131. Unpopular Opinion: Top 5 Reasons You Should Book Travel Through a Credit Card Travel Portal
Point Me To First Class
Devon Gimbel MD
5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Think booking through your credit card travel portal is always a mistake? Not so fast.
Last week, I shared five reasons why you’ll want to avoid making travel bookings through your credit card portal. But that’s not the whole story. There are also situations where using your card’s travel portal can be the smarter move.
In this episode, I’m breaking down the five most compelling reasons to consider booking flights, hotels, or car rentals through your credit card’s portal — from points-earning opportunities to unlocking annual credits and even finding better award pricing than transfer partners. I’ll share the key tradeoffs, what this means for real-world bookings, and my own approach to when portal bookings actually make sense in my travel strategy.
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Want to know what’s really possible with your points? Don’t just take it from me—hear from members who’ve used Points Made Easy to completely change the way they travel. From business class flights to dream vacations, their results speak for themselves. Watch their stories here - https://points.pointmetofirstclass.com/points-made-easy-success-stories
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher than average expenses to travel the world. |
| 0:10.7 | I'm your host, Devin Gimble, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset, if you know how to leverage them. |
| 0:17.8 | Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often. Let's get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome |
| 0:31.3 | back to the Point Me to First Class podcast. If you tuned in to last week's podcast episode, |
| 0:36.5 | you heard me discuss the top five reasons for why you should avoid booking travel through your credit card's travel portal. |
| 0:42.8 | And you may have walked away from that episode thinking that there's never a good reason to book travel directly through your credit card account. |
| 0:49.8 | But that's not actually true because even though I usually recommend against booking travel |
| 0:55.2 | through your credit card travel portal, whether that's paying cash or points for your booking, |
| 0:59.9 | I don't think it's accurate to say that it's always a mistake. |
| 1:02.8 | In fact, just like there are five reasons you might want to avoid booking travel through |
| 1:06.2 | your credit card travel portal, there are also five entirely valid reasons. |
| 1:10.5 | Why it can still make sense to book travel through your credit card travel portal. There are also five entirely valid reasons why it can still make sense to book |
| 1:12.5 | travel through your credit card travel portal. And that's what we're going to be diving into on |
| 1:16.5 | today's episode. By the end of the episode, I hope you will be equipped with everything you need to |
| 1:21.0 | know to confidently make decisions about whether travel portal bookings are in your favor or whether |
| 1:26.6 | you're better off avoiding them |
| 1:28.1 | and booking travel directly through airlines and hotels. I'm also going to share with you |
| 1:32.3 | my personal approach to travel portals and reveal if and why they ever factor into my travel |
| 1:37.9 | plans. And the answer just might surprise you. So let's jump in and start with number five |
| 1:43.9 | on the list of top five reasons that |
| 1:46.2 | booking travel through your credit cards travel portal could be the right move for you. And this is |
| 1:51.1 | something I alluded to on last week's episode. Specifically, when you're booking a flight or hotel stay |
... |
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