Funds for Fun

Eli 'The Travel Guy' Facenda is a travel-loving entrepreneur based in Austin, Texas. He has a passion for maximizing credit card points for world class travel experiences. He is the founder of Freedom Travel Systems, where he and his team help travel-loving business owners maximize luxury travel on points without the headaches or wasted time. Eli Facenda has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs use credit to start and/or scale businesses, create new investment opportunities, and enjoy tons of free luxury travel!

Episode Highlights:

3:13 – Purpose behind Freedom Travel Systems. “We're helping maximize points. The result of that? You get to take bucket list trips, or your dream travels for usually around 90% off. It's not only bucket list trips, but these are also the juice of life type trips. Those are the things that we really get really excited to help people create because they're the trips people really live for. There are also small things too like getting better lounge access, more first-class upgrades, better hotel suites for conferences. There's a full spectrum of how you can leverage the money you're already going to spend in your business or personal life to turn it into better quality travel and more savings. We've helped over a thousand business owners at this point, which is who we're primarily focused on helping because they tend to have more travel, spend more and have less time to figure it out. You don't have to be a business owner to take advantage of credit card points and travel, but that's who we've helped."

6:07 - Three ways to change your traveling experience. “I can lay it into three steps because that's really the simplest way to think about it.

• The first one is getting the right cards on the right expenses. We all have different goals, amounts of spend, purchases, airports… each person has their own travel DNA, so those cards are really based off of that.

• The second one is to maximize the value out of those points. This is where you take a trip that would be a $30,000 bucket list trip to Italy where you are flying business or first class and staying in five-star hotels for two weeks, but instead of paying $30,000 or three million points through the bank site, you're going to get it for 80-90% less points. Instead of paying three million points, you pay a few hundred thousand. That's through converting the points and using them well.

• The last one is to optimize an upgrade or travel. Are you getting the best lounges or experiences at hotels? Are you getting the free upgrades to suites? Are you getting free breakfast? Are you getting early check-in and late check-out? Are you getting free bags and skipping the lines at the airport? Just the things that take the pain in the butt experiences out of travel.”

13:13 – Common mistakes when using points. “I'll start with using the points to maximize the value of the points and use them effectively. There are a few things I'll say you don't want to do first. These are the common mistakes. Using your points for Amazon, gift cards, statement credits, or cashing them out - don't do that. You're getting less value. Now, if you want a simple way to think about this: one point equals one penny. 500,000 Amex points is 500,000 pennies or $5,000 through the bank site. When you transfer them, those points can be worth double, triple, 5x or 10x the value. Amex has partnerships with a bunch of different airlines and these airlines are in different alliances, so there's ways to move these points around where you get points arbitrage. This is where you capture the value in the difference between the way Amex would charge and the way the airlines would charge. If you have points, you might as well earn even more. Then, if you can use them effectively, you're getting a double amplification effect by earning more points and getting more value."

16:28 - Transferring points. “If I offered you guys 120 Mexican pesos or 100 US dollars, you would take the dollars, right? Even though the peso has a larger number, you understand the value of US dollars. Well, if you don't realize that these points are all worth something different, you could be missing out on points that are 4x to 5x as valuable. When I talk about transferring points, I'm saying you need to earn transferable bank points. These are points with banks like Amex or Chase where you're earning their currency. Instead of going to their website and clicking redeem travel, there's a section where you can convert to airlines or hotels. There are loyalty programs where you just punch in the number of points you want to send and hit go. Whether it's an hour or a few hours later, they will show up in your airline account as airline miles, then you go through the airline site to book it through that program's mileage booking process.”

19:34 – It’s a spectrum! “There's a spectrum here. On one end, there's complete and total utter optimization points nerd. The other way, there's super lazy, do nothing and use a debit card. Where do you want to be on that spectrum? Well, we tend to look for 80-20 because as business owners we want to get the most value without creating unnecessary complexity. Leaving money on the table is not a great option, but over-optimizing and making complexity in the business also isn't good either. If you have multiple entities, you usually want to figure the top categories to spend for that business and get the card that's optimal for that.”

21:47 – Flight preferences to personalized plan. “We capture what we call the travel DNA, which is basically that combination of preferences on cards, on travel, on lounges, where you live, how much you spend, what you spend on, frequency of volume, status levels. Then, we build the custom plan and help support the implementation of getting the right cards for you. It really varies a lot just based on those other factors, but we do a serious intake to make sure we understand the full picture. This isn't something you can just solve with ChatGPT.”

30:26 – Different travelers require different packages. “There are three different types of people that come to us for three different reasons.

• There's the first person who is the optimizer that hates leaving money on the table, using the wrong cards and being wasteful. For them, it’s important to gett the card optimization plan set up, so they're just set up for success. They may not have a ton of big trips or know where they want to go yet, but they don't want to leave money on the table, so we do the custom card plan.

• We have people that come in with a bunch of points that want to take a bucket list trip, and they want to make sure they don't waste points and get the most value. For that, we've created our Bucket List Menu. We have a menu of different trips we send people where we look at your windows of available dates and send you pre-planned packages that have business or first-class flights and luxury hotels that fit your availability. You don't have to think about planning - it's sent to you, you choose yes or no, and we'll help you book it.

• The third option is our ongoing travelers that just need more support, guidance, quick recommendations. For that, we have our ongoing community where you get access to our team of advisors.

There's three different elements and they range in prices. We have the monthly community that can go as low as $200/month, and we have services that go up to $10,000/year. Depending on what people need, we bundle things in or take things out. We make it a la carte, if need be, then stack in whatever else is essential for them. That's the easiest way.”

36:47 - Building airline points when booking through Amex Travel. “There's two ways to earn points: from actually flying in the seat/staying in the hotel and from the purchase. If you use Amex Business Platinum to purchase the flight, you're going to earn the points from the purchase on the Amex card and then you're going to earn the points from the actual flying through the loyalty program of that airline. If you booked American Airlines through Amex Travel, you earn the Amex points from the spend and you earn the American miles from the flight by being on the seat. The only downside of doing it this way is if you have an issue with a ticket or want to change/cancel, it would have been better to book directly with the airline. That's the only caveat to that and it's a rare situation. This is how I do it because the value is so much more in terms of savings and value if you go through Amex and earn those points.”

Episode Resources:

Eli’s Website

Eli’s Instagram