Six minutes after takeoff, he touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and approximately seven minutes after that, with the help of his T. Pre status, he was through security and perched at the bar of a lounge inside Terminal 5. When I arrived, twenty minutes later, still flustered from maneuvering a rolling suitcase around a packed A train for the better part of an hour, he was sipping a complimentary glass of Sancerre and chatting up a male model he had ushered into the lounge with a guest pass.
Kelly has made a career out of flying first class around the world, subsidizing his trips with a seemingly endless supply of credit-card points and airline miles and, on his Web site, ThePointsGuy. His site, which attracts around four million readers a month, reviews first-class cabins and V. You just have to know how to game the system.
Maxim No. The Points Guy is an avid collectorβhe currently has twenty credit cards, down from thirty. Credit-card companies also pay him now, via affiliate marketingβhe gets a nominal fee when someone clicks through his Web site to apply for a card, which is explained in a disclaimer posted at the bottom of every ThePointsGuy. While we were talking, a guy in a black leather jacket approached Kelly, roll-aboard trailing behind. Link your account, it takes two seconds, and, anytime you dine at a participating restaurant, you get points in your account in addition to the points on your credit card.
Then there are frequent-flier miles. The airlines now have better computer systems. Within the week of departure, or even the same day, tons of award seatsβ tons βthe very best, open up. If you have a little bit of an appetite for risk, wait until the week of or a couple of days before. To prove it, Kelly whipped out his phone and pulled up the Alaska Airlines app. More tech savvy than many of its competitors, it allows users to search for award fares on partners such as Emirates, which has ultra-luxe amenities including functioning showers and an onboard bar.
Kelly would use Travelocity, which was new at the time. In , at the suggestion of friends, Kelly turned his hobby into a serviceable Web site. It was a little travel agency for points. One day, a college friend who worked at Chase asked him to meet for drinks. During his first month of affiliate marketing, in February of , Kelly made five thousand dollars. Two months later, he published a post about a hundred-thousand-point bonus offer from Chase and British Airways.
