If you’ve ever wondered how to fly to Hawaii on points, give your family the type of vacation that others only dream about, and save thousands of dollars in the process, then you’re in luck! It’s a goal that is completely possible, and this is our story about how my family and I were able to make it happen!

Traveling to Hawaii has been a dream of our’s for quite some time. Ever since I was a small child, I could remember my elderly relatives talking about what incredible memories they had of their vacation in Hawaii. Combine that with that fact that Hawaii serves as the backdrop to dozens of famous movies and iconic moments throughout history, and my curiosity has definitely been peaked!

While there are certainly many other exotic places in the world you could travel to, Hawaii is still a huge must-go-to spot for many travelers. In fact, it still ranks as one of the top destinations to visit within the U.S.

Plus, for U.S. citizens, traveling to Hawaii is less hassle than traveling outside the U.S. Unlike when you travel to the Caribbean or Europe, you can leave your passport at home and only need to take your drivers license with you. For anyone without passports, that saves a family of four over $400 (not to mention the luxury of not having to wait in those incredibly long Customs lines at the airport.)

What’s not to like about flying to Hawaii? Unfortunately the price! When I first started researching flights to Hawaii, I was typically seeing costs on average of $2,000 round-trip per person. $2,000??? For my family of four, that would be a retail cost of $8,000! And we haven’t even talked about also budgeting in the expenses for the hotel, vehicle rental, food, and just plain having fun!

In the beginning, it seemed like this goal was going to be impossible. I could see why so many people shut down when they initially consider vacationing in Hawaii. But then I got into the travel hacking / credit card rewards game and learned that with a little bit of creativity, anything is possible! All over the Internet, I was finding story after story of people who had traveled to wonderful and exotic locations using nothing more than just their credit card rewards points to get there. And Hawaii was certainly no exception!

I thought: Is there a way my family and I could use points to fly to Hawaii? What would be our strategy, and how long would it take to get all of the points we’d need to make this goal possible?

The answer: Absolutely! Now, after having traveled to Maui, Hawaii, I can definitely tell you that getting flights for nearly free is completely possible, and we are living proof! (In fact, please enjoy a few of the photos from our family vacation throughout this post.) With that said, here is our story and how you too can travel to Hawaii on credit card points!

How to Fly to Hawaii on Points – Developing Your Strategy

Step 1 – Do Your Research!

It’s often been said that nothing in this life is ever truly free. And even when it comes to topics like flying to Hawaii on credit card points, the same is true!

To make this dream a reality, you’re going to have to invest a little bit of time and energy into doing your homework. What do I mean by homework? Mainly this: Identifying which airlines travel to the Hawaiian island of your choice (and on which dates).

This can easily be done by simply going to a free resource like Google Flights or a travel service website of your choice (Expedia, Travelocity, etc.). Do a round-trip, flight-only search and just simply see what the basic options are. For example:

• What airlines do you notice? Do some seem to be more frequent than others?
• Which dates seem to have the best options?
• Are there some airlines that offer more options (free WiFi) or flight duration? For example, a direct flight instead of one with connecting stops or long layovers?

When we started planning our trip to Hawaii, I did a Google Flights search and compared each of the different islands. Right away I noticed that from my home airport of Detroit that almost every flight was through Delta. This was a good fit because we already had a modest amount of miles saved from previous vacations. Therefore, Delta airlines and their SkyMiles frequent flyer program became the focus of my credit card rewards strategy.

Step 2 – Understand the Cost

Another reason its critical to do your research: It’s important for you to understand just how much money the tickets cost normally. This will help you to form a “basis” for later. You’ll easily be able to compare different offers, see which points are providing you the better deal, and this will help you to make informed decisions about which sources to pursue (or if you need to do anything extra such as purchase additional points from the airline directly).

Again, Google Flights or a travel service website of your choice will help to give you a really good idea of the retail price. Personally I like to use Google Flights because it gives you the option to compare flights over several weeks at a time to see which particular dates would be the most optimum; not just for price but also by flight times and other factors of your liking.

In terms of cost, like I mentioned earlier, I was seeing a lot of plane tickets in the neighborhood of $2,000 or more per person. However, through keeping our flight options flexible, I quickly recognized that the island of Oahu (the one with the state capital of Honolulu) had some very affordable dates that were closer to $1,250 per person.

Step 3 – Identify the Right Points System

With a particular airline in my mind and a ballpark idea of the cost, now you can begin to start looking into whether it would be possible or not to use points on that airline.

Going back to my vacation story, when I looked up how many points it would take to go to Oahu, it cost approximately 50,000 to 65,000 depending on which dates we’d pick.

Oahu would be awesome! But honestly, Maui was our #1 choice. So I went back and did some more cost comparisons of Delta SkyMiles to see if I could find anything that would be reasonable. Much to my surprise, I found a few flight options to Maui that were also approximately 65,000 per person. Though 260,000 SkyMiles would be a lot of points to accumulate, it wasn’t a number that would be completely out of reach.

Of course, Delta SkyMiles is just what I preferred to use. You could do this with any airline of your choice: United, American Airlines, Southwest, etc. Again, this is why it’s important to do Step 1 and see exactly which airlines you’ll want to be working towards.

Advanced tip: Keep in mind that many airlines have alliances with one another, and sometimes you might get a better deal by going through one frequent flyer program over another. For example, lots of travel bloggers have often stated luck with using Korean Air to get cheap flights through the Sky Team Partner alliance. Though it requires a bit more research to uncover, it could end up saving you thousands of dollars in the end.

