Earn Free Hotel Stays by Signing up for the SPG Rewards Credit Card

If you are thinking of traveling in the near future, then sign up of the Starwood Preferred Guest Credit Card. When you sign up for this free credit card you will get 10,000 Starwoods points after your first purchase. This is good for up to five free nights at a Category 1 hotel. the number of points goes up with the categories. Starwood owns Sheraton, Four Points, and several other hotel chains, so there are lots of options for places to say.

On top of that, you can receive an additional 5,000 rewards points for refrerring a friend. That is enough points for another two free nights! This works out really well if you are planning on traveling with a spouse or significant other. Both of you can sign up for the credit card and receive 10,000 points each plus one of you can receive the 5,000 point bonus for referrring the other. The 25,000 points are good for up to 12 free nights at a Category 1 hotel. Go on vacation and stay for free!

If you are interested in this offer, let me know and I will send you a link. You can help me out by using the link that I send you, and I will receive a 5,000 point bonus too!

Fly Cheap on Delta Airlines with 100% Bonus for Transfering/Buying Miles

Until September 30, 2011, Delta Airlines is offering a 100% bonus when you transfer/buy miles. Usually buying or transferring frequent flier miles is never a good idea because airlines charge way more than the miles are worth and there are fees for transfering miles. This bonus offer brings down the cost of transferring/buying miles by half which makes this a pretty good deal for getting really cheap flights on Delta.

Delta Charges $0.035 per mile plus a 7.5% excise tax plus a $30.00 transaction fee to purchase miles. So if you wanted to buy enough mileage for two base round trip (25,000 miles each) tickets on Delta. It would cost $875 to purchase the miles plus $65.63 in taxes plus $30 transaction fee for a total of $940.63. This can get you two round trip domestic flights so that is a cost of about $485 each. Without the bonus one round trip ticket would cost the full $940.63 (not a good deal!). So $485 for a domestic round trip ticket seems like an OK deal, but it is nothing to get too excited about.

Here is where it gets really exciting.....

Delta charges $0.01 per mile plus a $30 transaction fee to transfer miles to another Skymiles account holder. Normally, this is a bad idea because it would cost you $280 to transfer 25,000 miles to someone else so that they can book a ticket.

Let's look at this same situation with the 100% bonus for transferring miles offered by Delta Airlines. Let’s say you already have 25,000 Skymiles in your account. If you don't you can get 25,000 Delta Skymiles for free just for signing up for the Delta Skymiles American Express Card. Find someone else with a Skymiles account or have them sign up for one. The terms and conditions say that in order to get the bonus, you must have had your Skymiles account for at least 10 days.

With the 100% bonus for transferring miles, you will pay $280 for 25,000 Skymiles enough for one domestic round trip flight. From reading the terms and conditions, there is no reason why you could not transfer miles to one person’s account, get the 100% bonus, then transfer the miles back to the other account and get the 100% bonus again.

It’s a good idea to know where you want to fly and check out the amount of miles needed and the price for a full fair ticket.

I looked at traveling round trip from Seattle, WA to JFK in New York. The cost of a full price ticket was $370. Using 25,000 miles instead will save you $90 or about 24%.

The savings can vary greatly. I often fly out of Alaska. A round trip flight from Anchorage, AK to Seattle, WA cost $668. This flight was also 25,000 air miles. This represents a savings of $388. The lowest price on any of the competitor airlines was $548. This is still almost a 50% savings over the full cost fare.

Save yourself some money on air travel and check of this deal. Remember the offer expires September 30, 2011.

Travel for Free using Frequent Flier Credit Card Offers

My Girlfriend and I preparing for extended traveling in Asia at the end of the year. As I am always looking for a good deal I was researching freqent flier programs. Everyone has heard of freqent flier miles being awarded for signing up for a particular airlines sponsored credit card, but often you don't receive enough free miles to travel where you want to go, and many of these credit cards have steep membership fees.

So here is what I did...

For signing up for the Continental One Pass Credit Card you will receive 30,000 bonus miles. You get 25,000 bonus miles after you make your first purchase, and you can get another 5,000 bonus miles just for adding an authorized user (the authorized user does not have to make any purchases).

The flight that I purchased was 32,500 Continental miles for a flight from the west coast of the US all the way to Bangkok. I only had to come up with 2,500 more frequent flier miles which is easy.

There are plenty of other ways to earn the miles you need for a free flight. The website freefrequentflyermiles.com provides a comprehensive list of great ways to earn free frequent flyer miles.

If you want to earn even more miles... because Continental Air is merging with United Air beginning 12/31/2011, for a limited time only, you are able to transfer Continenal One Pass miles into your United Skymiles account without any additional charges. So after you sign up for the Continental One Pass Credit Card sign up for the United Mileage Plus Credit Card as well.

For signing up for the United Mileage Plus Credit Card you will earn 25,000 bonus miles after your first purchase and 5,000 additional miles when you add two authorized users to your account.

Once you've got both the Continental and the United air miles you can merge the miles into one frequent flier account and you will have 60,000 frequent flier miles!

Even better, this is not limited to just one person in your household. Your spouse or significant other can sign up for the same promotions and you can each earn 60,000 free freqent flier miles.

Both credit cards have annual fees, but for both offers, the annual fee is waved for the first year. Just remember to call and cancel the credit cards before the one year anniversary.

Make Money with JustaFive.com

So I was doing some research and came upon the site JustFive.com. At this site you can post any kind of job you are willing to do for $5, $10, or $20. The site is actually quite entertaining to see what some people post and are "willing" to do for $5. One lady wrote "I'm gunna Write whatever you need on my nice boobs for $10". A traveler with a creative idea could make good money. There is a large variety of job categories including travel, advertising, and photography just to name a few. JustFive.com could be another way to make a few bucks while traveling.

Become an Online Contractor with oDesk.

My first real tip for making money while traveling the world is to become an online contractor with oDesk. This Global On Demand Workforce is an online community of businesses looking to hire contractors for computer based projects. If you have any particular computer skill such as data entry, technical writing, Microsoft Office use, website development, graphic design, online research, etc... you can find yourself employment on oDesk. I am only recommending this because I have personally signed up and tried it out. Within the first day of signing up, I already picked up a job. Because I have a background in accounting, I have some skills with designing Excel spreadsheets. I looked for jobs that needed Excel work. In my first job I made over $100 in just a few hours of work. All you need is a computer.

This is the kind of job that provides the ultimate flexibility. Only work when you want to and you can do it from anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the internet. There are a number of websites out there that are similar to oDesk, this includes Elance and others, but odesk offers one of the largest networks of employers looking for contractors and is my first choice.

First Post Tips for Making Money While Traveling

First rule for writing a blog: Write about something that you are passionate about! I'm passionate about travleing. There are many people who would likely say the same thing and most of these same people face the same limitation that most of us do... money. Some of us have more money or less money, and some can travel on less or more money than others, but we still need money. It most cases it does not fall to the earth like mana from heaven (I wish). This blog will provide tips from my experience and research on how people can make money while traveling. You can check out my travel blog, Tim's World Travel Blog, and see how things are going on that end.