By this time, we felt pretty confident that we had accumulated enough points to pay for the flights to Europe and now we were trying to figure out how to reduce our costs for lodging.
I’m going to say something that is going to get me scorned by the miles and points community – We are VRBO and Airbnb enthusiasts. I know that they can be inconsistent, but you get more space and the kids can get their own rooms, usually. The most important thing for us, however, has always been the kitchen. Why? Well a couple of reasons, really. First, we’re kind of cheap, and eating out for 3 meals a day can get super expensive for a family of 4, especially if it’s a family of 4 people with adult-sized appetites. Hell, if we walk into a Starbucks to get a round of coffee and scones, we’re going to drop $40. We would easily spend $200 per day on meals alone on vacation, and that’s if we were being fairly cheap. The second reason is that while we like to eat out, it doesn’t match our dietary restrictions very well. We started eating mostly vegetarian a few years ago, and what Jenn and I both noticed right away is that when we stick fairly close to a plant-based diet, we generally feel better. When we stick to that diet, typically my joint pain goes away and Jenn’s stomach issues are gone and we both feel more energized. The moment we stray away from that, the old sluggishness returns, Jenn starts complaining about stomach discomfort and my knees and back start hurting again. So the typical plan for us when we are on vacation is to buy some healthy groceries and do our best to eat a couple of fairly healthy meals at the Airbnb and then eat out for one meal each day.
Ok, but how do we get vacation rentals on points? Airbnb and VRBO have no point programs that I could figure out. There was something that I had stumbled across called Marriott Homes and Villas. They have a smaller group of properties than Airbnb and VRBO, but from their website, they looked very well curated. It looked like there were a lot of high-quality vacation rentals that were available with Marriott Bonvoy points. Awesome! Now we needed to get some points to pay for those stays.
I was still working on spending on my Chase World of Hyatt card, but Jenn could get a new card. Marriott had rolled out a great offer with Chase. They were offering 5 certificates of up to 50,000 points per night if you spent $5,000 in the first 3 months of getting the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card. Great, that’ll take care of 5 nights in Marriott Homes and Villas in Europe. Some of you are laughing at me right not because you know my mistake – those certificates are not good at Marriott Homes and Villas. Marriott Bonvoy points are, but the certificates most definitely are not. The day that we figured that out, well, let’s just say Jenn was not happy with me.
The Chase Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card has a $95 annual fee, was offering a huge bonus of 5 50,000 point certificates on $5,000 in spending (their typical offer is 3 50,000 point certificates for $3,000 in spending). It offers 17x on spending at Marriott, 3x on first $6,000 spent on groceries, dining, and gas stations, 2x on everything else and a 35,000 point certificate every year on your account anniversary.
Anyway, on to the point check!
Our spending was quite a bit higher for this months statements because the spending from our trip to Colorado hit our cards. I spent a whopping $3800 on my Chase World of Hyatt card which resulted in me earning 7700 points on the spend and my 30,000 point bonus! I also spent $1,100 on my Citi Premier card resulting in around 1700 points. We somehow managed to spend small amounts on all 3 of our United cards totaling $400 earning us 400 points. Jenn spent $2,100 on her new Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card and earned 5000 Bonvoy points. I don’t even want to think about how much we spent on gas towing a camper at 8 miles to the gallon, over $4 a gallon and around 2,000 miles, yikes. Anyway it was a fun trip.
That left us with about 246,300 United miles, 62,300 Citi points, 41,000 Hyatt points and 5,000 Marriott Bonvoy Miles.
What we did right
There are two ways to really approach point accumulation in the miles and points hobby. The first is to grab the best possible deals when they come up and get the most points you can in a point currency that you will use in the future, even if you don’t have a current use for those points. That is probably the best long-term strategy. The second way is to look for a need and try to fill it. That’s what we were doing. Long term, I would like to be doing more of the first method, but we were trying to take care of a trip to Europe, so for us that was the correct strategy.
What we did wrong
The Marriott card Jenn applied for had a certificate bonus and not a point bonus, which meant we couldn’t use it for what we really wanted, which was a vacation rental and not hotel stays. I believe at the time we could have applied for Marriott cards that were offering point bonuses and not certificates. The bonuses were bigger with the certificates, but weren’t really what we wanted. Lesson learned, make sure you understand how you can use what they are offering you.
Newby to Expert Traveler 