasn't sure if with the merger and acquisitions of things if certain gas stations or grocery stores might now be a pretty good deal, but they tend to go by local brand names. Like locally I have a brand that was purchased by Kroger.
There's this thing called North American Reciprocal Museums, where if you have the right membership for one museum it gets you free entry to many others. We've joined a small local museum for just over $100 annual sub, and there are many hundreds of museums nationwide that we can visit. Here's the list of NARM member institutions.
There are actually several by me, this is a great resource! Thanks for sharing I do love history and should have known about this.
Honestly, a trip to say Japan may not be expensive. Zipair is a good budget airline if you're in the right areas (HNL, LAX, SJC), hotels can be <$50 a night (Business or Capsule), and the yen is very deflated. Deals may be destination specific.
Libraries may have tickets available to some locations/museums for free.