This past week I was traveling to Miami, Florida and boarded the Norwegian Joy cruise ship for the Monsters of Rock Cruise. This was my very first MORC cruise, and it was awesome hanging with so many other rockers! We talk a lot about finding your tribe and being part of community and why this is so important. This is part of this as well. Wherever you look and whomever you meet during this voyage, it’ll be someone there with similar taste in music and you’ll have SOMETHING in common. And you never know, you could meet a lifelong friend or future concert buddy.
Anyway as I’ve been planning, preparing and organizing my travel for this and other trips I have coming up this year, I always thought to myself, “I really need to learn how to make better use of my credit card points, or miles!” or, “I know there is probably a way to travel more efficiently and save money using my points or miles, but it’s so f’n confusing!” So I was excited when I heard there was a session at this year’s EconoMe Conference on how to get the most value when traveling redeeming your credit card points or miles!
EconoMe is the only large-scale conference built specifically for the FIRE (financial independence/retire early) movement and the crowd here already include people who think carefully about where every dollar goes. But travel hacking? That’s a layer of optimization a lot of even the most financially savvy FIRE folks haven’t fully cracked! Like I’ve said, I’ve always thought that travel hacking was very complicated and have never taken it seriously. Chamaree de Silva came to fix that and since this session I’ve even successfully booked my first flight from Minneapolis to London!
So, let’s dive into this story and session, Charmaree begins by painting you a picture. You’re 30,000 feet in the air somewhere over the Arabian Sea. You’re flying in a private cabin with a door that actually closes. What?! You just ordered an amazing meal that tastes like it came from a real restaurant. And, you’re doing this while wearing comfy pajamas that the airline gave you! You’re flying what is widely considered the number one ranked business class product in the world. You are living the lifestyles of the rich and famous!
Check it out, you paid under $300 out of pocket for the business class international flights alone! GTFOH!
Oh, and all hotel accommodations for the entire 30-day trip? $18.52 total. Not eighteen hundred. Eighteen dollars and fifty-two cents! Well, read on my friends.
This is not some fantasy. This is exactly what Chamaree de Silva did while she lead this break out sessions at the 2026 EconoMe Conference in Cincinnati and explained precisely how she pulled it off, step by step, with zero affiliation to the travel industry and nothing to sell.
Who Is Chamaree de Silva?
This was my first time meeting Chamaree. Following her talk we discussed so many trips. She is an experienced travel expert and has explored all 50 states and more than 35 countries! Keep in mind, most of her early travels involved inexpensive motels and long-haul economy flights. She assumed, like most of us, that everyone paid tens of thousands of dollars for those fancy international business class flights and luxury hotel stays.
Chamaree is an Associate Professor of Physics. After 23 years in the United States, she received her U.S. citizenship and her first American passport. She decided to celebrate by planning trips to 10 different countries! Wow! And get this, she decided to do it almost entirely on points.
She was on a 15-month sabbatical from her university. The EconoMe talk happened at month nine lol! Somewhere between teaching physics, fostering dogs, and running half marathons she describes signing up for and immediately regretting (Chamaree is hilarious! Her comedic timing was great and she was so funny!) she quietly became one of the most awesome travel hackers in the FIRE community.
The Foundation: Sign-Up Bonuses Are the Whole Game
Before she got into any specific trip, Chamaree laid out her philosophy. And it’s simpler than most people think.
She gets between four and six credit cards per year. She’s almost always working on a sign-up bonus, or what she calls a SUB. The strategy is not that complicated. You get a card, meet the minimum spend over a few months, collect the bonus, then move on to the next one. Over and over.
She does not really care about category spending bullshit. She said it clearly, she doesn’t care if a card gives 5% back at restaurants for example. While she’s working on a SUB, she’s using whatever card she’s currently meeting minimum spend on. The category bonuses can just become confusing noise. This was always one of my hang ups! The sign-up bonuses are where we are to focus our efforts.
A couple of other things she made sure the we understood:
Business cards are not just for business owners. She has five of them! lol A credit card’s definition of what qualifies as a business is very different from the IRS’s definition. Haha! For example, have you ever written a blog post? Sold something on Facebook Marketplace? That could be a business in Chase’s eyes. I like how she said directly Chase is not the IRS. They are two different things. Do not just assume you don’t qualify for a business card.
Annual fees are worth it. People are afraid to pay a an annual fee. I’ve always been reluctant to pay those annual fees on some of the credit cards. But she pointed out some of the math. Let’s say you’re spending $95 but get $1,500 worth of travel, why would you avoid that? The annual fee is kinda like the entry fee to the leverage. Pay it.
