Traveling costs money. Period. There is no such things as free tickets, free upgrades, free hotel stays or free holidays.
But I will argue that by knowing some tricks you can enhance the travel and holiday experience, and reduce the costs and amount of money you would spend on the travel. Not only that, you can probably increase the quality and even the quantity of your travel by strategically use the correct credit card, sign up deals, promotions and membership programs.
Whereas normally you would pay somewhere in the range of 2500-4000 dirhams for an economy class ticket to go to Europe for your holiday, by using some of the strategies I’ll point out, you can probably get away with paying less than a thousand dirham for the ticket, and even fly business or first class instead of squashed in economy class. How is that possible, unless you fly dozens of trips every year to collect air miles?
The question is quite simple. You just apply for the correct credit cards. The surprising thing today is that the frequent flyer programs for the airlines are insanely profitable! They are multi million if not billion dollar companies in themselves. For example, in February 2015 Etihad spent 112.5 million Euros for a 75% share of Alitalias Millemiglia frequent flyer program. Do you think they would spend that amount of money if they don’t plan on making a profit from it?
So how do the airlines make a profit from the frequent flyer programs? I will get to that in a moment, just let this sink in first: you can make a lot more miles from everyday spending than you can from actually flying!