I once spent six hours in a cold Starbucks in Newark trying to book a return flight from Lisbon, only to realize I’d accidentally transferred 80,000 Chase points to a British Airways account I couldn’t even log into. I was sweating, my laptop was at 4%, and I ended up just paying $1,100 for a one-way economy seat on United because I couldn’t figure out the ‘partner award’ logic. It was humiliating. I felt like a total failure in the world of ‘smart’ travel.
That’s the emotional state that gets you to buy into something like Travel Rewards University (TRU). You’re tired of feeling like everyone else is sipping champagne in business class while you’re stuck in 34B next to a guy who brought a tuna sandwich on board. So, I bit the bullet. I paid the money. I wanted the secrets.
The ‘University’ label is honestly a bit much
Can we just stop calling every online course a ‘University’? It’s a marketing gimmick that bugs me more than it should. It’s not a university. There’s no campus, no tenure, and nobody is giving you a degree in ‘Business Class Pajamas.’ What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. It’s a series of videos and a community. That’s it. Calling it a university is like calling my backyard a ‘Botanical Research Center’ because I managed to keep a succulent alive for three weeks.
Anyway, the branding is pretentious, but the content inside TRU (run by Alex Miller and the Upgraded Points team) is actually pretty dense. It’s not for casual people. If you just want to know which card gives you the best cash back on groceries, this is massive overkill. This is for the people who want to spend 20 hours a week hunting for ‘sweet spots’ on the All Nippon Airways award chart. Which, by the way, I’ve decided is a form of mental illness.
The truth is that 90% of the ‘secrets’ in these paid courses can be found for free on FlyerTalk or Reddit if you have the patience of a saint and the free time of a retired librarian.
What you actually get for $500
I tracked my ‘learning progress’ over 12 weeks. I watched about 40 videos. Here is the breakdown of what actually happens inside:
- A lot of talk about ‘transfer partners’ which is the holy grail of points.
- Step-by-step guides on how to use tools like Point.me or Seats.aero (which you have to pay for separately, by the way).
- A community forum where people post ‘wins.’
- Live Q&A sessions where you can ask why your specific flight to Des Moines isn’t bookable with points.
I used to think that there was some secret button you press to get free flights. I was completely wrong. The ‘secret’ is just work. It’s just sitting there and refreshing pages. I tested 14 different ‘deal alerts’ that were posted in the group over a three-week period in March. Only 4 of them were still bookable by the time I clicked the link. The rest were gone within 45 minutes. That’s the reality. It’s a race.
Total hustle.
The part I’m probably wrong about (but I’ll say it anyway)
I know people will disagree with me here, and the ‘points bros’ on Twitter will probably come for my throat, but I think the community aspect is overrated. Everyone says ‘you’re paying for the network.’ No, I’m paying for information. I don’t want to make friends with a guy named Chad who spends his weekends ‘churning’ five different Amex Gold cards. I just want to go to Italy without paying $4,000.
There’s this weird culture in these universities where people brag about their ‘redemption value.’ They’ll say, ‘I got 12 cents per point on this flight to Dubai!’ But they didn’t actually want to go to Dubai. They just went because the points worked out. That’s not travel; that’s just being a slave to an algorithm. I’d rather pay a little more and go where I actually want to go.
I also have this irrational hatred for the Capital One Venture X card. Everyone in these groups loves it. They treat it like a religious relic. I think the card is ugly, the ‘travel portal’ requirement is a trap, and I refuse to get one just because everyone else has one. It’s the Ugg boot of credit cards. I’m sticking with my Chase Sapphire Reserve even if the ‘math’ doesn’t always work out perfectly. I don’t care.
Is it actually worth the money?
This is the part where I’m supposed to give you a balanced answer. I won’t. For most people reading this? No. It’s not worth $497. You can buy a lot of actual plane tickets for $500.
However, if you are the type of person who finds joy in spreadsheets and you have at least $20,000 in annual spend that you can move around, the math starts to change. I managed to book a business class seat on Iberia from Madrid to Chicago for 34,000 points plus about $120 in taxes. Without the course, I wouldn’t have known that Iberia’s calendar opens up earlier than British Airways, or how to navigate their buggy-as-hell website. That one flight ‘saved’ me about $1,800 if you look at the cash price.
But let’s be real: I spent 15 hours learning how to do that. If my time is worth $50 an hour, I didn’t actually save anything. I just moved the cost from my wallet to my calendar.
It’s a hobby, not a hack.
The messy reality of ‘Hacking’
The biggest problem with Travel Rewards University—and all its competitors like 10xTravel or whatever—is that they make it look easy in the sales videos. They show a guy in a lie-flat seat with a glass of champagne. They don’t show the three hours he spent on hold with a Turkish Airlines call center in Istanbul trying to confirm a ticket that the website glitched out on. They don’t show the stress of transferring points and waiting 48 hours for them to show up, praying the seat doesn’t get taken by someone else in the meantime.
I’m still in the group. I still read the emails. But I’ve realized I’m just not that guy. I don’t want to spend my Sundays looking at award availability for 2025. I want to live my life in 2024.
I keep wondering if I’m just getting lazier as I get older. Ten years ago, I would have loved this. I would have optimized every single cent. Now? I just want to click ‘buy’ and know I’m not getting totally ripped off. Maybe that’s the real lesson I learned for my $500: my time is worth more than the ‘perfect’ redemption.
Don’t buy it unless you want a second job.