I'm going to Australia in March on Credit Card/Marriott points: Here's how I did it

Let me first say that this wasn't some sort of life hack where I got enough points to pull this off in a couple of months.  It took more than a few years, and I play the long game when it comes to points and patiently accumulated them until I found a trip I wanted to take.  The good news is, you could probably do a similar trip in 12-18 months.

THE PLANE TICKET

This part is pretty straight forward.  In the Fall of 2015 I applied for the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card and it had a sign up bonus of 50,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points after spending $4,000 in three months.  Chase points are the shit because you can transfer them on a one-to-one basis to partners such as United and Marriott.  There are others, but those are the two I primarily use, so that's all I really pay attention to.  You can also book flight/hotel directly through Chase's redemption system. Now, you may be skeptical and say, "What's 50,000 points worth?"  Chase's redemption system gives you 1.25 cents per point, so that bonus is worth $625 in travel, and since Chase is basically purchasing the flight/hotel on your behalf, so you don't have to deal with blackouts and all that other bullshit when it comes to redeeming travel.

This past fall, the new kid on the block was the Chase Sapphire Reserve that offered a 100,000 point bonus (which is fucking absurd, which is why it's dropping down to 50,000) along with higher 1.5 cents per point redemption.  After I got that bonus, I had accumulated enough points to book a roundtrip flight from Denver to Sydney.  Ended up being 132,637 for a ticket that cost just under $2000.  Not bad.

THE HOTEL

I don't like redeeming random nights with my Marriott points (though I have), my main goal was to save up for a 7-night + United Miles package.  In this case, I spent 290,000 Marriott points to get a 7-night stay at this pimp ass category 8 hotel in Sydney, along with 55,000 United miles to boot.  Gotta turn back the clock all the way to 2009 when I was moving from Arizona to Virginia.  I planned out a road trip and decided to sign up for Marriott rewards and only booked Marriott hotels on the way.  A few months later, I decided to sign up for the Marriott rewards credit card that offered a sign up bonus as well as 5 points per dollar when used to book a Marriott hotel and 2 points for travel and dining per dollar.  I used this from 2010 - 2015 for those purposes to rack up points.  I also preferred to book a Marriott whenever possible.  I know some people aren't brand loyal and like to book on Orbitz, Hotwire, etc.  That's all fine and good, because those people aren't getting a 7-night stay at the fucking Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel at Circular Quay.

Now I'm super psyched to see this down under:

HOW CAN I DO THIS?

The cool thing about all this is that if you haven't opened any new credit cards in the last two years, you can get started and get a shitload of points quickly.  Chase has this asinine rule that if you've got 5 credit card accounts opened in the last 24 months, they'll deny you most of their cards.  That said, here's my list of bonuses to get to amass points:

Chase Sapphire Reserve - 100K bonus if applying in a Chase branch, 50K online, $4000 spend/3 mo
Chase Ink Preferred - 80K bonus, $5,000 spend/3mo - this is a business card, a lot of people don't know this, but if you sell tube socks to Navy guys on Ebay, you have a sole proprietorship, which means you can quality for a business card.
Chase Sapphire Preferred - 50K bonus, $4000 spend/3 mo
Chase Marriott Rewards - 80K bonus, $3000 spend/3 mo
AMEX Starwood Preferred - 25K Starwood bonus, $3000/3 mo - this makes the list because due to the Marriott-Starwood merger, you can transfer your points between the rewards program and 1 Starwood point is equal to 3 Marriott points, making this bonus 75K Marriott points

Doing the math for you, you can get up to 230K chase points and 155K Marriott points in around 15 months.  You can do some serious damage with that.

All of these cards have bonus categories like spend on travel, dining, etc.  I could explain it here, but I really don't feel like typing all that shit out.  You can read about it on your own, the information isn't hard to find.  One other cool thing though, is that Chase has some no-annual fee cards that earn points in different areas better than the Reserve/Preferred and you can transfer points between those cards so you can use different cards but amass points into one pool.  Sounds a little confusing, but you can read up on that elsewhere too.

Finally, I'm not advocating you go into debt to get these bonuses.  The beauty of points is collecting rewards for money you were going to spend anyway.  Don't go out there buying something stupid like Justin Bieber concert tickets just to hit your bonus spends.


TLDR - There are a lot of good bonuses out there that can get you free travel.  People who think travel redemptions are too complicated and prefer cash back credit cards only like vanilla ice cream and missionary sex.