Our last few months have been pretty quiet. It’s been strange, taking a breather from traveling. The last few years, it’s seemed like we were always either traveling, recovering from traveling, or planning our next trip. With about 10 months between Spring Break this year and our next trip, we’ve been focusing more on our normal lives. It’s been nice. I’m not saying that I don’t want to be on a beach in Mexico or strolling down a narrow, cobblestone street somewhere in Europe, but it’s been fine. I think it will help us appreciate our next trips more.
We’ve still managed to do some local weekend trips, and in September we did a weekend trip to Des Moines where we rode the RAGBRAI fall ride, which is around 26 miles on a bike path from Des Moines to Cumming, Iowa. We were able to use our second $200 Bilt Hotel Credit as well as $100 in Bilt Cash to cover the majority of our 2-night stay. The bike ride itself was great; it’s a fairly flat course with plenty of food and beverage stops available on the route. We might have taken advantage of a few of the beverage stops.
Paris
I did our first bit of booking flights for our trip to Europe next summer. Looking for available flights, there was wide open availability on an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Paris on a direct flight for only 21K points and $5.60. I booked 6 tickets at that price for July 4th, just after sunset. We would be taking off from O’Hare during fireworks displays, and I think that would be amazing. We’ll see if that sticks, because finding good prices on flights back to Chicago has been trickier, so we might have to adjust the flight to Paris, just to make the timing work. I am fairly confident that we will be flying into Paris, though.
Unfortunately, in order to book the flights to Paris, I had to make a less-than-ideal transfer. A while back, I downgraded my Citi Strata Premier card to the Citi Strata card. The Citi Strata card allows you to transfer points to American Airlines, but at a 10:7 ratio instead of a 1:1 ratio. I wasn’t worried about it at the time because Jenn had a Strata Premier card and we could share points. Unfortunately, point sharing ended in May, and now the points I earn can’t be transferred at the 1:1 ratio to American.
Anyway, I needed an additional 14,000 AAdvantage miles to book these flights, and I ended up having to transfer 21,000 Citi Thank You Points to American Airlines to pull it off. That ratio was painful to me, but it was necessary to lock in that really great flight, so I was okay with it.
Delta Business Gold Card
I applied for and was accepted for the Delta Business Gold Card. It has an annual fee of $150, which is waived for the first year. The current offer is 90K bonus SkyMiles after spending $6,000 in 6 months. The earning structure for this card isn’t great, with 2x points on Delta purchases, restaurants, shipping, and advertising and 1x on everything else.
There are a couple of benefits that make it potentially worthwhile to keep, however. The first is the $150 Delta Stays credit. Once a year, you can book a hotel, vacation rental, or even a hostel through Delta Stays and receive a $150 credit back. You even earn SkyMiles on the stay. This benefit alone almost makes the card feel like a no-annual-fee card if you use this credit each year.
In addition to the Delta Stays credit, having this card gets you 15% off award redemptions, zone 5 boarding, free checked bags, and a $10 per month rideshare credit. Also, if you spend $10,000 on this card in a calendar year, you will receive a $200 Delta flight credit, which could potentially be worth it, especially if you were going to spend the $6,000 in the first 6 months to get the signup bonus. Spending an additional $4,000 to get a $200 Delta flight credit isn’t a bad secondary bonus, especially if you routinely pay for Delta flights.
Typically I’m not a big fan of Delta SkyMiles. I find it difficult to consistently find good prices for flights on Delta. That being said, I have found really good prices during flash sales. I have a feeling that we will be using these miles on trips to places that I spontaneously book because they had some ridiculous deal somewhere and we couldn’t pass it up.
On to the Points Check
Our points totals have gone down the last couple of months, with us booking the trip to Puerto Vallarta in January and those flights to Paris in July. Jenn and I are both getting close to our American Airlines bonuses of 80K each on our AAdvantage platinum cards. Those points will probably be used immediately after the bonus hits so that we can book the flight back from Europe. Once we have the flight in and flight out nailed down, we should be able to get into the fun part of planning the trip.
We did a really good job of spending on the correct cards this month. Most of the spending below is for things on automatic charges, such as utilities, car insurance, cell phones, etc. Some of it was spent by our son, who apparently learned to use the Bilt Palladium this month instead of the Amex Gold after us reminding him to stop using the Amex Gold if he’s not buying groceries. Ah, we just have to keep teaching our son the important things in life, such as the importance of prioritizing point generation when paying for things.
| Card Used | Spend | Points Earned | Point Value | Points Per $ | Return on Spend |
| Bilt Palladium | $1421 | 5,274 | $116.03 | 3.7 | 8.2% |
| Ink Cash | $465 | 2,328 | $47.72 | 5.0 | 10.3% |
| Wyndham Business Earner | $368 | 1,842 | $10.13 | 5.0 | 3.3% |
| Amex Gold | $113 | 205 | $4.10 | 1.8 | 3.6% |
| Citi Custom Cash | $71 | 356 | $6.76 | 5.0 | 9.5% |
| Total | $2,438 | 10,005 | $184.75 | 4.1 | 7.6% |
The rest of our spending this month went on our AAdvantage Platinum cards where we are trying to earn our 80K signup bonuses. Jenn spent a little over $1,400, earning a little over 2,000 AAdvantage miles while I earned a little over 2,300 points on around $1,300 in spend. After the points we earned and the points redemptions for the month, we ended with:
- 230,800 IHG Points
- 217,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points
- 156,600 Alaska/Hawaiian Airlines Atmos Miles
- 109,900 Bilt Points
- 97,100 Amex Membership Rewards Points
- 81,800 Avios
- 65,100 Wyndham Points
- 33,700 Marriott Bonvoy Points
- 13,100 Citi Thank You Points
- 8,100 American Airlines Miles
- 1,500 Delta Miles
- 700 United Miles
- 300 Hyatt Points
- $133 Cash Back
According the valuations published by the Points Guy, the value of all of these points is a little over $15,100. Hopefully we can earn those American Airlines bonuses soon and get the flights to and from Europe next summer locked in. With the price of airline fuel being so high, I’m nervous about what airlines might do to prices to compensate for their increased costs. The quicker I can get those booked, the better.
