Friday, October 26, 2012

Free Trips!

[Edit: I've moved! If you're interested in up-to-date info on free travel, check out Free Travel in Your Twenties]

Since my recent update on how much travel potential we've earned, numerous people have asked us where we plan on going.... I figure it's a great way to get into the redemption side of things!

Trip #1 - Cramming on a Budget

Every three months, Priority Club (a.k.a. Holiday Inn and friends) releases a list called PointBreaks - hotels that are temporarily available for only 5,000 points per night rather than the standard 10,000-25,000+. This spring we snagged a PointBreaks hotel for a weekend trip to Chicago! We went with another couple (current and future in-laws, woohoo!), and it was definitely a packed vacation. We drove rather than flying, and grabbed the Chicago CityPass to cover more entertainment than we could possibly fit in (and it let us skip most of the lines!). In three days, we packed in 16 hours of driving, Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, Willis Tower, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chinatown, Millennium Park, and some of the best deep-dish pizza in the world!

The Chicago trip came to $128/person (plus food) - $84 for the CityPass and $44 for gas/parking. Not bad for a fantastic weekend! Calculating how much those points were worth gets to be pretty tricky though... The hotel we stayed at typically goes for $95 on a weekend night, so we could say we saved $190. But if we were using cash rather than points, we probably would've opted for something in the $50-$60 dollar range. This would lower the amount saved to $120 or so. And since we stuck with the PointBreaks hotels, we stayed out in the suburbs. So how do we factor in taking the train one day and the driving time/parking the next?? Too many factors play into award travel to give it an exact value, but we're pretty confident we wouldn't have taken the trip otherwise. So in that regard, it was a pretty awesome deal!

The four of us at the Cloud Gate (a.k.a. the Bean)

Millennium Park

Shedd Aquarium

 Group photo inspired by the Art Institute

Chicago-style deep-dish pizza - SOO good!!

Interactive art

 More interactive art??

Museum of Science and Industry - I could
have spent an entire week here!


Trip #2 - Upcoming Luxury

I've got some relatives that head to the Caribbean each winter. Last year we were fortunate enough to visit them for a week, and we'll be going back again this spring. Keeping the destination the same makes for a great comparison, especially considering I used credit card points towards the trip last year as well! At that point, I had been carrying a credit card for seven years. We used all the points I had accumulated towards plane tickets, and still had to pay $800. This year, I used only a portion of the points I earned the last five months and we ended up paying $110. That's  90% less time to earn the points resulting in $700 less in airfare. Awesome! Oh, and we'll be redeeming some of our hotel points towards the Radisson Blu St. Martin, staying for free at one of the classiest Radisson resorts in the world!

Lounging by the pool 

Whale-watching from the patio

The view from the fort in Marigot 

Can't wait to go back!


Trip #3+ - ???

We're certainly not to the point yet where we can go anywhere and everywhere whenever we want, but we still have enough points to start considering future trips (and are constantly earning more). The big question now is, where do we want to go? We're pretty evenly split between wanting to do short domestic trips to visit friends (LA, Pittsburgh, Seattle...) and longer trips to foreign places we'd never be able to afford otherwise (New Zealand, Easter Island, Phuket, Kenya...). So many choices make it hard to be patient! But the last thing we want to do is blow our credit score in order to get a short-term travel fix. Slow and steady is the way to go - keep this hobby from interfering with car loans and mortgages, and not have to sit the travel game out a few years while things recover!


Any suggestions? Favorite places you've been, or places you've only dreamed of going??

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