All Blog Posts 🗺️

🤙🏿 Welcome back to the Better Than Points Newsletter - the premier place for all things Credit Card Points News and Travel

My name’s Luis and I’m the one writing this (hit me up here!)

Have I mentioned I love points.

I drank the points kool aid last night and stayed up too late messing around.

But the good thing is I made enough to share!

So let me show you what I have.

Not a subscriber yet? Sign up here

Get your brands in front of 6,000+ travelers & entrepreneurs.

✈️ Book Now. Stop Stressing. Let pAiback watch the price for you.

If you’ve ever booked a flight and immediately thought.
Did I just overpay?
And then spent the next week checking the price like it’s your second job, this is for you.

pAiback monitors your ticket price after you book.

If the price drops, they work to get you a voucher or credit for the difference so you can use that value on your next trip.

Here’s why it’s great right now (with airline prices being wildly volatile):

✅ Eliminates the “is this the right time to book?” stress
✅ They track price drops automatically after you purchase
✅ You only pay if they save you money (they charge a percentage of what they save)
✅ Free to use upfront — no savings, no payment
✅ Basically: would you pay $20 to get $100 back on a flight you already bought?

Book the flight. Forget about it. Let pAiback handle the price watching.

👉 Try Payback and let it monitor your tickets for you

Each week, I’ll share something cool I’ve discovered or tackle a question from the community. It’s my little corner to explore ideas, offer fresh perspectives, and hopefully spark your own curiosity.

Earlier this week I watched a 10xTravel podcast where they tried to prove you can book a vacation for 100,000 points.

They did it at a few levels:

A trip for one person
A trip for a couple
A trip for a whole family

I thought it’d be a fun challenge to do it myself and document the process so you can see my thinking and decide if this is something you’d want to try.

So here’s my pretend vacation. That now, after doing this seems pretty plausible.

And lucky for me, our daughter is still under 2, so she flies for free.

Depending on the airline and how you book, lap infant fees can vary, but it’s usually manageable.

With a 100,000 point budget, the first thing I’d tackle is flights.

I’d start on FlightConnections.

Being in Austin, I’d look at bigger airports like Dallas and Houston and see where the nonstop routes go from there.

Now, being realistic, I think a 100,000 point budget gets tight fast if you’re trying to take a family to Europe or Asia.

And I’m not trying to do long haul economy with a toddler.

So for this challenge I set my sights on Central America.

Specifically Panama, since that’s where I was born and I’ve been wanting to go back and spend some time there.

It’s also only about a 3 hour flight, so economy is totally doable, especially with a little one.

On the flight side, you can find economy seats through Air Canada for as low as 12,500 points one way.

Some of those are annoying routings with connections, but there are also options on Copa Airlines, and those are the ones you want.

I went down a rabbit hole and found you can book some of the same flights through Flying Blue too, but they’re harder to find.

When they show up, they can be as low as 9,500 points.

I’ll drop some of those dates in the Flight of the week section.

Being a little more realistic, I’d book through Air Canada for two adults.

Then add our toddler as a lap infant for $25, which is what Air Canada charges.

That’s way cheaper than a lot of other programs.

At that point, flights alone would be around half the 100,000 point budget.

Down to 50,000 points.

Now for hotels.

The option that gives you the most flexibility is something like Capital One’s “Purchase Eraser”, where you can book eligible travel purchases and then erase them at 1 cent per point.

i.e. a $100 travel purchase would be 10,000 points

You can do the same with a few other portals too.

I played around with a couple, and honestly the one that surprised me was Bilt’s travel portal.

Through the Bilt portal, I found a bed and breakfast option that you could book for 8 nights.

If you really wanted to stretch it, you could lock in almost 20 days at cheaper spots.

And if you want something with a view, you can still pull off about 7 nights plus the flights, which is basically a full week trip covered with points.

But if you know anything about me, I’m a little bougie.

So I had to look at a spot I’ve been watching for a while: Hotel La Compañía del Valle.

It’s basically on the side of a volcano and it’s a resort and spa, so yeah sign me up.

It’s showing through the Bilt portal for almost 25,000 points a night.

But if you book it through Hyatt, which you can transfer your BIlt poitns over to Hyatt, it’s 20,000 points a night.

All of this with the caveat that the new pricing tiers haven’t kicked in yet (those start May 20th).

So in theory, if you timed an Air Canada transfer during a bonus, you could do:

Two round trip tickets in economy
Plus three nights at a resort and spa in Panama

All covered with points.

Your out of pocket would mainly be around $250 in airline taxes and fees.

Personally, I’d do two nights at Hotel Del Valle, then sprinkle in one of the cheaper stays to stretch the trip.

Let me know if breakdowns like this are helpful.

They’re honestly fun to do, and it’s a cool way to show how far 100,000 points can go if you pick the right destination and keep it realistic.

It looks like Delta is having some real internal issues right now, and it’s starting to snowball.

From software problems to pilot contract negotiations, it’s getting messy enough that it could bleed into summer travel.

This is coming straight from Delta’s Chief Operating Officer.

They’re having trouble with pilot scheduling, they don’t have enough pilots, and they’re struggling to cover gaps when storms and bad weather hit.

Weather is getting blamed for a lot of the delays, but it sounds like the bigger issue is that Delta doesn’t have the internal staffing and systems in place to recover quickly when they need to plug in a new pilot.

Which is kind of wild for how big Delta is.

So if you’ve got Delta flights coming up in the next couple months, I’d keep a close eye on them.

Keep checking for schedule changes, and be ready for delays if this keeps trending the wrong way.

With Spirit Airlines kicking the can earlier this week, all eyes are on JetBlue and the bankruptcy rumors.

JetBlue’s CEO says they’re not contemplating filing Chapter 11 this year, which naturally makes people wonder what 2027 could look like.

Right now things seem “fine,” but they’re definitely not in a great spot.

And all it takes is one bad turn, the economy sliding, oil prices swinging again, or demand dipping, for things to get ugly fast.

So no, I don’t think it’s guaranteed, but it’s also not out of the question.

And it would really suck to see another airline go under.

More options keep prices down and keep the big carriers honest, and that’s good for all of us.

I don’t know if I’m one of the crazy ones, but I actually enjoy hanging out at airports.

Growing up, when my mom had to fly somewhere, we’d walk her all the way to the gate and watch her leave.

After 9/11 that quickly ended, and everything got way stricter.

But it looks like it’s slowly making a comeback, and I’m here for it.

Right now, 29 airports are allowing unticketed passengers through TSA with a Visitor Pass program.

I can 100% get behind this, especially for families where not everyone is traveling.

It would be so much easier to help your spouse with the kids all the way up until they actually board.

More airports are quietly rolling out their own versions of the Visitor Pass too.

Here’s the full list.

It’s going to be case by case depending on the airport.

Some make you apply ahead of time, and at a few airports you can even do it same day.

Either way, it’s super cool to see this coming back.

There’s something about meeting someone right at the gate, instead of having to wait down at baggage claim, that makes it better.

Check out these crazy award deals!

This section includes some of the best award flights of the week bookable with points and miles.

Chat with TravelBot - my AI clone. It’s trained on every newsletter I’ve published along with my 10+ years of points and credit card knowledge 🧠.

It’s also trained on my voice, so you can call it and have a full blown conversations. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

This section includes some of the best links videos and articles of the week around the points and travel community