My family of 4 booked a trip to Australia for just $350 by using a 3-step process

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• I wanted to plan a trip to visit a friend who lives in Australia, so I started saving credit card rewards.
• I opened two cards that both had intro bonuses and transferred the points to one card.
• I set an alert and waited for cheap tickets — my cost for 4 tickets was $348.

15 years ago, I studied abroad in Australia, and I've been back twice, including once for my honeymoon. Each time, I've paid at least $1,300 for a ticket to Sydney from Minneapolis/St. Paul.

This year marks my third trip to the continent, and I paid for our entire family of four's tickets with credit card rewards and less than $350 out of pocket.

My best friend married an Australian man she met while we were studying abroad. They live north of Sydney with their two kids and recently purchased a home. We figured it was the perfect opportunity to visit them.

Getting to Sydney can be expensive, and our oldest no longer qualifies as a lap infant. In 2023, when they were visiting us, we aimed to go to Australia within the next few years. I started strategizing how we would earn and redeem credit card reward points for airfare.

1. I opened credit cards with bonus points

Because I have my own business, I knew that opening up and using business credit cards would give me a significant amount of points to use. I started with the Ink Business Cash card, hit the welcome spend amount, and received the intro offer bonus points.

After that, I started the process again with the next card, the Ink Business Unlimited. Once I hit the welcome bonus amount, those points were deposited into my Chase account. I accumulated over 200,000 miles relatively quickly, including points from the initial welcome offer bonus and the points I got from using the card for expenses.

2. I transferred all my points to one card

Once I had a stockpile of Chase Ultimate Rewards® points, I had to transfer my business card points so that all my points were accessible from one card. I transferred my points to my Chase Sapphire Preferred account.

My Chase Sapphire Preferred account already had roughly 125,000 points from a previous welcome offer and additional accumulation that had yet to be used. Although we didn't use this option, you can also transfer points from a household member's Chase credit card.

3. I set an alert to get the cheapest tickets

The final piece of the puzzle was to find affordable tickets for which we had enough points. I set a price alert on Google Flights for the days we were interested in, and then waited for alerts. I also utilized Thrifty Traveler's premium flight service, which sends flight deals to your inbox. When I saw the flight prices drop from MSP to Sydney, I dropped everything to check it out.

While I could have transferred the points to an airline to get even more miles per point redemption, I didn't know how long the flight deal would last. Thus, I booked directly through the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel platform to snag the flight deal. The cheapest and fastest flights were through United, an airline I have not flown frequently, but we were willing to book for the price.

We adjusted our travel dates by a few days to ensure we got the cheapest deal but were still able to book the tickets for a two-week period that coincides with our children's spring break.

I found tickets for $1,117 each and used my combined total of nearly 330,000 points to book them. Since I did not have enough points to cover the entire cost of the flights, I paid the remaining balance in cash, which ended up being about $348.

While we had to pay an annual fee to open the Ink Business Cash credit card, it was still worth it. Even including the annual fee, this strategy saved us just over $4,027 on these four flights to Australia.