Step 4 – Find the Right Credit Card

Now that you’ve got some idea of how many frequent flyer miles you’ll need, now it’s time to find the right credit card offer for the job!

The best way to do this is to go to any of the top travel websites and look through all of the latest offers for cards that will support your goal. Some of my favorites:

• Million Mile Secrets
• The Points Guy
• Frugal Travel Guy
• Travel Miles 101

In my case, I needed as many Delta SkyMiles as possible. So I signed up both myself and my wife each for a Gold Delta SkyMiles American Express card with a bonus offer of 60,000 miles apiece and no annual fee for the first year.

Pro Tip: When applying for credit cards, don’t add your spouse to your application. Sign yourself and your spouse up separately for two individual credit cards. That way you’ll each have an opportunity to get the bonus offer and effectively double the number of rewards!

Unfortunately, those two cards weren’t quite enough to give us all the miles that we needed. So I also ended up signing up for the Platinum Delta SkyMiles American Express card that had a bonus offer of 70,000 miles. Though this one had a $195 up-front annual fee, I didn’t mind since it was helping us to save nearly $5,000 on our flights and the card allowed us to check bags for free (this would have cost us almost $200 anyways).

Step 5 – Spend Responsibly!

In almost every case with credit card bonus offers, there is some minimum spending that needs to met. Usually there is also some time period restriction on this spending such as $3,000 within the first 90 days (or something similar).

Be sure to meet this requirement making only purchases that you would normally have made! This aspect is so important that I’ll repeat it again: Only buy the stuff you were going to buy anyways! I really can’t stress this part enough!

Getting a new credit card and making purchases just for the sake of reaching some spending goal is just plain silly. This is not the time to go out of your way to buy a new flat-screen TV or put a down payment on a car (unless you had saved and were planning to make these purchases already). So again, please spend responsibly.

My suggestion would be to make purchases such as:

• Gas
• Groceries / restaurants
• Utilities / cell phone / internet bills
• Any other regularly occurring expenses

For example, usually when I get a new credit card where I have to meet a minimum spending requirement, I’ll generally switch over my automatic payments for my electric / gas and cell phone bills. It’s an easy way to cover almost $1,000 of that spending requirement within a short amount of time and with almost no effort!

Step 6 – Claim Your Prize!

So now you’ve meet the minimum spending requirement and been awarded your points. Now what?

It’s time to claim your prize! Go redeem those points for the flights you’ve been planning.

I mention this step because often times some people get caught up in what I like to call “points paralysis” – meaning now that they’ve accumulated such a large balance of points, they are afraid to spend them.

For example, have you ever met anyone who brags to you that they have X-hundred-thousand frequent flyer miles with their favorite airline. To that, I say “Great! So what?” Those points are completely useless unless you plan to spend them on something you and your family will remember. And what’s worse: Those points could even expire if you let them sit for too long. Honestly, there is no reason not to get your full value out of your points and use them for what they are good for: Free travel!

Alternative Strategies for Using Points to Fly to Hawaii

Luckily, my strategy for flying to Hawaii on points was just one example out of many. There are dozens of alternative ways you could use your credit card rewards to get to where you want to go. For example:

Use Airline Arbitrage to Get More for Your Points

The word “arbitrage” is often used in investing to mean making a trade for something at a better price. And airline frequent flyers are no exception!

Earlier in Step 3, I mentioned how Delta is part of a larger Sky Team Alliance. Why is that important? Because lots of bloggers have often said that they were able to book cheaper Delta flights by converting their credit card points to miles through Korean Air first. Here’s a link to an example of how this works. Although I’ve never personally had any luck with it, given that it could end up saving you a few thousand dollars, it’s worth it to look into!

Book Your Travel Directly Through the Credit Card Reward Program

Nearly every major credit card provider with one of these big programs will also offer you the oppertunity to book flights, hotels, etc. directly through their own internal travel portal. And at a discount!

For example, when we were holders of the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, each point value was increased to 1.5 if you booked through Chase’s travel portal. Example: 100,000 points ($1,000) was actually worth $1,500 of travel. This is one of the ways we were able to book our all-inclusive trip to Los Cabos Mexico in 2017 for nearly no money out of pocket.

Skip Points and Get Travel Credit

Don’t feel like messing around with points and conversions? You’re not alone! Some credit card companies have already recognized this, and instead make life very simple by offering travel credit instead.

For example, the Capital One Venture card is one that often awards 60,000 points that can be redeemed directly for $600 worth of travel expense. Use this card wisely, and you could easily build up enough rewards to get $1,000 of travel credit.

Don’t Stop At Flights, Get Free Hotels and Vehicle Rentals Too!

Like the idea of flying to Hawaii on points for free?

The good news is that it doesn’t have to stop there! You could really take your vacation budget down to as close to zero as possible. How? By applying the same lessons above from flights to also cover your other big travel expenses such as your hotel and vehicle rental.

Free Hotel Nights

The islands of Hawaii are full of hundreds of hotels – most of which bear popular, big-name brands such as Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, etc.

Why does that matter? Because just like with the airlines, each of these hotel chains has their own unique point system where you can take advantage. Similar to the savings with flights, it pays to do some research ahead of time to see which hotels cost which amount of points, and then develop your strategy from there.

How can you get started? By far, my favorite free resource is a wonderful site called Award Mapper. Simply type in the location of anywhere in the world you’d like to go, and Award Mapper will show you which hotels chains are available and how many points you’ll need for each night of stay. It’s a HUGE time-saver over going to each hotel chain’s website and researching the point cost yourself.

