Summer travel: 5 great travel rewards programs

Summer travel can be cheap with the help of credit card rewards. Here are five great credit card rewards programs to fit your vacationing style.

2. Frequent hotel guests

Nick Wass/AP Images for Hilton HHonors/File
Participants stand in line to received free certificates during the Hilton HHonors Global Social Media Treasure Hunt last year, which offered winners a free night certificate from Hilton's loyalty program. An easier way to earn Hilton points is to apply for the Hilton HHonors Credit Card.

If you plan to stay in a hotel wherever you visit this summer, you might want to make it a Hilton. The Hilton HHonors Credit Card offers 40,000 bonus points after your first purchase and 20,000 when you’ve spent $3,000. That’s redeemable for one to eight free nights, depending on the level of extravagance you desire from your lodging. This card charges a $75 annual fee as well as a 2.7 percent foreign transaction fee, so it doesn’t make the best option for international spending.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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