Travel – Newby to Expert Traveler

Manufacturing a Big Signup Bonus on the Amex Blue Business Plus

Posted on May 14, 2024May 15, 2024 by David Cox in Trips

The American Express Blue Business Plus is a somewhat boring, but great all around credit card. It doesn’t come with a big, flashy signup bonus. However, every once in a while, American Express puts out referral bonuses that can make the signup bonus pretty sweet. A recent referral offer from American Express gave us the opportunity to get this must-have credit card and still get a decent bonus.

Why Choose the Amex Blue Business Plus

There main reasons for why the Blue Business Plus is a great option for a business credit card are:

No Annual Fee
2x on all spending up to $50,000 in spending per year
Earns Membership Reward points that are transferable to 18 airline program and 3 hotel program partners

2x Membership Rewards points per dollar on all spending is great for a no annual fee card. If you are someone who uses multiple credit cards and take advantage of bonus categories to get 5x or 3x on your spending, you notice pretty quickly that not all spending will fall into a bonus category. Having a 2x card that acts as the lowest you earn can be very valuable, especially if you spend a lot in non-bonus categories.

Also, if you like to take advantage of big Amex signup bonus offers on their Gold and Platinum cards, but don’t want to pay the big annual fees for eternity, having the Blue Business Plus card gives you a no annual fee option that allows you to keep those points you earned on those big signup bonuses. This allows you to keep those points and cancel those credit cards. Keep in mind, cancelling an American Express card within 12 months from the date it was issued can cause them to take back the points.

Membership Rewards Transfer Partners

Program	Type	Transfer Rate
Aer Lingus	Airline	1 MR to 1 Avios
AeroMexico	Airline	1 MR to 1.6 AeroMexico Reward Points
Air Canada Aeroplan	Airline	1 MR to 1 Aeroplan Point
ANA Mileage Club	Airline	1 MR to 1 ANA Mile
Avianca Lifemiles	Airline	1 MR to 1 Lifemile
British Airways	Airline	1 MR to 1 Avios
Cathay Pacific	Airline	1 MR to 1 Asia Mile
Delta Skymiles	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Skymile
Emirates Skywards	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Skyward Mile
Etihad Guest	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Etihad Guest Mile
Flying Blue (Air France/KLM)	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Flying Blue Mile
Hawaiian Miles	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Hawaiian Mile
Iberia Plus	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Avios
JetBlue True Blue	Airlines	5 MR to 4 TrueBlue Points
Quantas Frequent Flyer	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Quantas Point
Qatar Airways Privilege Club	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Avios
Singapore Krisflyer	Airlines	1 MR to 1 KrisFlyer Miles
Virgin Atlantic Flying Club	Airlines	1 MR to 1 Virgin Point
Choice Privileges	Hotel	1 MR to 1 Choice Privilege
Hilton Honors	Hotels	1 MR to 2 Hilton Honors Points
Marriott Bonvoy	Hotels	1 MR to 1 Bonvoy Points

What makes Membership Rewards points so valuable is being able to take advantage of deals in any of these programs. For example, Flying Blue frequently offers flights from major US cities to Europe for 20,000 points (and around $150 taxes/surcharges) one-way in economy or 50,000 points (and around $250 taxes/surcharges) one-way in business class.

In addition, Virgin Voyages often offers points redemptions on cruises. Recently, they were offering a cruise for 120,000 points per cabin (1 or 2 people) for a seven night Mediterranean cruise leaving from Barcelona with stops in places like Ibiza, Mallorca, and Marseille. Simultaneously, there was also a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin from American Express which means that cruise could have been booked for around 93,000 Membership Rewards points.

Being able to pick and choose between programs when they are running specials is what makes flexible award currencies, such as Membership Rewards so incredibly valuable.

A Place to Keep Your Membership Rewards

American Express offers some monster signup bonuses on their cards. Recently, as Travel On Points pointed out, they offered a 300,000 point signup bonus on their Business Platinum card. That’s just enormous, with that bonus being worth $6,000.

However, the Business Platinum Card has an annual fee of $695. While there are definitely great ways of getting $700 worth of value on that card by using the credits and benefits on that card, eventually you might decide you want to dump the card to avoid that annual fee. By having the Blue Business Plus, you can keep the points you earned on your Business Platinum card in your account without having to pay an annual fee.

But the Signup Bonus for the Blue Business Plus is so Tiny

I have definitely gotten spoiled with signup offers that seem to always be north of 60,000 points. However, I knew if I was going to be trying to get big offers from American Express, I would want the Blue Business Plus in order to house those points. Unfortunately, they almost always offer 15,000 Membership Rewards points on a spend of $3,000 in 3 months – that’s just not exciting.

However, earlier this year, Jenn was given a very enticing offer from American Express. She signed up for the Business Gold card on an inflated 130,000 point offer. Since she was a Business Gold card holder, they offered her a 20,000 point referral bonus as well as 3 months of an additional 10x on dining.

