I've mentioned before that we use credit card rewards points to cover some of our travel costs. Since this is a topic I've gotten a lot of questions about, I thought it was worth a post to help anyone who's considering getting into the travel rewards game. Before we jump in, two disclaimers: We are lazy travel hackers. If you want to learn how to get free business-class seats to Bali by churning 6 cards a year, I'm not your gal. More power to those folks, but that level of obsession and planning is not for me. If you deal with open credit the way I deal with open packages of chips, stop reading now. Credit card travel rewards work only if you never pay interest or late fees. Seriously. If you don't pay off the full card balance every month, you'll never make more money from the card than they make from you. Likewise, if you buy stuff that you wouldn't have ordinarily bought just to earn rewards, that's a loss. How much can you earn in rewards? Generally