As 2025 came to a close, we looked back at what turned out to be a fairly hectic year of travel. In March, we went to Portugal and Spain, to hike six days on the Portuguese route of the Camino de Santiago. In July, Jenn went with Emma, her sister, and her niece to Munich and Dublin, while Alex and I went to Dresden, Saxon Switzerland National Park, and Berlin. In September, we went to Nice and Dublin. It’s been a lot.
We had a blast, but it did seem to add a bit of chaos to our lives, and we agreed to do a little less in 2026. We’ll probably still take three vacations, but we’re going to stay a little closer to home and keep the trip lengths a little shorter. That being said, we’ve only planned one trip for 2026, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a long way away and ten days long. But I swear – after that – we’ll be good, I promise!
That trip is to Tenerife, a place I’ve wanted to visit for years now. We will also spend two nights in London on our way to Tenerife and one night in Madrid on our way home. Virtually everything is booked, except for the flight from Tenerife to Madrid.
Picking an Airbnb
Tenerife is an interesting place to try to plan a vacation. There is so much to do spread out on an island that takes about an hour and a half to two hours to drive from the south side of the island to the north side. In the north, there are lush forests with beautiful hiking trails. On the south side, there are also beautiful hiking trails, but instead of pine forests, there are deserts with succulents and cacti. On the south side, there are tourist beaches, bars, and restaurants, while on the north side, the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the major city of the island. Also, slightly south of the center of the island is Mount Teide, a volcano towering 12,000 feet above the sea, and sometimes covered in snow.
Because there were so many things to visit all over the island, it made it tricky to pick an Airbnb. We had looked at rentals almost everywhere on the island, and finally, we just threw up our hands and let our son Alex pick. He chose a rental in Costa del Silencio, which I think will be nice. It looks like a quieter part of the island, only about a 20-minute drive from the tourist hot spots of Playa de los Americas, and about a 50-minute drive to Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Plus, if the Airbnb sucks, I can blame it on Alex.
Points or a Certificate?
It can be difficult sometimes to decide whether or not to use a hotel certificate or to use points. We have a 40,000 point IHG certificate that we wanted to use for a night in Iowa City. We have season tickets for the Iowa Hawkeye women’s basketball team, and we decided to go up the night before one of the games and enjoy Iowa City for an evening. Since we had the IHG certificate, we wanted to use it for the stay.
The problem was that the nicest IHG hotel in Iowa City was 22,000 points per night, which is well below the value of the certificate. Since the certificate expires in the fall of 2026, we figured that we probably will have the opportunity to book something more worthy of that certificate. We also had plenty of IHG points, so we decided to use points and save the certificate. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to make this bargain, and then find themselves later on with a certificate that they never used – so hopefully that isn’t our fate.
On to the point check!
There were no new credit card signups this month, and I think that’s because we just haven’t seen any offers that have gotten our attention lately. Since we don’t have another vacation in mind yet, we can be patient and wait until something grabs our attention.
That also means that Jenn hasn’t worked on a signup bonus in a while, and she defaulted to using her Amex Gold card. With Christmas spending being a significant part of our purchases, and there not being a consistently good way of earning points on Amazon purchases, the earning rates were a little low. That being said, we still managed to earn a return of a little over 5% on our spending not devoted to earning a signup bonus.
| Card Used | Spend | Points Earned | Point Value | Points Per $ | Return on Spend |
| Amex Gold | $2,722 | 6,585 | $131.70 | 2.4 | 4.8% |
| Ink Cash | $441 | 2205 | $45.20 | 5.0 | 10.3% |
| Wyndham Business Earner | $421 | 2,246 | $24.71 | 5.3 | 5.9% |
| Sapphire Preferred | $376 | 376 | $7.71 | 1.0 | 2.1% |
| AAdvantage Platinum | $223 | 223 | $3.46 | 1.0 | 1.6% |
| Blue Business Plus | $66 | 132 | $2.64 | 2.0 | 4.0% |
| Total | $4,249 | 11,767 | $215.41 | 2.8 | 5.1% |
In addition to the spending listed above, I spent a little under $2,400 on my Chase Ink Unlimited card, earning me a little less than 3,600 Ultimate Reward points. I should be hitting my signup bonus on that card in January, which is 90,000 points. We finished up the year with:
- 268,300 Chase Ultimate Reward Points
- 264,900 IHG Points
- 155,400 Amex Membership Rewards Points
- 98,800 Wyndham Points
- 79,400 Alaska Miles
- 33,900 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
According to the points valuations published by The Points Guy, these points and miles are worth a total of $12,800. We started off the year with $13,700 in points and miles. It’s shocking to me that, given the amount of travel we did in 2025, we finished the year only $900 behind where we were the previous year. Our vacation plans will be much tamer in 2026, so I expect our points balances should go up throughout 2026. That probably means we will have a wild 2027 – can’t sit on those points forever!
Newby to Expert Traveler 