Before we started looking at Maui for our family trip, using Award Mapper, I noticed there was a Hyatt Place in Waikiki Beach, Oahu that only cost 12,000 points per night. Using a credit card program like Chase Ultimate Rewards where each UR point transfers to Hyatt 1 for 1, this means we could have easily accumulated 60,000 points from opening one card and stayed at this location for 5 nights completely free!

Of course, we didn’t end up staying in Oahu, and I’m not going to lie … hotels in Maui were pretty darn expensive! Like $4,000 or more for the week expensive!!

But it was all good. Thankfully we had budgeted for this and were prepared to pay the cost. And this lead us to two more important things:

Instead of staying in the traditional 400 square foot hotel room, I noticed Maui was full of unused timeshares that you could rent like traditional hotel rooms. So instead we were able to stay at an 1,800 square foot, 2 room condo with full kitchen and living space … for less than what the big-boy hotel chains were charging! Let me tell you … that was REALLY nice! And the best part – no timeshare presentations or any nonsense like that!

Since we knew ahead of time that we were about to drop $4,000 on a single purchase, we thought: Hey, why not get some points for it? We signed up for the Capital One Venture Card because they offer a generous 10x points per dollar spent at Hotels.com. Combine that with the 50,000 introductory point offer, and with ONE purchase we were able to accumulate over 90,000 points on this credit card (+$900 in value).

Pro Tip: If you are planning to make any big purchases in the near future (vacation, home improvement, car down payment), try to find a credit card that will help you turn that purchase into as many points as possible!

Free Vehicle Rentals

If you’re going to stay in Hawaii, you’re going to want to go exploring! And so we knew we were going to need to rent a vehicle for the week.

This is another easy place to spend your points and save between $200 – $500. We ended up finding a pretty good deal on a Jeep and, using our credit card rewards, we ended up saving us approximately $343 more!

Miscellaneous Travel Expenses

Don’t forget that with some of the general purpose travel cards such as Capital One Venture you can use your points to pay for things you wouldn’t normally think about.

For example, we used our Capital One Venture points to pay for the airport parking. This was yet another savings of $113!

Planning to do any sort of activities or excursions? Check the travel portal to see if you can book any of these excursions ahead of time. Or you could always use one of the general purpose travel cards to cover this expense. There are a lot of possibilities!

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with any of the credit cards or travel sites mentioned within the content of this article. This is simply me sharing the facts of how I was able to achieve this savings with the hope that it will help you to be able to treat your family to the same incredible experience. Good luck!

Readers – What tricks have you found for flying to Hawaii on points? Which credit cards or rewards programs do you prefer to use?

Photo credit(s): Myself

The post How to Fly to Hawaii On Points – We Saved Over $5,000! appeared first on My Money Design.

How about ALSO getting a second vacation to the warm sandy beaches of an all-inclusive luxury resort in Los Cabos, Mexico … for just $95 out-of-pocket?

Yes, it’s true!

After strategically travel hacking our way to a whole bunch of Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) points and scoring nearly-free flights, a hotel, and rental car, we decided to go “all-in” and maneuver our remaining points towards yet another incredible vacation for barely any money at all!

Here’s the back-story …

As many of you already know from my previous Travel Hacking Chapters 1-3, originally our goal was to reduce the amount of money we were going to spend in 2017 by trying out this whole “travel hacking” thing.  Even if we could knock of $1,000 or more, that would be more money that we could divert into our early retirement savings or emergency fund.

As it turns out, my expectations were completely blown-away!  Using travel hacking, I was able to get enough points for all of us to take round-trip flights, cover the complete hotel stay, and get rental car for the week.  All we had to do was open two credit cards: The Chase Sapphire Preferred (50,000 introductory UR points) and Chase Sapphire Reserve card (100,000 introductory UR points).  Chase makes it very easy to transfer point within the same household, so my wife and I were able to combine the points that we needed.

Our only out-of-pocket expense was a hefty $450 membership fee for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card.  I’ll admit though that is a ton of money to spend up-front for one card, the 100,000 Chase UR points (cash value $1,000) and $600 in potential travel credit more than made up for it.

By the end of my last update, I noted that we still had at least 64,515 Chase UR points left in our account and a travel credit of $300 for 2017.  My options at the time were to:

A) Cash out the points and reimburse ourselves for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card membership fee.

B) Cash out the points and use the money for food and miscellaneous spending during our trip.

C) Wait to use the points for something else … something BIGGER!

As you can probably guess from the title of this post, we went for the gold and swung for Option C!

Truthfully, from a return-on-investment perspective, Option C had the biggest pay-off.  Generally speaking, cashing out your rewards points for money or gift cards is nice, but it’s usually the worst pay-out.  The points almost always work out to a 1:1 ratio, making them worth 1 cent/point each.  If you can instead use your rewards with one of the credit card’s travel partners or book your travel through the credit card company’s travel portal, then the payout becomes a lot greater – often 2 cents/point or more.

Our Strategy for Going to Los Cabo for Almost Free

So why decide to try to go for a second vacation?

Why not?  No really – This summer, my wife turns the big 4-0 and to celebrate, we wanted to finally take an awesome couples vacation – just the two of us.

We’ve been to Mexico before, but always on the east coast near Cancun.  To try something different, we both agreed that somewhere near Cabo San Lucas seemed like a great target destination.  That’s how we found Los Cabos.