Normally, credit card companies only offer referral bonuses on the same card that the cardholder has, but American Express offers referral bonuses that work if the invitee is approved for other American Express cards as well. This means that Jenn could get a referral bonus on her Business Gold card even though I was getting the Blue Business Plus.

The 20,000 point referral bonus wasn’t that unusual, but the extra 10x on dining was very interesting. Her Business Gold card already earns 4x on dining, which means that for 3 months, she will be earning 14x on every dollar spent on dining.

We don’t eat out that often, maybe a couple of times a month, but we do spend a decent amount of time at breweries. I mean, enough that most of the bartenders we see know us by name. Hey, we like beer. Anyway, breweries code as dining, so those are 14x when using her Business Gold card for the next 3 months.

All in all, lets say that over the next 3 months we spend $2,000 on dining. With the extra 10x, that is 20,000 Membership Reward Points. If you add the 20,000 point referral and the 15,000 point signup, that makes the total signup bonus 55,000 Membership Reward points. That’s pretty good for a no annual fee card, especially one with 2x transferable points on all spending.

Benefits of Working with Someone Else

This is a great example of the importance of working with someone else when earning points and miles. Experienced points and miles hobbyists refer to this as “2-player mode”. Being able to consistently refer a spouse, friend or family member, means that both of you can amass a larger amount of points that you can as an individual. This also means that you shouldn’t be an authorized user on your Player 2’s accounts.

In this case, if I was signing up for this card by myself, I would have earned a 15,000 point bonus. Since we are working in 2-player mode, Jenn will earn around 40,000 points in addition to the points that I’ve earned.

The American Express Blue Business Plus is one of those no-brainer credit cards that should be in your wallet. With 2x Membership Rewards points on all spending up to $50,000 per year and no annual fee, it’s a great card to keep around even if you don’t use it often. American Express has a tendency to give great referral bonuses from time to time, so if you can take advantage of those referral bonuses to bump up that sign up bonus, you should absolutely do so. This is one of those cards that you should have, but be patient to see if you can manufacture an elevated bonus.

Points Check April 2024

Posted on May 5, 2024 by David Cox in Trips

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%

This month’s spending not devoted to earning a signup bonus

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.

Hacienda Alsacia Coffee Farm

Posted on April 22, 2024 by David Cox in Trips

Hacienda Alcascia coffee farm is the only coffee farm in the world owned by Starbucks. Its a beautiful farm located on the southern slope of Poas Volcano about a 30 minute drive north of San Jose Airport in the Alajuela province of Costa Rica. Besides being an operating coffee farm, they also offer tours and have a gift shop and cafe.

Classic truck between parking lot and cafe

When we decided to go to Costa Rica, and knowing that we had an Airbnb in a major coffee producing region of Costa Rica, we knew that we would want to visit a coffee farm at some point. Since I personally drink about 2 gallons of coffee a day, I thought visiting a farm would be nice.

Wall art showing coffee growing regions of Costa Rica

I looked at quite a few local coffee tours, but Jenn found out that there was a Starbucks farm near where we were staying and suggested that. I was a little snarky about it, saying “Oh great, we’re going to go to Costa Rica to visit Starbucks. I mean, they’re so hard to find in the US.” In retrospect though, Jenn was right. This place was spectacular and if you’re anywhere near this, its an absolute must visit.

Coffee Bean Sacks on display near entrance

Starbucks History

A massive sliding door on the backside of the cafe has a sketch of the first Starbucks in Pike Place Market Seattle

Starbucks was formed in 1971 at Pikes Place market in Seattle. Since that time they have grown to over 35,000 stores worldwide. In my mind, Starbucks is largely responsible for getting Americans to drink flavorful coffee again. I can remember a time when Americans would only drink coffee flavored water produced by Maxwell House, Folgers or even Sanka. In the same way that the Boston Beer Company paved the way for microbrewers, Starbucks created a market for so many coffee shops and roasters in the US. My taste buds definitely thank Starbucks for that.

We’ve been to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Chicago, which I would recommend if you are in Chicago. It is one of 6 reserve locations throughout the world. While the Hacienda Alsacia farm is not one of these reserve locations, it has a very similar feel. The architecture is modern and clean. There is art everywhere you look and everything is meant to enhance the experience with your cup of coffee.

The Cafe and Gift Shop

They chose a phenomenal location for the coffee shop and gift shop. It is perched on a what is essentially the southern slope of Poas Volcano, with the building cantilevered over the slope. There is a huge bank of folding glass doors that when opened completely expose the cafe to an amazing view. That viewpoint is perfectly centered over a valley between two ridges. Adding to the amazing view is a waterfall coming off the ridge on the right hand side.

A large square shaped bar area is in the center of the cafe area, with a variety of baked goods on display. There is quite a variety of seating areas in the cafe, nicely spaced out. The seats that were in the highest demand, of course were along the railing which overlooks the valley.

