Mexican escape

Want to visit beautiful, sunny Los Cabos, Mexico for as little as 5000 Spirit miles? Today's your lucky day! I've found another great value in the Spirit award chart, that reaps as much as 2.7 cents per mile (CPM) in value!

Flying from San Diego (SAN) to San Jose Cabo - Los Cabos, Mexico (SJC), we can find plenty of off-peak (read: cardholder) availability on the Spirit award calendar.

And wide open availability for the return as well:

Now, you might have noticed, those fees add up to $101.10. That's not free travel! That's true. Truly free travel is hard to come by, often more expensive than an award. However, this is a highly discounted rate. Let's take a look at what Kayak shows across all carriers for these dates.

Sorted by price from low to high (lowest price is at the top)

We can clearly see that our beloved Spirit is the cheapest carrier available at $240 for these dates. Now, for a round-trip, we'll need to use 5,000 miles and $101.10. We can weight that against the $240 price tag for buying the ticket outright.

5000mi + $101.10 = $240
5000mi = $138.90
1mi = $.02778

That means one Spirit mile is worth 2.7 cents when redeemed for this route! That's a fantastic value! In fact, that's far better than a cash back card because we're earning TWO of those miles for every dollar spent. In terms of the value, the Barclaycard Arrival earns a return of 2.2% (2% with 10% back when redeemed for travel), while we're getting 5.5% returns on every dollar we spend!!!

That's just another reason to spirit yourself away to Mexico this spring on Spirit!

Travel Free!
~Free Spirit Travel

Bonus miles every year

I can't believe I forgot about this. I think it's because I sometimes forget how amazing Spirit's award chart can be.

As discussed previously, it's really, really important to have the Spirit card to maximize your miles' value. Having the card unlocks the lowest levels of award availability, which is what gives the program its amazing values.

I got a letter today reminding me of the benefits of my Spirit card. One of those points was the 5,000 bonus miles awarded every year that I spend $10,000 and pay my annual fee. Another one was earning 2 miles per dollar... wait, WHAT?! Since I value Spirit points so much, I put all my general spending on this card. I'll easily hit $10,000 this year, and I'm planning to keep the card for as long as I can. In fact, I want to see if I can get more of them! So, I'll have no problem getting 5,000 free miles for spending I was already planning to do!

Just to be sure, I went to the Spirit Mastercard application page and pulled up the terms and conditions. Here's what I found:

Anniversary Bonus Miles: If you spend at least $10,000 in Net Purchases on your Card within a year (beginning on the date you open your account and continuing for every 12 month period thereafter) and pay your annual fee, you will be awarded 5,000 bonus Miles. The bonus Miles will be posted to your Miles account within four to six weeks of the anniversary of your Card’s open date.

Well, that's pretty clear, folks! Spend $10,000 in a year, pay your annual fee, and get 5,000 bonus points for free! I'm loving this card more every day!

Travel Free!
~Free Spirit Travel

Time to get back on that horse!

I think I had a bit too much egg-nog this year!

Sorry for the break. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming!