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Welcome! If you have visited Boarding Area this week, you may have seen some of my posts and wondered – “Who is this Points With a Crew and why does he have so many people in the airplane in the logo?!?” 🙂

As a brief introduction, my name is Dan and my wife and I have 6 (SIX!) children. To forestall most of your questions, there are 3 boys and 3 girls, and yes, we do have our hands full!  If you wonder how we manage to make it work, you might be interested in a recent guest post I did at budgetsaresexy.com about what the budget for a family of 8 looks like.

We usually fly out of CVG (Cincinnati) and DAY (Dayton), though we’ve been known to drive to IND (Indianapolis), SDF (Louisville) or CMH (Columbus) if needed. We’ve even driven up to MDW (Chicago) before.  Though really, when you can fit 8 people in one vehicle, the economics of driving vs. flying tilts a lot towards driving (even when using miles!)

reunionA focus on Family Travel

While I write some about general travel, I aim to focus specifically on traveling with families, especially large families. Those of us who are navigating car trips in packed minivans or trying to keep track of 17 different pieces of luggage in an airport just have different perspectives on travel than someone traveling with no kids.

I had known about travel hacking for several years, but had not really applied myself until realizing that we had a family reunion scheduled in Nevada. Knowing that 8 cross-country plane tickets were not going to be cheap (and might keep us from going), I did my first credit card churn back in January 0f 2013, and eventually was able to use 170,000 Southwest Rapid Reward points and the Southwest Companion pass to fly us there for free! (plus taxes).

I started blogging as well because like I said earlier, most of the travel blogs out there seemed to be about single people or others with no kids traveling in first class cabins and 5 star hotels. And while that is fun to read about, it’s not an accurate representation of how my family (or most of the families that I know) travel. I wanted to give another perspective.  While others write glowing trip reports about the Vendome in Paris, I wonder whether staying at a Rodeway Inn is a good idea…

Some of my most popular or favorite posts

To get an idea of what I write about, here are some of my most popular or otherwise notable posts:

General Travel:

My visited counties map

My visited counties map

Family Travel:

Miles and Points

Best of 2014

And of course if you’re new to the miles and points game, you’ll want to check out my Beginner’s Guide, which is a more newbie-friendly, step-by-step introduction.

If you don’t want to miss out on all of the great travel deals, you’ll want to make sure to sign up for our once-daily email (no spam, ever!).  You’ll also want to follow me on Twitter and Facebook or email me at dan <at> pointswithacrew.com with any questions – I’m happy to help you out in any way that I can!


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