Waterfall on right hand side when looking out of the cafe.

On top of the amazing views, that the building is located at an elevation that in Costa Rica virtually guarantees pleasant temperatures. We were there on a crystal clear day, but I would imagine that fog probably isn’t uncommon in this area. Either way, I would imagine the sliding wall of glass doors is probably open most of the time.

We sat down in an area with couches near the railing. I ordered a pour over coffee, which I assumed meant a drip coffee, which it apparently isn’t. Pour over coffee is when they put the coffee grounds into some sort of filter and then pour hot water over it. I’m still not sure how this is different from a drip machine, but apparently I’m a knuckle-dragging moron when it comes to coffee.

There is a microroaster in the gift shop which both produces the coffee beans in the gift shop but also is used to demonstrate the roasting process for the tours.

Either way, what I got, after a painfully long wait (I need my caffeine!), was probably the smoothest cup of coffee I’ve ever drank. I normally use creamer, but they gave me a little bit of cream and some sugar, which I used at first. However, this coffee was so good that eventually, after I ordered a second pour over, I just drank it black.

I don’t know if it was the Costa Rican beans, the pour over method, or the roast itself, but that was probably the best regular cup of coffee I’ve ever had.

The Grounds of the Farm

After we had our fill of coffee and snacks, we decided to walk around the property a little bit. There is a decent amount of the property that they allow guests to roam, even without paying for the tour.

There is a building behind the cafe that is used to process the coffee fruit into coffee beans.

If you continue walking toward the back of the property there is a tree nursery.

There is patio area in the back that allows you to get a really great view of the cafe as well as great views of the valley.

Much of the displayed art at Hacienda Alsacia are tributes to the farmers of the region.

Starbucks Hacienda Alsacia Farm Tour

Hacienda Alsacia offers a tour at the facility. It takes about an hour and a half to complete and costs $30 for an adult, $25 for students and $25 for seniors. Children under 6 years old are free.

The tour covers their tree nursery as well as their processing areas and the microroaster. We chose not to do the tour. Without the tour you actually can see a lot of the areas that are covered in the tour, but I imagine that you would get a much better understanding of the history and the process of making coffee by doing the tour. Two Weeks in Costa Rica has a very well written post about this tour if you are looking for more information.

Other Considerations

If you are planning to come to Hacienda Alsacia, I would recommend pairing it with either a visit to the Poas Volcano National Park, or to La Paz Waterfall Gardens Nature Park. Both of those parks are still a half hour drive from Hacienda Alsacia, but by Costa Rican standards, that’s actually a pretty quick drive.

If you take the tour, you’ll probably be there for 2 to 2 1/2 hours, assuming you’ll stay for a coffee and visit the gift shop. If you’re not doing the tour, it’ll probably be an hour to an hour and a half so keep that in mind.

There is plenty of parking, with a paved lot on site and a gravel overflow lot across the road. and parking is free.

We had a great time at Hacienda Alsacia. The views are amazing and the coffee is delicious. They did an absolutely fantastic job creating an experience for coffee fans to enjoy a cup of coffee while learning something about the process of making this magical drink. I would highly recommend a visit.

Visiting the Breathtaking Blue Falls of Costa Rica

Posted on April 14, 2024April 18, 2024 by David Cox in Trips

The Blue Falls of Costa Rica are a group of seven gorgeous waterfalls set on a tributary to Rio Toro. The river is fed by runoff from the northwest slope of Poas Volcano and is a seemingly unnatural shade of blue due to a high concentration of aluminum sulfate. This aquamarine colored water flowing over rocky terrain makes for an unbelievable landscape of pools, waterfalls and rapids.

There is a tour company that maintains the Blue Falls as well as Catarata Del Toro, which is another waterfall on the same property, but it is on Rio Toro, not on the tributary where the Blue Falls are located. They take admission for both attractions and have a station where you can pay, use the restrooms and potentially get some food, although the snack bar was not open the day we were there.

When we arrived at the visitor center, we were greeted by a gentleman who asked us whether we would be doing Catarata Del Toro, the Blue Falls or both. We paid for the Blue Falls, and he gave us our wristbands for entrance and instructions to go back to our cars and drive up the road a bit and park in a different lot and enter there.

The first river crossing is literally a few inches wide. Only 2 people are allowed on this bridge at a time.

The crazy thing about this gentleman was that, while we were standing there, he also was giving instructions to other hikers and I’m not 100% sure, but it sounded like to one group of hikers he spoke in Dutch (maybe German) and another in French while he was talking to us in pretty flawless English. I’m pretty sure he probably speaks Spanish as well, but the fact that he was just switching back and forth between languages that quickly was amazing to me. I asked him how many languages he knew, and he just responded humbly with “oh, a couple”.

This was early along the road, as you continue to walk the rocks have been moved into the center of the road to operate more like a sidewalk.

