November is the beginning of the holiday season and apparently, the beginning of the winter season for those of us who live in the Midwest. On the weekend after Thanksgiving, we were handed a foot of snow, which will probably be covering the ground until March. The last few years, we’ve managed to avoid significant snowfalls until January, but not this year. In my experience, once there is a decent amount of snow on the ground, it’ll be there until spring.
So I guess as long as I’m going to be stuck inside for the next 3-4 months, I might as well start thinking about our Spring Break trip, which is how Midwesterners celebrate the end of this winter hellscape. While we haven’t completely finalized our trip to Tenerife in March, we booked the return trip from Madrid as well as our hotel rooms in London. The only things we have left to book are a hotel for one night in Madrid, an Airbnb for 5 nights in Tenerife, and a flight from Tenerife to Madrid. I think most, if not all of that, will be booked with cash instead of points, but if there is a good use of points in there somewhere, I will definitely consider it.
Booking Stuff For Spring Break
I was having a hell of a time trying to find a good price on a flight back from Europe for Spring Break. We had already booked a flight from Moline to London for only 19,000 American Airlines miles and $5.60 each, as well as a separate flight from London to Tenerife for 13,750 British Airways Avios and $1.00 each. We still needed to book a flight back home and, after months of searching, decided to book from Madrid to Moline on American Airlines for 34,000 AAdvantage miles and $50 each. We still don’t have a flight from Tenerife to Madrid, but there are a lot of flights on Iberia between Tenerife and Madrid daily, so I think we can be patient with that.
I had to do some maneuvering to get enough American Airlines miles in one account to book the flight from Madrid to Moline. I needed to buy 3 tickets out of Jenn’s account, but she only had 88,800 miles, and we needed 102,000. Because American Airlines is now a transfer partner with Citi Thank You points, we could transfer to her account using her Citi Strata Premier card, but she didn’t have enough Thank You points to make it work. I did have enough and was able to move my Thank You points to her account using their Points Sharing feature. Then she was able to transfer them to her American Airlines account. It’s good to know that Citibank allows that kind of points movement between family members, because that was the only way we could make that work.
We have also managed to book our hotels in London. We booked 2 rooms in London at the Hyatt Place London City East. I had two category 1-4 free night certificates and used them. We have always liked staying at Hyatt Place hotels, and yes, they are low-end for Hyatt, but I’ve always found them to be clean, comfortable, and overall, very nice hotels.
We also used a Marriott Bonvoy free night certificate to book a night at the Courtyard by Marriott London Gatwick Airport. That should work out perfectly because we have a very early flight from Gatwick to Tenerife, and the closer to the airport, the better.
Mini-Bonuses
We got a couple of mini-bonuses this month. One is a referral bonus that Jenn got for referring me to the Chase Ink Unlimited Card. She received 20,000 Ultimate Reward points for referring me. We also received a 10,000 Membership Reward point bonus. That was earned from a deal where we made our son, Alex, an authorized user, with a spend requirement of $2,000 on the new card over 6 months. That was easy enough, so Jenn recently added our Daughter Emma as an authorized user with the same bonus and spend requirement.
On to the Points Check
Some of the charges that we made last month weren’t ideal. We really should have stopped using the AAdvantage Platinum card, it earns almost nothing, and it was basically just top of Jenn’s wallet since that was her last card she got a bonus on. The Sapphire Preferred is where I have our car insurance going to (yes, I know it’s a lot, I have a teenage son). I need to at least switch that to a card that earns more than 1 point per dollar. Overall, we are still earning over 5.5% on non-bonus spend, so I’m not upset about that.
| Card Used | Spend | Points Earned | Point Value | Points Per $ | Return on Spend |
| Amex Gold | $1,658 | 4,746 | $94.92 | 2.9 | 5.7% |
| Wyndham Business Earner | $683 | 3,734 | $41.07 | 5.5 | 6.0% |
| Ink Cash | $580 | 2,914 | $59.74 | 5.0 | 10.3% |
| AAdvantage Platinum | $545 | 634 | $10.46 | 1.2 | 1.9% |
| Sapphire Preferred | $403 | 403 | $8.26 | 1.0 | 2.0% |
| Amex Blue Business Plus | $66 | 132 | $2.64 | 2.0 | 4.0% |
| Total | $3,935 | 12,563 | $217.09 | 3.2 | 5.5% |
In addition to the spending listed above, I spent a little less than $2,500 on my Chase Ink Unlimited card, earning over 3,700 Ultimate Reward points. I have to spend $6,000 within three months to earn the 90,000-point bonus on that card. All of the points earned and the points spent to book the hotels and the flight back from Madrid left us with:
- 286,900 IHG Points
- 262,200 Chase Ultimate Reward Points
- 150,400 Amex Membership Rewards Points
- 96,500 Wyndham Points
- 79,400 Alaska Miles
- 33,600 American Airlines Miles
- 19,300 Citi Thank You Points
- 16,700 United Miles
- 15,900 Marriott Bonvoy Points
- 1,500 Delta Miles
- 300 Hyatt Points
- $133 Cash Back
Using the point valuations published by The Points Guy, the total value of all of those points and miles is $12,700. That is down from $14,000 last month. Since we pretty much have Spring Break booked and I don’t have any plans after that, we are going to be in complete point accumulation mode. By the time we get around to booking the next trip, we should be sitting on a lot of points.
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