Awhile back I read a pretty savvy blog post about how to travel to Hawaii for free or nearly free.
I decided to give it a go myself, and what do you know… it worked!
Thanks to some travel hacking, we paid next to nothing for our flights and hotel, and even got an upgrade to a sweet suite.
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In an effort to reignite travel spending from its cardmembers, American Express released a slew of new benefits to their Platinum credit card in 2021 — one of which was a $200 yearly credit for prepaid hotels through the Amex Travel portal.
Finding ourselves in Chicago for a weekend gave us the opportunity to put this credit, and a new property, to the test at the Four Seasons. Here’s how it went.
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Recently my wife I stayed at the Miraval Resort in Austin, Texas, a luxury wellness spa on the banks of Lake Travis just a short drive from downtown. This was an aspirational property for us and since it’s bookable with Hyatt points it was within reach given our stockpile of points that we’ve been sitting on due to limited international travel over the past year. We stayed for two nights in mid-October while celebrating my wife’s birthday and were blown away with the experience.
If you’re thinking about booking a stay here, here’s what you can expect.
FinCon or Bust
It’s that time of year again, when the world’s financial bloggers converge to communicate, collaborate, and carouse, aka FinCon.
We will miss out since we are back in Asia, but hundreds of others will be converging in Dallas this week. As with any gathering that involves travel, there will be airplane tickets and hotel rooms, a bit of dining, maybe a car rental or Uber, and perhaps even an alcohol related expense or two.
Sounds like a great opportunity to use credit card reward points to get some free travel, right?! Several people on Twitter were considering last minute trips and trying to decide, cash or points.
imho, cash. Every time. Twice on Sunday.
Philadelphia (photo from visitphilly.com)
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Recently I mentioned that our upcoming visit to Philadelphia will earn us a few free hotel nights. Several people wrote to ask how that works. Sorry for being too vague.
Thanks to the quarterly IHG Accelerate promotion our 3 nights in Philly will earn over 62,000 IHG Rewards Club points.This is worth over $400 or somewhere between 2 and 3 free nights.
Here are the details:
Paris (photo credit)
About a year ago we flew from Asia to Europe to begin a 4 month tour. We spent a month each in Spain, Italy, and UK/Ireland, and a handful of weeks in Portugal, Czech, Germany, Denmark, and Iceland. This was a big chunk of Jr’s 16 countries visited in his first 16 months.
Notably absent from this list of countries is France. And it has been an awfully long time since I’ve had a good croissant.
To rectify this terrible situation, in a few weeks we are flying to Paris. We’ll be there at least 2 weeks, after which we will eventually make it to the other slighted countries.
I was pretty excited about how we saved $10k+ on our previous trip. But this time… we did even better.