We moved the car to the parking lot by the Blue Falls entrance and began our hike. There is a dirt road to follow for the first half to three quarters of a mile. The dirt road had basically turned to mud, which I’m sure is the case a lot of the time. There was a row of stones in the center where most people walk to avoid the mud.

Little “sidewalk” like rock formation to help hikers stay out of the mud

At the end of the road, we came across some signs pointing to where to find the falls. Three trails to the left – La Pintada, La Turquesa and La Celestial, and three trails to the right – Poza Azul, Las Gemelas, and Tepezquintle. Las Gemeles is one trail with two waterfalls.

La Celestial Waterfall

Makeshift stairs on the trail to La Celestial

We decided to visit La Celestial first. Once we started to hike down the actual trail to La Celestial, the trail became more like forest stairs for lack of a better term. The trail has been altered to be more like steps. As wet as this area is, I assume that without the steps it would be incredibly slippery.

There are metal stairs on the trails where the trail would be too dangerous without them.

There were other sections that had some makeshift metal stairs and railings. As we got closer to the falls, the steps made way to boulders. As we descended down the trail, the sound of the waterfall grew in intensity until finally the waterfall appeared in view.

La Celestial waterfall taken from the end of the trail

La Celestial is fairly wide with quite a bit of water coming over it. It’s probably about 30 feet tall and has a bit of a pool under the waterfall. I don’t know how deep the pool is because, I didn’t get more than about waist deep there.

The water is fairly cold, which wasn’t unexpected, since it is running off of a mountain, but it’s not so cold as to want to avoid it completely.

A group of rocks about 50 to 100 feet from the falls creates a pool under and near the falls which you can swim in.

We hung out there for about 15 minutes enjoying the waterfall and the cold water and then decided to go back to the trail to head over to our second waterfall, La Turquesa

La Turquesa

The trail down to La Turquesa seemed much easier than the trail down to La Celestial. There still was quite a bit of steps on the way down, however, once we reached the river, we came across a metal structure with a ladder. There was a guide there to greet us.

A fairly typical trail at Blue Falls. It’s been altered to be more like steps,

In order to get to La Turquesa, you have to cross the river. The guide showed us the right place to cross and helped us through some of the more treacherous parts of the trail, which at this point mostly consisted of stepping on wet slippery rocks.

Guide helping Jenn across the river on the trail to La Turquesa

There is a fairly brisk section of rapids that we needed to climb over to that was the last main obstacle to getting to the falls. In this section, we had to climb over a boulder to get there. The guide was very helpful in making sure that none of us slipped on the boulder.

You need to climb over this boulder to get to La Turquesa.

The reward for this hike is a probably one of the shorter falls here, but it has a really nice pool area where you can kind of relax a little and swim, if you can stand the cold water. I got in up to my neck, but Alex actually dunked his head. Emma bet him $5 he wouldn’t do it.

This was a really calm and relaxing area to hang out in. We stayed for a little while and then decided to head back to the trail and go down one last trail.

Las Gemelas

We headed back up to the main trail, and we knew that we probably only had one more trail left in us. The hiking at the Blue Falls is somewhat challenging and some fatigue was beginning to set in. Jenn suggested we see Las Gemelas (The Twins). It was a great choice.

A metal bridge over the river at La Gemelas

Once we got down to the river from the main trail, we were greeted by a narrow metal bridge.

Once you crossed that, the trail mostly stayed dry on the left side of the river as we approached the first of the two twins.

One of the falls at Las Gemelas. — The first of the falls at La Gemelas

This was easily the tallest of the waterfalls we had seen that day.

Once you walk closer to the first of the twins and can see further down the river, the second of the twins appear in view.

There is a location on the left side of the river, where both waterfalls can be seen simultaneously. This is a surreal spot.

Standing where both of La Gemelas can be seen.

At this point of the day we were pretty hungry and tired and were ready to head back. We hiked back to the main trail and then to our car.

Getting to Blue Falls of Costa Rica

We drove to the Blue Falls from Grecia, but in general if you are coming from San Jose or the Central Valley you will be coming over a fairly tall ridge on Ruta Nacional 708 from the south. I mention this for one specific reason, that is the steepest section of road I have ever driven on.

The steep section I’m talking about is a very new road, but as we were descending the mountain, I suddenly got terrified because I knew I would have to drive back up this mountain, and I rented a Geely GX3. It has a not at all impressive 102 horsepower, and I had 4 full-sized Americans that had to ride in this car up this insane grade. Long story short, we made it, it was terrifying and my speed going up this grade was about 5 MPH with the pedal on the floor. I would suggest maybe a more powerful car if you are going to attempt this drive.

Much of the drive is typical of rural Costa Rica with narrow roads, switchbacks, and limited visibility. We did come across some pretty sketchy bridges made of wood near the end of the drive. At one point I asked Jenn “Was there a hole in that bridge?” She replied as calmly as she could “Yep.”

