Points for Business Travelers is a new weekly series aimed at helping business travelers maximize miles and points without a lot of effort. Have a suggestion or question? Email roadwarriorette @ gmail.com.

One of the perks of frequent business travel is accruing miles that you can use for fun trips. After all, what’s the point of being on the road all the time if you don’t get anything out of it? And of course, the more free trips the better! The problem is that traditional mileage runs and other points accruing techniques can take a lot of effort, add stress, or mean more time away from home. This series will focus on the easiest way for business travelers to get the largest amount of points and miles with the least amount of aggravation. I’ll cover a range of topics, including loyalty programs, credit cards, challenges, and other strategies.

But before starting to chase miles, you really have to figure out—what are your goals? Do you want status? Upgrades? Free vacations? Lounge access? For your family to go on trips with you? Your goals will really set the parameters for your overall strategy. In my case, I want my family to be able to come on some trips with me and free vacations most of all, then status and upgrades. This made the first step easy: the Southwest Companion Pass. This allows my husband and baby to fly with me for free on business trips where it makes sense, plus gives us a lot of options for low cost vacations. After taking advantage of the Chase Southwest credit card bonuses, flying a bit, and some strategic shopping, I have the Companion Pass until the end of 2014. Hooray! Now to figure out a strategy for the status goals…..

On that note, I will be co-hosting a Twitter chat this afternoon focused on accruing points and miles. It’s sponsored by TripIt (an awesome app!) and the other hosts are super cool: @earthXplorer, @LandLopers, and @ThePointsGuy. This is your chance to ask your points-related questions! Not only that, but we will be giving away TripIt prize packages to two lucky people that include a one-year subscription to TripIt Pro and a bunch of other goodies.

How to win? Make sure you are following me @RoadWarriorette and @TripIt, along with the other hosts. Then join us today, Thursday January 31 at 5pm EST/2pm PST and follow the hashtag #TripItChat and join in the conversation! Active participants who use the hashtag are eligible to win the prize pack. I’m honored to be in a group with these guys! Should be lots of fun.

Readers, what are your points and miles goals?

Happy New Year!

2012 passed in a blur of work, travel, conferences, pregnancy, and babies. Was it a crazy year? Yes indeed! And I wasn’t able to travel for several months. So I was about 50-50 with my 2012 travel resolutions:

Get to Chicago and South Texas. Visiting family is always a priority! I was able to visit Chicago three times last year! That’s a lot of sister time. The Home Warrior and I traveled to South Texas to visit my grandmother twice, and took the Mini Warrior once. As a bonus, we also went to North Texas to visit the Home Warrior’s family twice. I’m sure the Tours of Texas will continue this year!

Take at least one fun vacation. With all the conferences and work trips this year, it’s a wonder the Home Warrior and I had a chance to see each other, much less go on a fun trip. But we managed it! Some good friends of ours got married in Playa del Carmen this year, and we managed to get there for the festivities (and a little fun time before). At seven months pregnant there were definitely challenges, but it was a great trip nonetheless.

Make Executive Platinum. Well, not being able to fly for five months made this one nearly impossible. Maybe next year!

Get the Companion Pass. While I wasn’t able to make this happen in 2012, I am pretty certain that it will happen early in 2012. I don’t want to jinx myself though, so I’m going to hold off on talking about it too much for now.

Looking forward: Travel resolutions for 2013.

1. Visit family. Same as previous years, I want to go see our family all over Texas and in Chicago, plus we have family in New York now.
2. Companion Pass. Get it and USE it. This is the year!!!
3. Get Gold status with Hilton. I’ve been Silver for years without being able to cross that threshold. I am currently doing the Gold Challenge, so should have it soon!
4. Master travel with baby. Or at least learn to travel with baby without losing my mind.
5. Visit Wine Country. For a blissful year and a half, I was able to get to Napa every couple of months. The last time was three and a half years ago and I want to go back!!!
6. Visit one new place in the US. Hopefully the Companion Pass will help us out here! If not, well, we’ll make it happen another way.

My two main resolutions aside from the travel ones are to start getting ready to leave ten minutes before I think I need to (trying to deal with being chronically late to stuff) and do another triathlon.

(Pictured: Photo booth props from Etsy shop The Manic Moose.)

Readers, what are your resolutions this year? How did you do on last year’s?

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After my trip last week to Nashville, I was awarded A-list status from Southwest. What does this mean? I get to go through a special security line at some airports, 25% bonus on points earned, priority standby, a dedicated check-in and phone line, and most importantly….. priority boarding! So basically it’s just like being Gold with American Airlines. Which is great, especially as I don’t feel like I flew Southwest that much this year.

They recently changed their reward programs, so that now you can get status (and free flights) by either flights or points. The thing that’s cool (or at least, that I think is cool) is that you get points not based on length of flight, but how much the flights cost. Even though I only flew Southwest maybe 10-15 times this year, my travel isn’t determined until a week or two prior, so the flights were more expensive and I got more points.

Next step? Companion pass.  DealsWeLike wrote a post that got me all fired up about the Companion Pass, so I will definitely be looking for ways to get that next year. Basically, after 110,000 points you get one, and any flight that you buy one ticket on, you can have your companion fly with you for free. Doesn’t matter if the ticket was paid for or a reward ticket, or if you purchase it on their website or you go through your company travel agent. Chase has a regular 50k point bonus for card sign up, so I will be on the lookout for that in the new year. Another cool thing? You don’t redeem the 100k points for your pass—you still have them to use toward reward tickets. Awesome!

(As a bonus to A-list, Southwest sent me this nice luggage tag with my name and Rapid Rewards number on it. Nice!!)