Free Travel with Bonus Miles

Probably everyone in the USA who has a Social Security number get unsolicited mail (actual and electronic) from banks with credit card offers.. There are all kinds of lucrative offers in these brochures like 0% APR on purchases and balance transfers, cash back, or rewards points good for merchandise and free travel.  Usually, I would just throw these letters straight into the trash.  You see, I never really liked to have a lot of credit cards.  I mean, what if I loose track of one, forget to pay it on time and my credit history gets bad. Or someone gets hold of the credit card number, starts using it and I won't even know about it until its too late... Who needs this trouble?!

That is until I started to receive offers from Chase offering me a Continental Airlines credit card with a sigh on bonus of around 30,000 miles. As I kept ignoring the offers, they were getting better and better: 35,000 free miles, 40,000...  One day I got an e-mail with a 50,000 Continental miles personal offer.  This I could no longer ignore.

Now, a little bit of a background about me.  I was born in former Soviet Union republic of Azerbaijan.  When I was 17 years old I emigrated with my family to the United States.  For more than 20 years I consider USA my home.  Still, I haven't lost contact with my school friends who, just like me, also got scattered all over the world.  A lot of them settled in Moscow, Russia, while some stayed in Baku - the capital of Azerbaijan. To be able to see them would have been a tremendous financial undertaking.  I did visit my friends in 2000 when I was still single. When I got "married with children" things became different.  It is difficult to justify spending several thousand dollars just to hang out with friends when your first priority is your family. An so I kept postponing the trip, you know - maybe next year...

When I received the above mentioned offer I realized that maybe - just maybe, I will not have to wait one more year to see my friends. I already had some miles with Continental Airlines from my business travel.  This bonus would make it totally possible for me to make a free trip to Russia and Azerbaijan.  So, I took a deep breath and filled out the credit card application.

A couple of weeks later I had just enough miles to make a trip that I was dreaming about for 10 years!

Stay tuned for the trip report and more stories on free bonus miles...