A single well-timed credit card signup bonus is often worth more than a year of everyday spending on that same card. Most people leave this value on the table because they treat the welcome bonus as a nice-to-have instead of the entire reason to open the card in the first place.
The trick isn't the card itself — it's matching the bonus to a redemption you already know you want, and checking the often-overlooked transfer partners before assuming the points are only good for a generic "travel statement credit." Statement credits are almost always the worst use of transferable points; they typically redeem at a fraction of what the same points are worth transferred to an airline or hotel partner.
The overlooked step
Most transferable points programs have a partner list that goes well beyond the two or three big-name airlines people already know about. Smaller or less obvious partners — regional carriers, hotel programs, even partners that don't fly the route you want directly — can sometimes offer far better redemption rates for a specific route than the "obvious" partner does. It's worth spending twenty minutes checking the full partner list before transferring anything.
What this looked like for Paris
A single card's welcome bonus, combined with a few months of spending that would have happened anyway (redirected onto that one card instead of spread across several), covered a round-trip economy fare to Paris with points left over. No 100,000-point mega-bonus required — the math works with far more ordinary offers than people assume, as long as the spending is deliberately consolidated onto one card during the bonus window instead of split across multiple cards.