I saw another family's dream trip on Instagram and thought, why can't that be us?

I'm a mom of five. Which means when we travel, we're not booking two seats and a hotel room. We're booking seven seats, two hotel rooms, and budgeting for a family that size at every meal, activity, and airport snack run.

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For a long time I scrolled past other families' travel photos the way most of us do,  a little wistful, a little envious, and mostly convinced that more than one big trip a year was for other people. Not for us.

 

Until one day I stopped scrolling and started asking questions. How are they doing this? What do they know that I don't?

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That curiosity sent me down a rabbit hole of credit card points, transfer partners, and award redemptions. I spent months learning how it all worked: flexible points, airline alliances, hotel sweet spots, stacking strategies. I absorbed everything I could find.

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After doing all the work and building up our points, I booked Abu Dhabi, then England, then Tokyo and knew my strategies worked. Seven of us. Flights and hotels covered almost entirely on points we had earned on groceries, gas, dance lessons, soccer fees, and the everyday spending we were already doing every single month.

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Standing in Tokyo with my husband and our kids, in a city we had dreamed about, I knew I had finally arrived! I was now living and seeing the places I had wanted to take my family to for years.

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That was the moment I realized two things. First, that this points thing actually works for a real family on a real budget. And second, that we had been leaving thousands of dollars in free travel on the table for years simply because nobody had ever explained how any of this worked.