If you are coming from La Fortuna, you will probably be coming down from the north, so you wouldn’t have the steep grade that we had to deal with. That being said, I have no experience with the roads from La Fortuna, so I don’t know what they are like.

What to Wear at the Blue Falls of Costa Rica

You need to be prepared to get wet and muddy. You also need to have shoes that don’t slip. This does present a challenge for me, because frankly I’m a big fan of wearing socks and you’re not going to want to wear socks. They are going to get wet and your feet are going to prune, and you will be hating your life decisions.

Rocks are wet and slippery. Make sure your shoes grip properly.

You will also be walking on some extremely slick rocks. Having a pair of water shoes that have excellent grip that you can wear in the water is essential. They should also be a good fit, because as you can imagine, wearing ill-fitting shoes on a hike without socks can cause blisters in a hurry.

The alternative to water shoes is to do what the guides do and wear rubber boots. I’m pretty sure the guides know what they are doing, so following their lead can’t be a bad idea.

As far as your clothes are concerned, again you need to take into account the fact that you are both hiking and swimming. A swimsuit might not cover as much as you want when you are hiking and hiking clothes might be too heavy and uncomfortable once you get them wet. I settled on a quick dry shirt and a pair of board shorts. That seemed to be a pretty good compromise. Keep in mind the trails are pretty well maintained so you probably don’t need to cover your legs from things like thorns.

Other Considerations

We didn’t plan out our day very well. We had a light breakfast before driving an hour to get to the falls. A couple of hours of hiking had made us pretty hungry and we had not brought anything to eat. We basically quit out of fatigue, but if we had decided to do all of the falls, it would have taken us a bit more time and we would’ve been extremely hungry.

I would recommend packing a lunch if you want to do the entire Blue Falls hike. I think you could probably do the whole hike in 2 or 3 hours, but honestly, why are you hurrying? It’s beautiful, chill out and swim in the pools for a while. If you’re really enjoying the hike, I would think it would take you at least 4 hours, maybe longer, and with the amount of calories you’ll be burning with constantly going up and downhill, you’ll probably want something to replenish your energy.

I took along a regular backpack, but this is a very wet area, and the chance of accidentally falling into the river is fairly high. I would recommend using a dry bag or a dry backpack. I was carrying everyone’s phones in my backpack, so had I fallen, it might’ve been a really bad day. A dry bag would prevent that.

At the beginning of the hike, they will offer you a hiking stick. Take it! It must’ve saved me from falling a dozen times – its slippery out there!

Also, keep in mind you are in a forest in Costa Rica – if you have ever needed bug spray and/or sunscreen, you will need it here.

How Much Does the Blue Falls of Costa Rica Cost?

Entrance fees for the Blue Falls of Costa Rica is $17 USD per person. If you plan to also visit Catarata Del Toro, then a combo ticket costs $25 USD per person.

For more information visit the Catarata Del Toro/Blue Falls website.

Using the Lodge

Where you pay to get in, there are a bunch of tables where you can eat. There is a snack bar, but it was closed that day, so I’m not sure I would count on them having food available.

There are a couple of bathrooms in the back, and we used them to change our clothes after the hike. Pretty much anywhere you go when you leave the Blue Falls is going to be a long drive and you’ll want to be dry for that drive. Also, there aren’t any bathrooms on the trail itself, so you might want to use it before you head onto the trail.

I don’t know if tipping is customary, but we did leave a tip with the gentleman who was running the front desk. He asked us who the tip was for and we just let him know what falls we hiked at and he was happy to give the tip to the guides who were working those falls.

There is a hummingbird feeder in the lodge that gets a ton of activity with some very aggressive hummingbirds. Make sure you take a few moments to enjoy the hummingbirds as well.

Conclusion

If you have an opportunity to hike at the Blue Falls, jump at it. This was, by far, the most beautiful hike I have ever been on. Keep in mind that you should be in pretty reasonable shape to do the hike. It is wet, steep, and your balance will be challenged constantly.

Make sure that you come prepared and enjoy the beauty of Costa Rica. Pura Vida!

Points Check March 2023

Posted on April 4, 2024 by David Cox in 2024, Point Check

March was a pretty exciting month. We took a spring break trip to Costa Rica and had the opportunity to see just how beautiful that country is. We stayed in an Airbnb in the Central Valley near Grecia, which meant we were staying amongst the locals. That really gave us a more authentic taste of Costa Rica and was definitely not the normal touristy vacation.

We had to drive quite a bit to get to the locations that we wanted to visit, but in a week we managed to do hikes in a mountain pine forest and another by gorgeous waterfalls. We visited the only coffee farm owned by Starbucks. We also visited Poas Volcano as well as Playa Hermosa. Hey, any week you manage to visit the mountains, the beach and waterfalls in the same week is pretty good.

Costa Rica is a beautiful country and I would recommend it to anyone who is willing to go a little off the beaten path.

