I love to travel. My husband loves to travel. We both love to save money. We are a great team ;-). In the last few years, finally, we have been able to travel overseas, and have been getting better at money-saving tricks. There are so many posts on the internet about travel hacking, I was curious to see if we could take a nice vacation for free (or super cheap). I don’t profess to be an expert, but I tried to use as many options as possible on our latest vacation, and I wanted to lay the results out in one place. I might compare and contrast with our prior methods. Here goes:
The Flight.
We had many American Advantage points, both from travel, and from a sign-on bonus with a Barclay Card a few years ago. We had planned to use that bonus for a trip to Europe earlier, but kept finding deals that were too good to pass up (2 round-trip tickets for under $900!). I looked around to see where we could go that had an expensive cash price ticket, to stretch the value of the miles: Athens, Greece, looked great. Coach round-trip tickets were running $2200-2400 for two, for the same number of miles needed to go anywhere else in Europe. Neither of us had ever been to Greece, and seeing the Acropolis really is a bucket list item for us. In the end, we needed to use a little more than the minimum of 120,000 miles to make sure I could get back in time for scheduled work days; we burned 145,000 miles (actually 155,000 miles plus a refund of 10,000 miles because of the affiliated credit card) and $22.40 in taxes for 2 round-trip coach tickets.
The Other Flight.
Once we started reading about travel to Greece, it became apparent that we didn’t want to spend all of our time in Athens. We decided to fly to an island as well, so now we needed another set of plane tickets. Two sets of one-way tickets ran $437.35. But, I had signed up for the Chase Sapphire Reserve, and put those babies on the new card to hit the minimum spend. I was surprised to see the $300 travel reimbursement hit the account without my asking. Suddenly the out of pocket for these tickets (leaving out the annual fee for the credit card) was just $137.35.
The Hotels.
This was all about Hotels.com. We have been using that site to find and book hotels for some time. They usually can get us some reasonable deals; the sweetest part is that after 10 nights, you can get “one night free.” If you look at the small print, it’s really that you can get credit for the average price of those 10 nights you paid for (or 10% off overall). The trick is that you want to redeem that free night for a hotel that costs about as much as that average, since you don’t get to keep any “leftover” savings. I.e. If your 10 night average was $189, you don’t want to use it to book a $59 stay, as you would basically lose $130 of benefit.
We used 3 free nights to stay in a pretty spiffy hotel in Athens (with breakfast) for a total of $174.14.
Around that time, I started looking into gift cards for Hotels.com. You can buy discounted gift cards (Go Curry Cracker explains it well here), but I was a little too chicken to buy a $1000 gift card without plans to use it all right away.
It turns out, though, that if you have a Discover card, you can redeem your Cashback bonus for Hotels.com gift cards: $45 for a $50 card, or $90 for a $100 card. A few years ago, Discover had offered a spending challenge, and then there had been that computer I bought through their portal when the old one couldn’t support working from home anymore. Suddenly I had an “extra” $400 towards hotels, which translated into 2 nights in one town for $45.40 out of pocket, and 2 nights in a different town for $265.14.
Add in a straight-pay, no-deals night at the airport hotel for $222.83 (which goes towards our next collection of 10 nights=1 free, as do those 4 nights listed above), and we have a total of cash paid for flights of $159.75 and 8 nights of very nice hotels for $708.20. Or, an 9-day (8 night) European vacation for 2 with flights for $867.95.
Spun another way, we used benefits and hoarded points from various programs to save about $3500. That’s awesome.
The Contrary Arguments.
On the other hand, I could certainly spin our numbers another way. Athens didn’t really hit our radar until I started looking for one of the more expensive destinations to use our points on. Using Google flights (see here and here for tips and tricks), right now, I can find flights for 2 people to Europe for spring 2019 for $1200 to $1300. These aren’t flights to Greece, but Spain, Italy, France and England are all pretty tasty destinations. You have a choice of vacation destinations, and some are cheaper than others.
We waited a bit to book some of our hotels, and found the cheaper rooms had disappeared. We could have easily saved $200 by booking our reservations earlier, probably more. Book hotels earlier.
That isn’t to mention my HUGE fail with Hotels.com. I’ve used Hotels.com for years, and never booked the wrong date. This time around, though, I was looking to book a different trip, and somehow I booked a hotel in Greece in the wrong month! Non-refundable, of course. :-(. I didn’t include the charges for that hotel, which would increase our vacation costs by about $200. Check the details multiple times, pretend you are a resident in July.
Alternatively, we could have used one of the many vacation deals I see on sites like TravelZoo. Checking today, I see a 6 night trip to Rome and Athens, from NYC, for $699 per person. Granted, we’d have to get to NYC, and it wasn’t the vacation we planned, and I’m not sure that the hotels would be quite as nice as what we picked for ourselves, but $1400 (+getting to NYC) for 2 people to fly and stay for 6 nights sounds pretty good. Give up a little control to save a ton of money.
My conclusion, as I put all these numbers down for the first time, is that we didn’t do too badly using all of the travel hacking tips I could muster. As a working physician, my flexibility is limited, and it’s nice to get the vacation I want with a discount.
However, we blew through about 3 years’ worth of frequent flyer miles, Hotel.com nights, and Discover Card Cashback bonuses for 1 trip. When it’s time for the next vacation, I’ll revert back to our old tricks: Google flights, flexible destinations, booking hotels early. We might even try something new and see about one of those package deals. I think we’ll save those points and free nights, though–I might want to get back in the travel hacking waters in a year or two….