Points Check February 2025

Looking forward to the Camino

We’ve spent a good deal of time in February planning our spring break trip to Portugal and Spain as well as booking some parts of a summer trip to Europe.

“Planning” is an odd way to put how we’re approaching our spring break trip. We’re doing a week on the Portuguese route of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a thousand year old tradition of folks, primarily Spanish Catholics, taking a pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela to visit the final resting place of Saint James. The fact of the matter is that planning, other than making sure you have the correct gear, is unnecessary and maybe counterproductive for the Camino. It’s probably best to do the Camino with spontaneity, and this is driving me crazy because I want to plan SOMETHING!

This will be our first opportunity to do participate in something in Europe, instead of just being a tourist. While Americans certainly are welcome on the Camino only about 8 percent of pilgrims are Americans. Pilgrims come from around the world, but the majority are Europeans and hence this is primarily a European phenomenon. Knowing that the stops along the Camino are primarily to cater to the needs of them and not just Americans hopefully will mean that this will seem more authentic and not altered to appeal to American tourists.

We will be spending an evening in Porto on the day we arrive and a night in Madrid the day we leave. We booked a room in Porto at a hotel not affiliated with any major program using Jenn’s Delta Business Gold Card and the Delta Stays site, because her Delta Gold card has a $150 hotel credit which was immediately credited to her account.

We also used two IHG certificates to book a night at The Intercontinental Madrid. We had to book 2 rooms because, as usual, booking any room in Europe with 4 people is next to impossible, especially with points. Those rooms cost us a 60,000 point certificate each, but the cash rate for those rooms are $273 per night, which is right at about the maximum value you can expect to get for a 60,000 point IHG certificate.

American Express Gold

I referred Jenn to the American Express Gold Card and she was approved. I immediately received a 15,000 point referral bonus and Jenn will receive a 75,000 Membership Rewards point bonus when she completes $6,000 in spend in 6 months. It has a pretty steep $325 annual fee.

Despite the high annual fee, it’s actually one of my favorite credit cards for families. The reason is that it earns 4x on groceries and 4x on dining. Those are two categories where people tend to spend a lot of money, so it has the ability to accumulate points very quickly.

The 4x bonus categories wouldn’t be good enough to offset the $325 annual fee, but if you are able to use some of the credits available on the Amex Gold card, you should be able to get all or most of the annual fee back. Those credits include $100 per year at Resy restaurants, $120 per year Uber credit, $120 per year dining credit and a $84 per year credit at Dunkin.

Amex points are extremely flexible since the transfer to 18 airline reward programs and 3 hotel programs. I’ve had no problem finding good use for Amex points but I do have a problem keeping them around, so earning a few more is always good.

Booking Jenn’s Summer Trip

We booked the main legs of Jenn’s trip this summer with her sister, our niece and our daughter. The four of them will be flying from Chicago to Munich on a direct flight on United that we booked using Singapore Krisflyer miles. We transferred 87,000 Citi Thank You points and 35,000 American Express Membership Reward points to get the 122,000 points needed. Booking using Krisflyer miles meant that the flight was 30,500 points per ticket and $5.60 instead of 40,000 United miles and $5.60 each.

We also booked the flight home, a direct flight on Aer Lingus from Dublin to Chicago. That cost 20,000 Aer Lingus Avios and $155 each. We transferred the 80,000 points from American Express to book that flight.

I’m waiting to book the flight from Munich to Dublin until they decide on what day they want to travel. They might even want to take a train or bus to another nearby city like Vienna or Zurich, spend a day and fly out of those cities. They need to hash out those details before I book anything else.

On to the Point Check

Jenn didn’t have a welcome offer to work on, so her default credit card was her Amex Business Gold card, which she earned a surprising 2.4 points per dollar spent on. We almost never use my World of Hyatt card because it’s just not good for earning points. However, they had an offer of 5x on groceries for up to $1,000 spent this quarter, so we started to use it for our groceries. I’ll take 5x Hyatt points any day of the week. So for all of our credit card spending not going towards a welcome bonus, we earned a 6.2% return. That means that we were doing a good job of taking advantage of the bonus categories on our credit cards to maximize point accumulation.

Card Used	Spend	Points Earned	Point Value	Points Per $	Return on Spend
Amex Business Gold	$1,059	2,591	51.82	2.4	4.9%
Ink Cash	$445	2,224	$45.59	5.0	10.3%
World of Hyatt	$356	1,783	$30.31	5.0	8.5%
Venture	$345	690	$12.77	2.0	3.7%
Wyndham Business Earner	$306	2,253	$24.78	7.4	8.1%
Blue Business Plus	$234	468	$9.36	2.0	4.0%
Citi Premier	$206	271	$4.88	1.3	2.4%
Amex Gold	$127	508	$10.16	4.0	8.0%
Total	$3,078	10,788	$189.67	3.5	6.2%

Besides that, I spent a little over $1,500 on my Alaska Airlines card and earned around 1,500 Alaska miles. With the redemptions for the summer trip, that leaves us with:

• 170,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points
• 105,000 Amex Membership Reward Points
• 99,700 American Airlines Miles
• 83,800 IHG Points
• 71,900 Marriott Bonvoy Points
• 54,300 Wyndham Points
• 32,000 Citi Thank You Points
• 12,400 Hyatt Points
• 6,300 Delta Miles
• 2,800 United Miles
• 1,500 Alaska Airlines Miles
• $109 in Cash Back

It feels like lately we’ve been absolutely bleeding points, but we are getting to the end of most of the points redemptions, at least for flights, that we will need for 2025. That means that we should be able to concentrate more on enjoying our trips and accumulating more points to get ready for whatever we have plan for 2026. In October our points, according to the Point Guy, was worth $16,500. With all of the redemptions that we’ve made since October, we are down to $9,900. Time to earn some more points!