American Express Business Gold

Jenn applied for and was accepted for the American Express Business Gold. This is a card that we normally would ignore because of the higher annual fee and the higher required spend to earn the bonus on the card.

I have some mixed feelings about this card. The first issue for me is the $375 annual fee. We have, for the most part, gotten used to annual fees when they hand you a nice welcome bonus, but normally they have been less than $100 for us. That being said, this was an enormous 130,000 Membership Reward point bonus which The Points Guy values at 2 cents per point, so the bonus itself is worth $2,600. That definitely takes the sting out of the annual fee, especially if you plan to cancel before it renews.

The other negative here is that in order to receive this massive bonus, you must spend $10,000 in the first 3 months. That’s not easy for us, but with tax time coming and a pretty large tax bill, this shouldn’t be too hard. Making the most out of paying our taxes is becoming a annual tradition for us, last year we managed to profit $1,350 from paying our taxes.

The Amex Business Gold card earns 4x on some pretty good categories such as dining, gas and transit. It also offers 4x in some business categories such as advertising, electronics retailers, cloud system providers and cell phone service providers. In addition, it earns 3x on purchases through amextravel.com and 1x on all other purchases.

They have some monthly and annual credits, such as $155 refund for Walmart Plus membership and $20 per month for purchases at office supply stores, Grubhub, or FedEx. While I don’t think we’ll be signing up for Walmart Plus, Jenn has figured out that she can use that $20 per month by ordering takeout through Grubhub for some of our favorite restaurants so we will definitely be using those $20 Grubhub credits.

Ok, on the Points Check

Card Used	Spend	Points Earned	Point Value	Points Per $	Return on Spend
Ink Cash	$534	2,651	$54.35	5.0	10.2%
Capital One Venture	$519	1,038	$19.20	2.0	3.6%
Marriott Bonvoy	$421	2,105	$17.68	5.0	4.2%
Citibusiness AAdvantage	$347	347	$5.38	1.0	1.6%
Wyndham Business Earner	$124	814	$8.95	6.6	7.2%
Custom Cash	$49	244	$4.39	5	9.2%
Total	$1,994	7,199	$109.96	3.6	5.5%

This month’s spending not devoted to earning a signup bonus

We actually have 3 open cards where we are working on signup bonuses, which is a little crazy so the spend on cards without signup bonuses is pretty low this month. Most of the stuff in the chart above are set up as autopay for things like insurance, cell phones, utilities, etc. The Marriott Bonvoy charges are because we were earning 5x on groceries as a promo, and once again, somehow, we accidentally spent on the Citibusiness card at 1x which is a little frustrating. All in all, though, getting 5.5% back on non-bonus spend is fine by me.

In addition to the non-bonus spend, I spent $735 on my American Express Gold card and earned a little over 1,900 Membership Reward points. Jenn spent about $2,250 on her US Bank Business Connect card and earned $46 in cash back.

We didn’t earn any bonuses this month but I would imagine that those should start to hit over the next few months and they are some pretty big ones, with a $500 cash back bonus, a 75,000 Membership Reward bonus on my Amex Gold card, and the 130,000 Membership Reward bonus on Jenn’s Amex Business Gold card. I’m looking forward to seeing our point valuations balloon as these start to hit.

The only real redemption this month was that I used the cash back that I had earned last year to pay for the rental car and some of the gas while we were in Costa Rica.

Because we used some of our cash back, and we didn’t have any bonuses hit, we ended the month with a lower total value than the previous month. We ended the month with 260,300 Chase Ultimate Reward points, 115,200 American Airlines miles, 76,300 Capital One Venture miles, 38,800 Citi Thank You points, 34,000 Marriott Bonvoy points, 25,000 United miles, 10,000 Wyndham points, 6,900 Hyatt points, 5,000 Delta Miles, 1,900 Amex Membership Reward points and $183 in cash back. All of that, according to the valuations from The Points Guy, is worth around $10,300.

Latest Vacasa/Wyndham Devaluation Stings A Bit

Posted on March 31, 2024March 31, 2024 by David Cox in Travel Hacking

The Vacasa/Wyndham partnership devalued again, for the second time in just 6 months. This is pretty annoying, because this partnership went under the radar for a while, and as people became aware of what a tremendous deal this was, they had to start dialing it back. Now after a second devaluation, the partnership is still pretty good but it’s just not the same fantastic deal it was before.

We have loved this program for a while and have used it a couple of times, once for a trip to Nashville, where we saved almost $1,000 by buying points and redeeming it on the rental and another where Jenn got a great deal on a Vacasa in Playa Del Carmen for a girl’s trip.

What Happened Now?

The original redemption rates for Wyndham points on Vacasa rentals was simple – 15,000 Wyndham points per bedroom, per night on any rental up to $500 per bedroom per night. In October of last year, they kept the same basic structure, but lowered the maximum redemption from $500 per bedroom per night to $350 per bedroom per night.