To get there, our strategy was as follows:

1. Find out which flights and hotels we could use our Chase UR points with.
2. Build up our points by getting at least one more credit card with a generous intro offer.

Flights

Usually the place I like to start in this process to go to Expedia and just start doing a generic search in the weeks we’d like to travel.  This gives me a general idea of which airlines are available and which dates to pinpoint.

I quickly found a lot of United and Delta flights at this time and discovered a particular week that seemed to be the cheapest.

Neither United or Delta had any Super Saver-style options for these times.  So at this point we could pretty much book with any airline through the Chase UR travel portal and our points would automatically be worth 1.5 cents each.

The most practical one was a flight from Spirit that cost roughly $400 per person.  To book this flight, I would need at least 60,000 UR points.

Hotel

For the resort, there were a lot of great all-inclusive options.  The one that really seemed to stand out was a really Hyatt.  From the photos, the place just looked outstanding!  Lots of restaurants, pools, clean beaches, … the works!

Having recently joined the Hyatt rewards program to get our last hotel, I was able to look up that this resort would only cost 20,000 points per night, or 80,000 Hyatt points for all 4 nights.  Out of pocket, this hotel would have cost roughly $1,200 or more.  Since Chase UR points convert to Hyatt points at a rate of 1:1, this meant I’d need 80,000 Chase points.

The Next Credit Card

With roughly 64,515 Chase UR points waiting around in our account, I decided we’d need to get another card that would give us roughly 80,000 more points.

After a little bit of research, I discovered that the Chase Ink Business Preferred card had recently increased its introductory offer to 80,000 points with a $95 fee for the first year.  All you’d have to do is spend $5,000 within the first 3 months.

I was a bit concerned at first that I would be rejected for this offer since my only “business” is blogging.  But surprisingly, that was good enough for them to approve me!

Like before, we earned all of the points after just 2 months of spending.  We even scored quite a few extra points from the $5,000+ initial spending requirement.

Once the points cleared and were deposited into our account, it was time to make this second vacation a reality!

How Much We Saved!

In the end, between the flights and resort, we spent another 143,386 of our Chase UR points.  Due to availability at the resort, I ended up going booking the Hyatt through Chase’s UR portal.  No sweat though – we got a slightly nicer room, and for some reason it cost less points than what Hyatt was offering it for.  So this worked out just fine to our advantage.

Out of pocket through a commercial site like Expedia, this trip would have cost $1,877 (or more).  But using travel hacking, it only cost us $95 total out of pocket!

Between the two vacations, that’s a net $4,247 in savings altogether!  Absolutely outstanding!

Our Next Travel Hack …

2 awesome (and pretty much free) vacations in one year is pretty incredible.  From here on out, all my travel hacking efforts are going to focus on our vacation plans for 2018.

Where is our target destination this time?  Hawaii!

My wife and I have talked forever about taking the entire family there.  But just the cost of 4 flights alone from DET is over $5,000.  AND, as I understand it, there are no all-inclusive resorts there like we find in Mexico and the Caribbean.  So food and entertainment will be yet another cost to consider on top of everything else.

I will definitely have my work cut out for me on this one.  But I’m up for the challenge!

Until next time …

Readers – How are your travel hacking schemes going?  Has anyone else been able to book one, two, (three?) vacations this year as a result of your efforts?  Who’s been to Los Cabos?  Does anyone have any good advice for hacking my way to Hawaii?

Images courtesy of Trip Advisor and Flickr

The post Travel Hacking Chapter 4 – How We Got an All-Inclusive Trip to Los Cabos, Mexico for Just $95! appeared first on My Money Design.

For anyone unfamiliar with this term, “travel hacking” is when you attempt to get free or near-free deals on your travel expenses.  You do this by taking advantage of big credit card sign-up offers and optimizing the rewards points to get the best deals possible.

As I mentioned in the original post, I decided to give travel hacking a try after looking over our expenses for the year and concluding that we needed to find a way to save money on our annual family vacation.  We really enjoy our vacations and enjoy traveling to new places.  So if I’m able to apply even just a few of the travel hacking, money-saving tips that I’m always reading about other people enjoying, then this could be a huge win-win!

To quickly recap, in the first post, I talked about how we made a goal to travel to Orlando, Florida next summer to hit the Universal Studios theme park as well as a few other stops.  Our first missions was to get free flights.  To do this, we specifically targeted the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card.  By combining the 50,000 Chase Ultimate Reward point intro offer with the points we already had from our other everyday usage Chase Freedom credit card, we easily got $1,400 in airfare for no money out of pocket.  Mission #1 accomplish!

In the second post, I decided to keep this free-travel thing going and set a new mission to get the hotel for free too.  We explored some of the various options for a second credit card offer that would help us get the best hotel deal available.  I ended up finding that yet another Chase credit card would give us the best results.

So … did we accomplish Mission #2?  We certainly did! And that’s what we’re going to cover in this post.  But we didn’t stop there.  We also quickly set and accomplished Mission #3 to get a rental car.  As you’ll soon find out, this is all literally adding up to thousands of dollars in savings.

And the best part … we’re STILL not done maxing out all of our tricks yet!

Here’s the latest chapter on exactly how we got our hotel and rental car for almost free.

How We Booked Our Hotel

Hyatt Has the Best Bang-for-the-Buck

As we explored in Post No. 2, there are hundreds of different offers out there for hotels.  So how did we narrow them down?

