Mexico City, while not on everyone’s radar, is remarkable and has so much to offer. It’s even more appealing when you realize you can go and stay in Mexico City for free. We did it, and so can you.
As usual, you’re probably checking out these posts hoping to uncover the wild secrets that got us to Mexico City for free. But honestly, if you’ve read any of our other posts, you probably already know how we pulled it off.
But, without further adieu. Let’s do this!
The True Secret.
Sign up for email lists. We’ll preach it until we’re too old to get on airplanes. There truly is no better “hack” or “secret” than subscribing. Why do the work when others can do it for you?
Most of our travels are due to these emails. That being said, we are getting better at using our miles and our methods are shifting more to award travel, but in this case, it was because of this that we were able to “find” (open our inbox) round-trip flights to Mexico City for $250. It costs more to fly to a neighboring state. Why do that when you can fly to Mexico and enjoy some tacos?
To find the lists we love, check out our post on “How to Find Cheap Flights.”
Make it Free.
There are a couple of different ways to do this, but the easiest is with the Capital One Venture card. Yes, we know you’re sick and tired of reading about this card, but how else do you think you get free flights? The airlines sure aren’t giving them to you.
The Venture card lets you turn your spending into points and with those points you can book flights. It can be as easy as buying tickets with points through the Capital One Travel Portal. A $250 ticket will cost 25,000 miles. You can also use these miles to erase travel purchases like Uber, Airbnb, trains, and more.
These types of travel credit cards will give you opening bonuses after spending a certain amount. Now it should be said, never spend the money you don’t have. But, if you’ve got large purchases coming up such as medical bills, tuition, babies, home expenses, etc… It’s a great time to open a card. You might as well get rewarded for your required spending.
The Venture card can have opening bonuses as high as 75,000 miles. That’s three trips to Mexico. Pretty simple if you ask me.
Check out our post on why we love the Venture card. And if you’re feeling it, use our link to sign up for yourself.
But wait, what about hotels?
Guess what? Like airlines, hotels aren’t just handing out free rooms to anyone. But, hope is not lost. Again, it comes down to travel credit cards. This is a new one for us. We haven’t dove much into this side of travel hacking, but we’re already hooked. We knew we’d have a lot of expenses with our new baby so a few months back we opened the Chase IHG One Rewards Premier credit card. This card not only comes with a handful of hotel-related benefits, but it also comes with a really big opening bonus. At the time of opening, April ’23, the opening bonus was 175,000 points after spending $3,000 in the first 3 months.
We used this card to book 4 nights, (“Redeem 3 nights, get 4th night free.” One of its many benefits) in downtown Mexico City for a total of 59,000 points. Because of the big opening bonus, we still have 126,000 points. We could go back twice, or anywhere else in the world. One option that stood out was Bali, Indonesia. Hotels there can be booked for as few as 8,500 miles a night. It’s worth the sign-up.
All that’s left are the Tacos.
After these two little travel hacks, all that’s left are the tacos. Everything else is covered. No stress about budgets or spending too much money.
In full transparency, we chose not to use our Capital One miles for these flights. We have the miles, but the flights were cheap enough that we felt it would be better to save our miles for better use elsewhere. Where Will Your Miles Take You? The flights cost us $500. Had we used miles to cover this, the entire trip would’ve only cost us a total of $420.
Conclusion
There’s no big secret or special hack. We sign up for emails, open relevant travel credit cards, and by combining the two, we travel more and for cheaper than we ever thought possible.
So what are you waiting for? Travel doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate. With a few tricks and a few travel cards, you can go to Mexico City for free, or wherever your heart desires! And then all that’s left are the Tacos.
Still unsure where to begin? Check out our last post or reach out with questions.
Additional
We chose IHG because of their promotional high opening bonus. Hyatt and Marriot are two other great programs. Both of which have associated credit cards. Before jumping into anything, it’s always important to see what best fits your needs. That being said, you really can’t go wrong with IHG. They have hotels everywhere, they’ve got a good program with good benefits, and you’ve got to start somewhere so why not with IHG? Just know there are lots of options out there for hotels.