Points Are Not Created Equal: Understanding CPP
This is the part that really helped me, and was one of my key takeaways. Chamaree introduced me to this concept called cents per point, or CPP, which is how you measure whether you’re getting good value out of your points. Your points can be worth more depending where you redeem them.
Here’s the framework she laid out:
If you have 60,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points and you cash them out directly, that’s 1 CPP, or $600. That’s the floor. This is not ideal.
If you use the Chase travel portal to book your travel, you get 1.25 CPP. Those same 60,000 points now get you $750 worth of travel. Better. But still not the ceiling.
Okay, are you ready? This was mind-blowing! When you transfer your points to airline or hotel partners, you can routinely hit 2, 3, even 10+ CPP on premium cabin bookings. Those 60,000 points just became $1,200 or more in real value!
Her goal is always to beat 1.25. The way you can calculate CPP when you’re not using the portal, just take the cash price of a flight minus taxes and fees, divide by the number of points required. This would be your CPP. If it’s above 1.25, you’re winning!
Ecosystems, Transfer Partners, and Alliances
This is where most people’s eyes glaze over. This was something I avoided because it seemed so confusing. But, Chamaree made it clearer by explaining how all these work together.
Your credit card points live in ecosystems. Chase Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, Capital One Miles. Each ecosystem has its own list of airline and hotel transfer partners.
Chase’s transfer partners include Air France (Flying Blue), British Airways (Avios), Southwest, United, and Hyatt for hotels, among others.
Now, each airline is part of one of three major alliances: Star Alliance, SkyTeam, or oneworld. Airlines in the same alliance can often book each other’s flights on their own websites.
Here’s the move Chamaree uses constantly: British Airways is a Chase transfer partner AND is in the oneworld alliance alongside Qatar Airways. So she transfers Chase points to British Airways, then books Qatar Airways flights on the British Airways website. Qatar’s Qsuite (the private cabin with the closing door) shows up as bookable there.
For Delta specifically, she uses SkyTeam. Delta is in SkyTeam with Air France and Virgin Atlantic, both of which are Chase transfer partners. Transfer Chase points to Virgin Atlantic or Air France, then book Delta flights on those websites. That’s how you book Delta without using Delta SkyMiles. This is exactly what I did! I transferred my Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Virgin Atlantic, then found my flight from Minneapolis to London, England, and was able to to book my Delta flight for only 22,500 points! I’ll be honest there is a little anxiety when you hit that transfer points button and there is a few moments that you wonder if the points are actually gonna make it and get transferred! But in the end it took almost no time and the points were in my newly created Virgin Atlantic Flying Club account! Boom!
Which brings up Delta SkyMiles, affectionately known in the travel hacking community as “SkyPesos”. This was so funny! These frequent flyer miles are deeply undervalued, often a trap. Even if you live in Atlanta on a Delta hub like she does, she does not get Delta cards. Do not get Delta cards. She said, “Friends don’t let friends get Delta cards!”
Sadly, This is what I had for years while working my corporate job. However, much of, or almost all travel was reimbursed from my employer. So I had used Delta SkyMiles to fly my family on some vacations over the years. But Now I know if I had used another travel credit card, I could’ve gotten much more value over the years!
The Southeast Asia Trip: The Main Event
Chamaree opened her EconoMe talk with the trip that got everyone’s attention: a 30-day journey through Southeast Asia where the international business class flights cost under $300 out of pocket and the entire trip, all 30 days of it, cost $2,782.56 total.
Her home airport is Atlanta. The route: Atlanta to Doha, Qatar (15 hours), then Doha to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (about 5.5 hours on Qatar). She spent a week in Kuala Lumpur, then continued to Hanoi, Vietnam as her primary destination, then a side trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, back to Hanoi, and home.
She needed 190,000 points total for the flights. She didn’t have that many in one ecosystem, so she combined them: 85,000 from Capital One and the rest from Chase Ultimate Rewards, all transferred into British Airways Avios. She then booked Qatar Airways flights on the British Airways website, including the famous Qsuite on the long-haul legs.
The Qsuite, for those who haven’t seen it, is a private suite with a door that closes. It consistently ranks as the number one business class product in the world. She had done this Atlanta-to-Sri Lanka route many times in economy, paying $900 to $2,000 depending on timing. This time, she paid $287 plus taxes and fees for business class across the ocean.
Hotels for the entire 30-day trip came to just $18.52 total! Four nights at a Hyatt property using 5,000 Hyatt points per night (Hyatt is a Chase transfer partner). Three more nights at a boutique hotel booked through the Chase travel portal at around 6,000 points per night. Breakfast included.
The two biggest cash expenses of the trip were both bucket-list experiences: the Oxalis Cave Trek through the Phong Nha cave system in Vietnam at $388.92, and a Dragon Junk overnight cruise on Ha Long Bay at $500.24. Two of the most stunning natural wonders in Southeast Asia. No points required. No apologies either.
A Separate Sri Lanka Trip: Different Strategy, Same Alliance
Chamaree also described a separate trip back to her home country of Sri Lanka, during her CampFI talk, which uses a similar but slightly different approach. For that trip, she used 86,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points transferred to British Airways, booking Qatar Airways round trip. That redemption came out to about 1.6 CPP, above the 1.25 portal rate.
The point was that that the same OneWorld/British Airways/Qatar Airways framework works for both Southeast Asia and South Asia. Once you understand the system, you can apply it repeatedly across different destinations.
The SkyPesos Moment and Other Hard Lessons
Chamaree spent some time on what not to do, which was just as valuable.
She described getting the shiny pre-approved Delta SkyMiles envelope in the mail. 60,000 miles, your name on it, feels special. She had the room repeat after her: you are not special. The card is not special. SkyPesos are not worth it.
She also explained the United Excursionist Perk, a hidden feature she used on a trip to Nicaragua to learn Spanish. United divides the world into seven regions. If you fly from Region 1 (say, the U.S.) to Region 2 (Latin America) and take a connecting flight within Region 2 before flying home, that within-region leg costs zero points. She booked Atlanta to Managua, Nicaragua, and tacked on a free side trip to El Salvador. Zero additional points for El Salvador. She had no idea what was in El Salvador. She booked it because it was free haha!
The Golden Thread: Point Style Inflation
From her CampFI talk, Chamaree described something she calls “point style inflation.” Once you fly business class internationally, economy starts feeling very different. She’s paying $300 to fly to Europe and back in a lie-flat business class seat on a transatlantic overnight. She mentioned walking the Camino de Santiago from Porto to Santiago as an upcoming trip, about 150 miles, with the flights covered almost entirely in points.
Her framework for this is simple but worth hearing out loud. She is frugal with her dollars and completely YOLO with her points. The points exist to unlock experiences she would never pay cash for. A $400-per-night boutique hotel in Colombia for 12,000 Hyatt points per night? She’d never spend $400 a night. But 12,000 points? Absolutely.
That framing matters for the FIRE community. Points are not a substitute for your money. They’re a separate lever. You build the points through sign-up bonuses by spending money you were already going to spend. Then you deploy those points for disproportionate value on travel. The two systems run in parallel, not instead of each other.
The One Thing She Wants You to Actually Do
Chamaree was emphatic about this in both talks, and I’m going to repeat it the same way she did.
Go to 10xtravel.com. Sign up for the free course. Do it in order. Do not skip it. Do not go rogue opening random cards because someone online recommended them.
10xTravel was founded by Bryce Conway and offers a completely free course that lays out the whole points and miles system from scratch, with more than 113,000 members in its Facebook community.
She mentioned specific chapters worth paying attention to: the chapter on business cards (and what to put in the application), and the chapter on Chase reconsideration calls. If Chase denies you a card, you call them, and 10xTravel has a script for exactly what to say. She used it herself recently to get a denial reversed.
They also publish a monthly best cards list. It doesn’t change dramatically month to month. Work through the list in order. Get the first card. Meet the minimum spend. Move to the second. That’s it. That’s the whole system.
The Real Point of All of This
Chamaree has traveled to so many countries on points she built through a systematic, boring, repeatable process.
The FIRE community already understands systematic, boring, repeatable processes for building wealth. The exact same mindset applies here. Don’t chase shiny objects. Don’t pick random cards. Follow the system. Let the compounding do the work.
She flew business class across the ocean for under $300. She covered 30 days of hotels for $18.52 total. The entire 30-day Southeast Asia trip, including world-class experiences like the Oxalis Cave Trek and a Dragon Junk cruise on Ha Long Bay, came to $2,782.56. That’s about $93 a day.. She’s walking the Camino on points. She’s going to the Galapagos on points.
Also, remember your mileage may vary and it depends on flights that are available. I tried my best to get the costs, and redemption values correct, my apologies if this is not 100% I think you can still get the gist 🙂
She’s not doing any of this because she’s special. She said so herself, with some emphasis. I’d beg to differ, she seems pretty awesome to me! She’s doing it because she learned the rules of a game most people don’t know is being played. And now you do too.
Horns up and Happy Traveling my friends \m/ \m/.
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