How to earn more points and miles
When people ask me how to build up a points balance, they often assume it's all about chasing sign-up bonuses. Those certainly help, but a healthy points portfolio is really the product of four things working together. Here's how I think about each.
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In this post
Welcome bonuses, with intention
Multipliers on the cards you already have
Shopping portals
Targeted card offers
A note on transferable currencies
1. Welcome bonuses, with intention
The fastest way to earn a large points balance is a credit card welcome bonus. Depending on the card and the offer, these can be worth anywhere from a few hundred dollars to well over a thousand in travel value.
The catch is the minimum spend requirement. A 100,000-point bonus that asks for $8,000 in three months only works if that $8,000 genuinely fits into your normal spending. Manufactured spend (buying things you don't actually need just to clear the threshold) almost always cancels out the value of the bonus, and sometimes then some. Plan around real, planned expenses: insurance premiums, tax payments, a flight you were going to book anyway. If you can't see a clear path to the minimum spend without changing your behavior, it's not the right bonus for you right now.
2. Multipliers on the cards you already have
The second-best way to earn points is to stop leaving them on the table with the cards in your wallet. A few of my go-tos:
Amex Platinum: 5x points on flights booked directly with the airline. No travel portal required, which I love. This is the card I reach for any time I'm paying for a flight directly.
Amex Gold: 4x on restaurants and at U.S. supermarkets. Between dining out and weekly grocery runs, this one adds up fast.
Chase Freedom Flex: This $0 annual fee card earns 3x Chase Ultimate Rewards points on drug stores plus each quarter there’s rotating categories which earn 5x points on things like Amazon, gas, and gyms.
Capital One Venture X: 2x on everything. Not the most exciting multiplier, but it catches all the spending that doesn't fit neatly into a bonus category.
A simple habit: before you swipe, pause and think about which card earns the most on that specific purchase. Two tools make this much easier. MaxRewards automates the decision in real time across every card in your wallet. AwardWallet has a merchant lookup that shows you exactly how a given business is coded, along with the best card to use there (and you can filter the results by your personal cards or business cards).
A quick word on coding: every merchant is assigned a category code by its payment processor, and that code, not what the business looks like from the outside, is what determines whether a purchase earns the dining bonus, the grocery bonus, and so on. It's often not what you'd expect. Target, for example, typically codes as a discount store rather than a grocery store, so your Amex Gold's 4x grocery multiplier won't apply there even when you're buying groceries. For larger purchases, it's worth looking the merchant up first so you know which card to reach for.
3. Shopping portals
Before any online purchase, check whether a shopping portal will give you bonus points for the same transaction you were already going to make. Most major programs run one:
Alaska Mileage Plan Shopping
AAdvantage eShopping
Capital One Shopping
Shop through Chase
Rakuten deserves its own mention. You can link your Rakuten account to your Amex Membership Rewards account and receive your cashback as MR points instead of a check. Given how flexible MR points are, that's almost always the better payoff.
The mechanics are straightforward: click through the portal first, then shop normally on the retailer's site. The purchase tracks back to the portal and the bonus points or cashback post a few weeks later.
4. Targeted card offers
Your card issuer almost certainly has a dedicated offers section that's easy to overlook. Amex Offers, Chase Offers, Capital One Offers, and Bank of America Deals all let you add promotions directly to a specific card. Once added, the benefit applies automatically when you use that card at the merchant.
Offers usually show up in one of two forms: a statement credit (e.g., "$30 back on a $150 purchase") or a points multiplier (e.g., "10x points at a specific retailer"). They cost nothing to load, so I scan through each card's offers about once a month and add anything I can realistically see myself using.
A note on transferable currencies
One principle that shapes all of this: not all points are created equal. Whenever possible, I prioritize earning transferable currencies (Amex Membership Rewards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Capital One miles) over co-branded points. The reason is flexibility. Transferable points can move to many different airline and hotel partners depending on what you need for a specific trip, while co-branded points are locked to one program. The same dollar of spend, put on the right card, gives you far more options down the road.
Welcome bonuses get the attention, but it's the combination of all four levers, run consistently, that keeps the points coming in year after year.
