April had us recovering from our trip to Costa Rica, and had us planning a camping trip to Canada. Believe it or not, I’m 49 years old, love travel, live only a few hundred miles from the Canadian border and I’ve actually never been there. I don’t exactly know why, maybe I was thinking that it’s just a slightly more polite America with weird ideas about french fries. Anyway, it’s about time we hitched up the camper and found out what Canada is all aboot.
We found a little campground in a park on Lake Ontario in Hamilton, Ontario where I booked a week with full RV hookups for about $300 in July, which seems like a pretty good deal. Hamilton is a nice halfway point between Toronto and Niagara Falls. It seems like a really great place to relax as well as visit both of those places. Can’t wait to try all of those exotic, um, donuts?
Patience Pays Off (A Little)
I have a friend getting married in Montana in June. I’m meeting a group of my high school friends there, but booking an award flight there is less than ideal. The biggest reason for this is that in order to book award flights without using a ton of points, you want to be flexible with both dates and location. Obviously, for a wedding I couldn’t be flexible with either of those things since apparently I can’t get them to adjust the date and location for me.
The other reason was that I was going to be flying from a small airport to a small airport. This was definitely going to be challenging to book for a reasonable number of points. The first day I started to look, booking round-trip was going to cost about 70,000 miles. For the most part, the only options were going to be American Airlines miles or United Miles.
Generally this is the kind of redemption that is going to be better on American Airlines, because they don’t seem to punish you for flying from a small airport as much as United does. And as it turns out, this was the case here as well. I was able to book the flight home on Tuesday for 23,000 miles. After struggling to find a good deal on the flight out and waiting a few weeks, I was able to book the flight out on Friday for 22,000 miles, when American dropped the price by about 20,000 miles.
The cash price for this flight was a little over $600 so I managed to get 1.3 cents per point value for this flight, which isn’t great (The Points Guy values AA miles at 1.6 cents per point), but given then fact that I had no flexibility, I’m not mad about it.
Both of these flights are fully cancelable, so I will continue to check to see if I can find a cheaper alternate. There really isn’t any punishment for rebooking at a lower price, so if I can save a few points, why not?
Jenn Hit Her Business Connect Signup Bonus
Jenn hit the signup bonus on her US Bank Business Altitude Connect card and earned the $600 bonus. She earned an additional $100 over the time when she was reaching her spending requirement which was $6,000 over 6 months. This means she earned over 10 cents per dollar spent, which is pretty good.
On to the points Check!
| Card Used | Spend | Points Earned | Point Value | Points Per $ | Return on Spend |
| Capital One Venture | $688 | 1,377 | $25.47 | 2.0 | 3.7% |
| Ink Cash | $529 | 2,626 | $53.83 | 5.0 | 10.2% |
| Wyndham Business Earner | $265 | 1,326 | $14.59 | 5.0 | 5.5% |
| Marriott Bonvoy | $238 | 910 | $7.64 | 3.8 | 3.2% |
| Total | $1,720 | 6,239 | $101.54 | 3.6 | 5.9% |
Aside from the spending in the above chart. Jenn spent $725 dollars on her US Bank Business Altitude Connect card and earned $10 cash back plus the $600 signup bonus. Jenn also spent $2,300 on her Amex Gold Business Card, most of which went to the purchase of a viola for our son, after renting one for something like 8 years. Maybe we should have done that sooner. She earned over 2,600 Membership Rewards points for those purchases. I spent under $1,700 on my American Express Gold card earning 5,800 Membership Rewards points. We also earned 15,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points on a referral bonus.
After redeeming 45,000 American Airlines miles for my flight to Montana, we are left with 277,900 Ultimate Rewards points, 80,200 American Airlines miles, 77,600 Capital One miles, 38,800 Citi Thank You points, 34,900 Marriott Bonvoy points, 25,000 United Airlines miles, 11,400 Wyndham points, 10,400 American Express Membership Rewards points, 6,900 Hyatt points, 5,100 Delta Skymiles and $790 in cash back. Using the valuations from the Points Guy, the total value of our points, miles and cash back is over $10,800.
Newby to Expert Traveler 