After doing a little bit of research, I concluded that the Hyatt line-up of hotels had the best rewards program as far as point-per-dollar conversion.

In particular, we really liked the Hyatt Place Orlando Universal for several reasons:

1. Since it’s not considered to be one of the “fancier” hotels, it only cost 8,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points per night to book. (Previously their website had a points+cash offer where you could pay just 4,000 Hyatt points plus $35 /night, but this was unfortunately no longer an option.)
2. The hotel includes free Wi-Fi. I don’t know about you, but my family LOVES using up Wi-Fi!
3. The location is practically across the street from the Universal Theme park; one of the main attractions we plan to visit.
4. The hotel has free parking. Although they did not advertise it, the Trip Advisor comments seemed to suggest that they also offered shuttle service to the Universal theme park.
5. They also offer free breakfast in the morning. SCORE!  That’s one-third of our meal cost dilemma solved right there!

Ironically, the much “nicer” Hyatt Regency Orlando resort down the street not only cost a whole lot more per night to stay there, but it also did not offer free parking or breakfast.  I guess more expensive doesn’t always mean “better”.

Since we plan to be gone almost every day and only truly use the hotel for sleeping, the Hyatt Place Orlando Universal will work just fine.

BIG Rewards with the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card

Out of all the credit card offers we could have used to book this Hyatt, I concluded that the Chase Sapphire Reserve card was the way to go for a few reasons:

• We’d get more Chase Ultimate Rewards points that we could easily combine with the other Ultimate Rewards points we already had.
• Those points could then be simply transferred 1:1 to the Hyatt Gold Passport rewards program.

The only negative to this credit card is the sticker-shock of paying a $450 annual fee.

While that might sting you at first, you have to really look at the bigger picture to get a full understanding of the full range of possible benefits.  Remember that:

1. The intro offer for getting this card is 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points. That’s HUGE!  That’s the equivalent of $1,000 in cash, $1,500 worth of travel through the Chase Travel Portal, or possibly even more rewards if you transfer the points to another rewards system like United Airlines or Hyatt.  All you have to do is complete $4,000 worth of purchases in 3 months.
2. If that’s not enough, you can also score $600 worth of travel credits if you’re creative about how you do it. Each calendar year, Chase will give you an instant $300 travel credit for travel purchases you make on this card.  That’s one $300 between now and December 31, and another January 1^st onward for next year.

All in all, that’s a minimum of $1,600 worth of rewards in return for spending that $450 fee.  Nearly quadrupling your money?  I’d say that’s not a bad return on investment!

On top of that, this card also offers you 3x points for every dollar you spend on dining out and travel.  Between how often we do these things and the travel I may have to do for work soon, that’s another strong reason to keep this card handy.

Converting Points Was a Breeze!

Because we put nearly all of our everyday purchases on our credit cards (including many of our regular automatic bills), we met the spending minimum and received those 100,000 intro points with no trouble at all.

Signing up for the Hyatt Gold Passport program was super-easy.  It was completely free and only took about 10 minutes.

Once I had my Hyatt membership number, I was able to login to Chase and electronically transfer exactly the number of points I needed to my Hyatt account.  The process was instantaneous.

Within minutes, I logged back into my Hyatt account and booked the hotel.  We didn’t spend a single dollar beyond the $450 credit card fee.

What was the retail price of the Hyatt if we had paid cash? =$1,238.

That’s a savings of $1,238 – $450 = $788!

But then it gets better …

Booking Our Rental Car Too!

Since I need to use our Chase Sapphire Reserve $300 travel credit before the end of the year, I decided now is the time that I should also book our rental car.

I researched about 4-5 different travel websites, including the Chase travel portal, and determined that for the type of vehicle and location that Budget had the best offering. They were asking $277 in total for one-week with a Ford Explorer or similar. This size vehicle will be perfect for our family of four and all the junk we always seem to bring with us.

To my surprise, getting that Chase travel credit really was “instant”.  After booking the auto, the credit card recognized this expense as being for travel and applied the statement credit the next day.  No submitting receipts or anything.  Completely painless!

Total cost: $277 – $277 = $0!

$2,465 in Savings, and Still Going!

So, a lot of people have either commented or asked me: Has this whole travel hacking thing been worth it?

Thus far, between airfare, hotel, and rental car, the total retail price would have been $2,915. Out of pocket, I’ve only spent $450 in the process.  Therefore, we’ve saved $2,465 so far!

But here’s the best part: We’re not even close to being done yet with saving money on this upcoming trip!

At Least $1,000 MORE In Rewards

As of the writing of this post, we still have almost 65,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points that we haven’t used. I have not decided if I will redeem all those points for a straight $650 in cash which we could use to pay for the amusement park tickets and food.   OR I may just simply let the points sit (they don’t expire) and use them towards our next set of travel plans in 2018.

In addition, we still have another $300 travel credit that we can redeem starting January 1^st.  I’m fairly confident that between airport parking and fight baggage fees we should be able to rack up enough travel expenses to redeem the full amount with no trouble.

MORE Travel Hacking with Yet Another Credit Card?

With how easy it’s been to rack up all these free goodies, why stop here?  I’m seriously considering keeping a good thing going and going after yet another rewards bonus.  I have no idea which one yet.

It’s not that uncommon to read about travel hackers who open 5 to 10 cards per year for the very reason of taking advantage of these deals.  (The Go Curry Cracker duo opened 9 this year.)  Though I don’t plan to get that intense, I can see how one more card might just but this entire vacation over the top.

To be continued ….