With the change made in October, it effectively made any rental that cost more than $350 per bedroom per night unrentable on points. The newest devaluation makes those properties rentable again, but means that any property that cost between $250-$500 per night per bedroom just got twice as expensive as it was prior to October 2023.

The new Vacasa/Wyndham redemption rates are essentially this: for any Vacasa vacation rental, it costs 15,000 Wyndham points per bedroom per night for any property that costs up to $250 per bedroom per night. For any property that costs $250-$500 per bedroom per night, that will cost 30,000 Wyndham points per bedroom per night. Any property that costs more that $500 per bedroom per night will be unavailable on points.

Example	Before Oct 2023	Oct 2023 – March 2024	After March 2024
1 Bedroom $200/Night	15,000 Pts/Night	15,000 Pts/Night	15,000 Pts/Night
1 Bedroom $300/Night	15,000 Pts/Night	15,000 Pts/Night	30,000 Pts/Night
1 Bedroom $400/Night	15,000 Pts/Night	Unavailable on Points	30,000 Pts/ Night
2 Bedroom $450/Night	30,000 Pts/Night	30,000 Pts/Night	30,000 Pts/Night
2 Bedroom $600/Night	30,000 Pts/Night	30,000 Pts/Night	60,000 Pts/Night
2 Bedroom $900/Night	30,000 Pts/Night	Unavailable on Points	60,000 Pts/Night

Effect of last 2 Vacasa/Wyndham devaluation on redemptions

These are All-In Prices

The $250 per bedroom per night price is the all-in price not the headline price on Vacasa’s website. They might show a headline price of $200 per night, for example, but for 5 nights it’s not going to be $1,000, it’s probably going to be closer to $1,400. This is because they charge a number of taxes and fees, which can get pretty extensive.

These fees can be state and local taxes, amenity fees, booking fees, damage waivers, etc. In my experience, these will probably cost an extra 30 to 50 percent on top of the rent itself.

I think we can all agree that fees are getting out of control as you can see below. I mean, damn, I know you have expenses and all but do you need to itemize them and make me pay one by one? Just tell me what the price is! I mean, I get it, you got an HOA, but you can include that in the price instead of charging me for an ‘Amenity Fee’? And what the hell is a ‘destination surcharge’?

How Many Properties Does This Actually Affect?

One of the bright spots about this devaluation has been that if you had a rental that you liked that normally cost $200 per bedroom per night, you have gone completely unaffected by this. There are a lot of quality vacation rentals that are under that $250 per bedroom per night range and they are the same as they ever were.

That being said, if you had your eye on a more expensive unit, you might be reevaluating your plans now.

Let’s look at the Destin Florida area for a 5 day rental in June to see the real life results of the devaluation. Let’s say you’re a family of 4 and you would prefer a 2 bedroom vacation rental, but would settle for a 1 bedroom if it had room for everyone to sleep.

The below examples are taking into account a 40% upcharge for taxes and fees. These fees vary by property, so some are higher and some are lower but in order for me to use the filters on Vacasa’s website for this chart, I had to make some assumptions.

	Up to $250 per bedroom per night	$250 -$350 per bedroom per night	$350- $500 per bedroom per night	More than $500 per bedroom per night
1 Bedroom	25 (15,000 pts)	119 (30,000 pts)	129 (30,000 pts)	120
2 Bedrooms	323 (30,000 pts)	298 (60,000 pts)	94 (60,000 pts)	12
3 Bedroom	204 (45,000 pts)	86 (90,000 pts)	29 (90,000 pts)	4

Example availability of Vacasa vacation rentals with room for 4 near Destin for a random summer extended weekend.

The unicorn rental is if you can find a 1 bedroom with enough sleeping space for 4, that can be rented for 15,000 Wyndham points. In this example, prior to October 2023, there would have been 273 total 1 bedroom properties rentable for under $500 per night. When the first devaluation occurred and dropped the maximum price for redemption to $350 per night, that number dropped to 144. After the March 2024 devaluation, there are only 25 such properties left at the 15,000 point level. That’s only 9% of the original available properties at that rate.

Two bedroom properties fared a little better in the devaluation than the one bedroom properties. 94 were affected by the devaluation in October and another 298 were affected by the March devaluation. In this case 45% of the two bedroom properties in this example were unaffected by these devaluations.

The three bedroom properties fared the best with 204 of the total 319 properties for a total of 64% unaffected by the devaluation.

In general, the next time that I rent a Vacasa on points I’ll most likely be renting something that is 30,000 points per night, because the unicorn 15,000 point redemption is just going to be very hard to find now. It probably means that we will be looking for a two bedroom which will probably be more comfortable for us than a one bedroom, but twice the number of points is still a bit of a kick to the gut.

Elevated Signup Bonuses as a Consolation Prize

I don’t know if Wyndham did this at the same time as the most recent devaluation to soften the blow a little bit, but current signup bonuses for Wyndham credit cards are massive right now.

