Accommodation is among the top expenses for many of us when we travel overseas, So by using our accumulated credit card miles to book hotels or serviced apartments, we can offset some of our travel costs.

For example, KrisFlyer Vroom enables customers to book hotels and car rentals by redeeming KrisFlyer miles and similarly, Expedia allows you to redeem frequent flyer miles for your hotel bookings via their platform too.

Usually airline miles and points can only be redeemed for flight tickets booked directly through your selected airline’s website. At times, any better promotions offered by third-party sites, such as Expedia or Agoda may be missed out.

So, it’ll be wise to compare promotions on a third-party site with the amount of points or miles required if you book directly with your preferred airline, then select the option that provides the most value for you and your travel companion.

One of the quickest ways to earn miles is to get an air miles card that offers you a generous amount of air miles for signing up, spending a minimum amount, or paying the annual fee.

Some of the more attractive offers with the highest welcome bonus air miles include those by Citi PremierMiles, DBS Altitude Card, and Amex KrisFlyer Ascend which offer up to 45,000 miles, 38,000 miles and 21,000 miles respectively, each with a different minimum spend requirement.

Different cards have different benefits, i.e. some will offer you bonus air miles upon your annual fee payment like Standard Chartered Visa Infinite X Card (30,000 miles upon annual fee payment), while others offer sign-up bonus air miles like the ones mentioned above.

In order to maximise your credit card rewards, it is often a good choice to combine multiple credit cards with each card specialising in a particular spending type or card feature that best suits your lifestyle. Avoid pairing air miles credit cards with cashback credit cards since these reward types are incompatible.

On the other hand, reward points credit cards are more flexible as they can be used to either get cash rebates on specific merchants or have your reward points converted into miles to redeem free tech gadgets, shopping vouchers, hotel bookings, flight tickets or other perks.

Cards like the Amex Rewards Card offer 17,500 rewards points as long as you spend $5,000 in a calendar year, which you can convert to 17,500 miles on one of Amex’s many frequent flyer programmes, including KrisFlyer.

You can even use platforms like CardUp to split your payments over multiple cards to maximise your benefits so that you can gain reward points and air miles at the same time while using all of your cards.