Readers: What do you think so far?  Have we gone far enough for the year in rewards, or should we keep on racking up more points?  Has anyone else signed up for the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card?  What travel hacking scheme are you working on right now?

Featured image courtesy Flickr

The post Travel Hacking Chapter 3: Getting the Hotel and Rental Car for (Almost) Free! appeared first on My Money Design.

For anyone who’s not familiar with that term, “travel hacking” his when you get to travel for free or at a seriously reduced price by strategically signing up for various credit card offers and optimizing the value of your points.

In my last post on this topic, I wrote about what a steal I got by scoring free flights for the entire family next year to Orlando!

All it took was signing up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card where I was awarded nearly 60,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points as part of the sign-up bonus, adding another user, and meeting the purchase requirement.  By combining this with the bank of Chase points I already had, this enabled me to scoop up the tickets for absolutely no money out of pocket!

My goal with this whole travel hacking scheme is to get as much of our family vacation next year for free.  Yes, that’s right, I said free!

To put things in perspective, this past summer when we took our trip to the Dominican Republic, it cost us well over $4,000 to go. While I value family vacations, there’s absolutely no reason I can’t be clever and find a way to cut back on this expense (just like any other household expense) without sacrificing the quality of the trip!

By investing this time into figuring out how we can get the whole vacation for free or minimal cost, that’s potentially $4,000 (or more) we could save ourselves this year!  That’s a bonus I’m willing to work for.

So now that the flights are taken care of, in this post, I’m going to discuss some of the ideas and options I’ve research for what should potentially ne our next biggest expense: The hotel.

How Do You Measure a “Good Deal”?

With all the different credit card offers that are out there and unique hotel points system with all of their rules, how can anyone keep all of this straight to know which credit card is the best one to “hack” and which ones are not worth the trouble?

Truthfully, I think it’s pretty straightforward to figure out. The way I will evaluate a “good deal” is like this:

• First I’ll look at the “real” prices for various hotels in the area we plan to stay at.
• Next, I’ll see how many points it will take to stay at these hotels for free.

This way, I’ll be able to see exactly how much value each point is truly worth without all the fuss!

By default, we already know that it is exceptionally easy to get a cash back credit card that pays you somewhere between 1% and 2%.  So as long as these points are worth more than this base-line comparison, then we’ll know that this is a potentially good deal!

Onward with the research …

Marriott Rewards

At first glance, the Marriott Rewords Premier card looks extremely attractive!  It offers 80,000 points plus an extra 7,500 for each user that you had. That’s not too shabby!  So for just signing up and meeting the minimum purchase requirement, you’re already pretty darn close to having almost 100,000 points right from the start!

Great!  But what do all of these Marriott points actually buy me?

Using this cool link from Travel Miles 101 called Award Mapper, I was able to very quickly see which hotels were available near my destination and how many points they might potentially cost me.

One of the first ones I looked up with the Residence Inn Orlando Lake Nona by Marriott.  The official price for the week that I wanted to stay was $973.  But if you used all Marriott points to pay for your stay, it would only cost 120,000 points.

Unfortunately when you do the math, that’s only 0.6 cents per point!  That’s a terrible conversion rate!  You’d be better off taking 1% cash back from a standard credit card.  Definitely not worth the trouble.

Of course, this is why we need to compare these various programs in this way.  Even though this one was dud, as you’ll see, some diamonds in the rough will soon appear!

Starwood Points

The next hotel I decided to take a closer look at was the Starwood line of hotels.

In particular, I decide to check into the Westin Lake Mary, Orlando North.  This hotel had a price tag of $1,127.  With points, I could purchase the entire hotel stay for 42,000 Starwood points. That’s a rate of 2.7 cents per point.  Not too bad!

But as an alternative, I found out that Starwood (along with a few other hotel chains) will allow you to purchase your stay with a combination of both cash and points. If I went this route, it would cost 24,500 points plus $385 out-of-pocket. Contrary to what I initially thought would happen, this option actually increases the value to 3.0 cents per point.

All the Points I Need!

So what kind of sign-up bonus offers are there for Starwood hotels?  The best one I could find was the Starwood Preferred Guest American Express.  They offered 25,000 points for sign up, and it was rumored that sometimes the offer increases to 30,000 throughout the year. The credit card had no annual fee for the first year and then cost $95 annually thereafter.

Unfortunately, Starwood is not a compatible program with the Chase Ultimate Rewards program.  So this means I cannot transfer any of my UR points over to the Starwood program.  Therefore, if I really wanted to go this route, I could easily signup for the American Express card and have enough points to make the cash plus points purchase.

Honestly, this would not be a bad option at all! The only negative I could find in this arrangement was that unlike a lot of the other hotels, breakfast was not included at the Starwood hotels. This would mean a little extra money out of our pockets every day.  And as you can guess, for a family of 4, that would really start to add up.

I decided I would keep looking just a little more.

The Hyatt

Hyatt’s are some of my favorite hotels to stay at what I’m traveling for business. They can be very swanky at times and really give you that sense of luxury that is often missing from other chains.

I looked up two different hotels in the Hyatt chain:

• The Hyatt Place, Orlando Universal
• The Hyatt Place, Orlando Convention Center

The Hyatt Place, Orlando Universal retails at $1,277 out-of-pocket. If you used points, it would cost 56,000 total. This made the points worth 2.3 cents each. However, if you used the cash plus points option, it would only cost 28,000 points plus $385.  This would increase your value to 3.2 cents per point.

