Wife and I are having a year where we need to travel across the country to my home state (Oregon to Michigan) 3 times for family events/weddings/Christmas. This is much more than our ideal 1 long trip as a vacation, but necessary this year. To mitigate the extra costs of these annoyingly expensive flights --
(which have NOT decreased in price even as price per barrel of oil has essentially been cut in half . . . price fixing by airlines anyone?)
-- we signed up for two United credit cards that gave 50,000 point bonuses, plus another 5,000 for adding someone to your card (we added each other). After meeting the spending goal for the first 3 months on both cards, we were able to book our ridiculously expensive flights around Christmas FOR FREE (except for mandatory fees to fund security theater, of course). Total savings according to the actual costs of our flights: ~$1,700. Booyah.
We are already looking for our next CC churning opportunity. Love it.