✅ End of year travel checklist

Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 36 seconds

Good morning from beautiful Sichuan Province in China!

I’m enjoying my private hot spring villa in the mountains, but I dragged myself to the desk to bring you some important travel tips for the end of the year.

Today, I’m going to give you a super simple end-of-year points and miles checklist.

✅ End-of-year points and miles checklist

As you know, the end of the year is fast approaching… like really fast.

So before it’s too late, I want to refresh your memory on some things you should pay attention to in the travel, credit card, and points & miles world before December 31st.

A lot of other blogs are publishing these massive lists of things to do, like “Think about your strategy for 2025,” or “Sign up for a new credit card to celebrate the end of the year.”

But I’m going to focus on the handful of concrete things that simply can only be done right now for two more weeks. Nice and simple.

Here we go:

Annual Credits

Many credit cards offer perks and benefits that are tied to your card member year (in other words, if you sign up for a card in March, the credits are good until the following March).

However, some banks and some cards actually base this on the calendar year rather than the cardmember year.

For example, this card offers a number of perks that are tied to the calendar year, including a semi-annual $50 credit at Saks Fifth Avenue.

This is a super easy way to find a gift for someone online and get a quick $50 rebate to offset that high annual fee, and you’ll have another credit to use come January 1st.

The same card also offers things like travel incidental credits.

Even if you don’t have any travel to book by the end of the year, you could simply load up your United Travel Bank with a few transactions of $50 to trigger this credit.

Then, when you need to book a cash flight on United sometime in the future, you’ll have an extra couple hundred bucks to put toward it!

Other cards like this Hilton card have things like semi-annual resort credits of $200 a pop, which you’ll want to make sure you use like I did earlier this year in Bali:

Again, you can get creative with this even if you don’t have a stay taking place before the end of the year.

If you have a stay at a Hilton Resort property next year, you could call the property and ask them to bill your card now to trigger the credit.

Mileage Runs and Mattress Runs

I’ve already told you about how to plan your elite status goals in 2025 and how to leverage mileage runs, so I won’t get into that here…

But don’t forget that you can also do mattress runs or book some hotel stays to unlock elite status or milestone rewards.

For example, I have been sitting at 49 nights with IHG for a while and didn’t have another stay booked, leaving me just one night short of the 50-night milestone:

Since IHG also has a number of promotions going on right now, I booked a cheap night in Jakarta for $31 and asked my friend to go check in and stay there for me.

By doing this, I unlocked 10,000 bonus points plus another 3,000 bonus points from a promotion that offered bonus points for every two nights stayed (for which I only needed one more night to trigger again).

In this case, I effectively bought 13,000 points for $31, which is a nice deal!

With Hyatt, well… y’all already know that I just gave away all of my Guest of Honor, Suite Upgrade, and Club Access awards to you last week.

(By the way, thanks for all of the amazing poems, Chat GPT - *ahem* I mean, readers… 🧐)

Anyway, one of my selfish motives for doing so was that each time you gift someone a Guest of Honor Award (and the giftee uses it), the gifter (me, in this case) gets one Hyatt Elite Night.

Since I’ll end the year with 127 Hyatt nights this year, gifting my awards to people who plan to use them before the end of the year will put me over 130 nights, unlocking another valuable milestone reward of 10,000 Hyatt points.

So sometimes, like in both of my cases, you can mattress run without getting out of bed!

Transferring and Buying Points

This one won’t apply to as many of you, but it’s good to know about.

We often talk about buying points and miles to get better value for your dollars, usually with hotel points.

What we don’t often talk about is that these programs have annual limits for how many points you can buy in a calendar year.

For example, right now, Hyatt is offering a 25% bonus on purchased points but does have an annual cap.

You could buy 10,000 points for $192, which is enough to buy two or three nights at a Category 1 hotel, which could be a great deal.

If you are in the habit of buying points and think you might want to do it again next year, you could buy some now before the end of the year and start fresh in 2025 with the full allowance.

Same goes for IHG, which is currently selling points with a 100% bonus and also has an annual cap for buying points.

Since I buy IHG points all the time, I would definitely consider paying upfront for some points before the end of the year.

If you do this, you’ll want to use a card like this one, which earns 2x points on purchases like this.

In this same realm is the idea of transferring points between members of the same program.

For example, Marriott allows you to transfer points to other members for free, but only up to 100,000 points per year.

If you are playing the points and miles game in 2-player mode and want to pool your points into one member’s account, you’ll want to transfer as many points as you can NOW so you can do the same next year.

So here’s the bottom line:

There are a lot of travel tricks you can take advantage of before the end of this year before the clock resets on January 1st.

So look through your accounts and see if there are any opportunities mentioned above that might be worth taking advantage of.

Whether you’re part of our exclusive Facebook group, the Daily Drop Lounge, or you’re a Pro member in our Daily Drop Pro Lounge, you can see how others are reaching their travel goals!

This member scored business class seats to Turkey with an 11.2 cent-per-point value which is craaaaazy good.

If you haven’t joined us there yet, come check it out and share your own travel wins!

That’s all she wrote, folks. And by she, I mean me.

I hope you enjoyed this simplified end-of-year to-do list, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow, where I’ll have some exciting and fun travel content to share with y’all.

Cheers,

30.9667° N, 103.5167° E