The Hyatt Place, Orlando Convention Center on the other hand would cost $1,646 out-of-pocket. With points, you could again spend 56,000 points for a value of 2.9 cents per point. Or if you did the cash plus points option, you could spend the same 28,000 points plus $385, and your value per point would skyrocket to a remarkable 4.5 cents per point!

Plus, unlike the Starwood, breakfast IS complementary.  The deal just keeps on getting sweeter!

But how to get 28,000 to 56,000 points?

No-Go On the Hyatt Visa Signature

The first option was to look at a credit that offered deals for Hyatt’s exclusively.  I did find the Hyatt Visa Signature credit card which offers two free nights, but these were vouchers and not points specifically.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any credit card offers that would give you straight points.

This is where you have to get a little creative!

Going Back to the Well With Chase!

I noticed that my Chase Ultimate Rewards points could be transferred directly to the Hyatt hotel program at a rate of 1:1.  That means that over the next few months I could simply build up my Chase UR point balance and then transfer the points over to the Hyatt program without having to sup up for any new credit cards at all.

But then I thought to myself why stop there?

I noticed one of Chase’s other BIG rewards cards what’s the Chase Ink Plus Business credit card which offers 60,000 bonus points right at the sign-up.  Even though they charge a $95 annual fee up-front, this option would easily give me all the points I needed (and then some) to score the hotel for pretty close to free!

It seems I had found the best strategy… Or did I?

The Chase Sapphire Reserve Card

Not that long ago, I had heard that Chase was offering a brand-new credit card called the Sapphire Reserve that gives you a RIDICULOUS 100,000 point sign-up bonus!  That’s worth virtually $1,000 in cash back or $1,500 in travel if you use Chase’s travel portal. Basically, this was Chase’s version of the legendary American Express Black Card; read-up on that one someday in your spare time.

The only unfortunate thing was that this new Chase card also included a $450 annual fee. Ouch! I remember saying to myself “Who in the world is going to sign up for something like that, even with such an incredible sign-up bonus?”

Then just this week, I noticed an article by the Points Guy that’s got me looking at this card in a whole new way …

Double-Down on a $300 Travel Credit

The Points Guy article was discussing a reader question about one of the potentially incredible benefits to this card that I may have previously overlooked.  In addition to the 100,000 UR points, this credit card also offers you $300 in travel credit for each calendar year.  Basically, every time you book a flight, pay for a hotel, or buy anything else related to travel, Chase automatically credits your account up to $300.

But that’s not even the beautiful part.  The Points Guy article was highlighting a loop-hole where you can get $300 in travel credit now up to December 31^st, and then ANOTHER $300 after Jan 1^st.   Potentially, that’s $600 in additional benefits ON TOP of that 100,000 UR point intro bonus.

With this $600 alone, that would cover the $450 annual fee and still net me $150!

My mind is blown…

The Plan

So here’s what I’m thinking:

• First, sign up for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card and meet the minimum spending requirements to get the 100,000 UR points.
• Next, book the Hyatt using the cash and points option. Remember, this one had the best value per point.  Though it would cost me $385 out of pocket, I’d be promptly credited $300, leaving me to hold the bill for only $85.
• After January 1^st, I could then use my new $300 travel credit to cover things like booking the rental car, baggage fees, airport parking, and all those other little extras.

Yes, it would stink to have to pay the $450 annual fee to get this card.  But then I’d have a WHOPPING 100,000 UR points stashed away in my bank with the option to use them for $1,500 in travel.  In reality, if I really wanted to stick to my guns and make this entire trip “free”, I could always redeem the points for cash and use it to reimburse myself for the $450 annual fee, $85 hotel charge, and so on.

Or I could really be smart and maximize my value potential by waiting to use them in 2018!  (Yes, I’m always thinking ahead!)

Right now, I’m away on business in Germany. But when I return to the U.S., I’m pretty sure that this is the route I’d like to go.  I’ll sign up for this card and take full advantage of the generous points offer as well as the $300 rebate for this year and next.

UPDATE: So, did we end up getting that expensive Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card?  Click here to read the next post in this series and find out!

(Disclaimer: I am NOT affiliated in any way with any of these credit cards or hotels.  I’m just a Dad who’s simply trying not to spend an arm and a leg to travel with his family around the world.  If you’re willing to be a little creative, as we’ve shown, there are some pretty good offers out there that can save you a ton of money.  I’m sharing all of this with you because I want you to be able to do the same.)

What do you think?  Out of all the options I’ve presented, which one would you feel good about going with?  Does anyone have the Chase Sapphire Reserve or any of these credit cards?  Are there any other good deals that I’ve missed?

Featured image courtesy of Flickr | Josh Hallett

The post Our Next Travel Hacking Scheme: How to Get a Free Hotel Stay appeared first on My Money Design.

That’s right – me!  And I’m very excited about it.

This year, after spending almost $2,000 on just the flights alone for our annual family vacation, I became extremely determined to find a way to do better when we book our trip to Orlando next year.  And I wanted to do this without sacrificing the quality of our travels.

You know … do more with less!  Just like we did already this year with our mortgage refinance, Sprint cell phone bill, and even our property taxes.

That’s when I found a pretty incredible resource: A free ecourse and website that is all about “travel hacking” – different strategies you can use to get some deeply discounted or even free travel.

I’ll admit: In the past I had always heard about travel hackers, but didn’t really put a lot of stock into it.  But now that I’ve actually received my first set of free plane tickets, I’ve been converted.  I’m a believer!

And I want more!

Here’s the story of exactly how I got these free flights and how you can do the same.

How I Learned a Ton About Travel Hacking – For Free!

The story of how this all started begins with one of my most favorite podcasts: The Mad Fientist Podcast.  A new episode had downloaded to my phone, and it was from a website I had never heard of called Travel Miles 101.  (You can go to the episode here.)

In the past, I had always thought that travel hacking was just people saving up their credit card points to redeem them for free flights and such.  But after listening to the podcast, it was clear to me that the effort could be a whole more lucrative than that!

At the end of the podcast, there was an invitation to go to the Travel Miles 101 website and sign up for a free ecourse where the site’s owners Brad and Alexi would teach you practically everything you needed to know about the art of travel hacking.

The Travel Miles 101 Free ECourse

I’ve got to say – from one blogger to another, that is one hell of a way to capture emails.  Nicely done gentlemen!

The ecourse was awesome!  Every day you received a new email with a link to a new lesson.  The process was self-paced, so you were able to go back and revisit previous lessons if you missed the day before.

Each lesson targeted a sub-target that was very specific to travel hacking.  It started off with a nice introduction followed by several lessons about certain credit card bonuses, airline miles, hotel programs, transfers, strategies, and a whole lot more.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, there are two signup buttons right on the homepage.

What sort of things did I get from the ecourse?

• I found out there are a ton of credit cards (a lot more than I knew existed) that had some pretty lucrative sign-up bonus offers; quite a few with $500 or more!
• I learned that part of this process is that you have to be willing to be flexible. By scooping up flights or hotels when they are deeply discounted, you’ll get the best rates possible.
• To my surprise, I also learned that my Delta flight miles are no particularly the best for travel hacking. Apparently, United has one of the better programs for miles redemption.  Who knew?

The more I took in, the more I wanted to test out one of these strategies for myself.

But which one?

How I Booked Free Flights for Next Year

Out of all the possible travel hacking routes I could have taken, I decided my first victim would be the Chase Sapphire Preferred Rewards credit card.

There were a lot of reasons I decided to go with this one:

1. We were already members of the Chase Ultimate Rewards points program. We’ve had the Chase Freedom card for years and had accumulated roughly 35,000 points since last Christmas.  When you have more than one Chase card, you can combine your points.
2. The introductory offer is incredible! You get 50,000 Ultimate Rewards points just for signing up and spending $4,000 within 3 months (that’s pretty easy to do in our house since we put nearly all of our regular purchases on credit cards to max out the points).  If you redeemed them for straight cash, that would be $500.
3. By adding my wife to the account, we got an additional 5,000 points. Plus spending $4,000 to meet the introductory requirement also meant another 4,000 points.
4. By getting the Sapphire Preferred card (or any premium Chase card), when you shop for your flights through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards website, your points are worth 25% more in value! So for example, those 50,000 introductory points are worth $625 in travel.

When all was said and done, our Ultimate Rewards account spiked to roughly 96,000 points!

And so it was time to find some flights!

Booking My Flights

Usually before I book any flights ever, I like to get a rough idea of what the retail cost of the flights will be.  The way I do this is to go to Delta’s website and start playing around with the flight dates to see which combo will give me the best price.  I found a set of dates that worked well with our schedule, and the sticker cost was right around $350 per person.

I then went into my Chase Ultimate Rewards portal and did the same search.  Out of all the flights available, that same Delta flight I was looking at actually came up as the cheapest flight.  And I’m not sure why, the price was only $250 per person.

NOW … since I had the Sapphire Preferred account, our points were worth 25% more.  That made each flight only cost roughly 20,000 points each.

At that rate, I simply couldn’t resist.  Why wait a month when that flight will probably be all gone and only more expensive other flights will be left.  I snatched up the 20,000 point flight option in seconds!

Summary

So to recap, I bought roughly $1,400 worth of flights for $800 in Chase rewards points that cost me nothing.

Just like that, we got our plane tickets for virtually nothing.  All we did was strategically get a whole bunch of Chase points in a very short amount of time and then strike while the iron was hot.  I’m pretty sure if it was 3 months from now, those same flights cost a whole lot more.

So What’s Next?

Success!  I set out to get free flights for next year’s vacation, and I did just that.

So what will be our next travel hacker scheme?

Well, we’ve still got the rental car and hotel to think about for this trip.  In addition, while in Orlando, we plan to hit the Universal Studios theme park.  So if there is any way to score some free tickets, I’ll be very interested in exploring that further.

In the meantime, I’m likely going to go back to Travel Miles 101 ecourse and re-read the lessons.  I just noticed they added a whole lesson specifically on the Chase Ultimate Rewards program – perfect timing!

Just like a good book, I always find that when I go back over material with so much detail packed inside, there’s always something to be learned.

After all, there’s always family vacation 2018 and on to start scheming for!

UPDATE: Read the next post in this series where we explore our options for getting a free hotel-stay too!

(Disclaimer: Neither Travel Miles 101 or Mad Fientist asked me to write this.  This is my honest account of how I was able to save over $1,000 on flights for next year, and I’m simply very grateful to have learned how to do this.  This is what PF blogging is all about – people helping other people do more with less!)

Readers – Do you have a travel hacking strategy?  If so, what tips and tricks do you recommend for getting the most out of your points and miles? 

Featured image courtesy of Flickr | Master Octa

The post How I Got Free Flights and a Great Travel Hacking Resource appeared first on My Money Design.