Wyndham is currently offering 100,000 point bonuses on their Wyndham Reward Earner Business card and their Wyndham Reward Earner Plus (Consumer) card. They are also offering a 75,000 point bonus on their Wyndham Earner card. All of those bonuses are the largest bonuses ever offered according to Frequent Miler.

The Wyndham Reward Earner Business card is one that we hold and continue to use. Jenn signed up for this one when the bonus was only 45,000 points. The reason we continue to use it is that it has some great point earning rates. It is 8x at gas stations and 5x on utilities. I put all of our gas and utilities on it for this reason. The full 100,000 point bonus for this card is after spending $15,000 on the card within 12 months.

If you really like those Wyndham points (which we do), the Wyndham Reward Earner (Consumer version) Card has some great earning categories too. It is 6x at gas stations, 4x on groceries and 4x on dining. It is also currently offering a 100,000 point bonus after a much lower $2,000 in spending within 6 months.

If you spend a lot on gas and you like vacation rentals, these cards can rack up points for those rentals in a hurry. In addition, all 3 of the Wyndham cards offer a 10% discount on award redemptions if you are a cardholder. This means that the example of a 1 bedroom Vacasa under $250 per night isn’t actually 15,000 points per night, it’s really 13,500 points per night for cardholders. The 100,000 point bonus alone would pay for a week at those rates.

Keep in mind that if you were to maximize these redemptions at a full $250 per night per bedroom, and you had one of these credit cards to reduce the redemption to 13,500 points, you would be redeeming those points at 1.85 cents per point. If you are earning 8x on all of your gas spending, you are essentially earning 14.8% back at gas stations. That’s pretty ridiculous.

Vacasa Still Remains the Best Way to Book a Vacation Rental on Points

Even with the rapid fire devaluations, Vacasa still remains the best way to book a vacation rental on points. Marriott has it’s Homes and Villas collection which does allow for booking vacation rentals using Bonvoy points, but the rates are much higher, and I would argue the points are harder to earn.

Sure, if you are a business traveler, you might be able to earn quite a lot of Bonvoy points by staying in Marriott hotels, so Homes and Villas might be pretty attractive for your family vacation. But, if you’re not a business traveler, the ability to earn a lot of points through spending on gas and utilities on the Business Earner card or by gas, groceries, and dining on the consumer Earner card is huge.

I’m still hoping that Hyatt, IHG, or Hilton can someday begin to make their points usable at VRBO or Airbnb, but I wouldn’t count on it. That being said, as long as Wyndham keeps the amount of points needed to book a rental low as well as allow easy earning of Wyndham points, it’s going to remain a fantastic deal. There is no doubt in my mind that the Vacasa/Wyndham partnership remains the best way to use points on vacation rentals.

Unwinding in Playa Hermosa

Posted on March 24, 2024 by David Cox in Trips

Playa Hermosa is a small, laid back beach town along the Pacific coast in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. The sand on the beach is a little darker than you might expect because of the volcanic rock that helped form Costa Rica over millions of years. The bay around Playa Hermosa is crescent shaped and creates some stunning views, especially at sunset. It also makes for a nice stopping point for flights in or out of Guanacaste Airport.

Playa Hermosa is a Great Stop after Landing at Guanacaste Airport

The reason why we stayed at Playa Hermosa was simply that we didn’t want to drive at night. We had about a 3 to 3 1/2 hour drive from Guanacaste Airport to our Airbnb in the Central Valley near Grecia. Even though we landed around noon, by the time we got through passport control and customs, took the shuttle to the car rental place and finally got the keys to the rental car, it was around 2:30.

The problem with Guanacaste Airport is that almost all of the planes from the US and Canada (which are the majority of planes landing there) arrive between 10:30 and 2:30. Also, the airport itself isn’t really near many tourist spots. A lot of the typical stops for tourists are a bit of a drive from the airport:

La Fortuna – 2.5 to 3 hour drive from the airport
Monteverde Cloud Forest – 2.5 to 3 hour drive from the airport
Jaco – 3 to 4 hour drive from the airport
Central Valley – 3 to 4 hour drive from the airport

Driving at night in Costa Rica, if you aren’t familiar with the area that you are driving, can be tricky to say the least. Between the fact that the roads are narrow, curvy and unlit, the lack of street signs, and the fact that there are always people walking in the road, you might just want to drive in the daytime, at least at first.

Lodging in Playa Hermosa

For being a pretty small travel destination there are a number of choices of places to spend the night in Playa Hermosa, all of whom are small operators (your Marriott Bonvoy and World of Hyatt points are useless here). For more expensive hotels, there are some villas on the north side of Playa Hermosa and Hotel Bosque del Mar on the south end. We stayed in the center of Playa Hermosa where you will find some modest boutique hotels.

We stayed at Huetares Hotel and Villas. It had a nice pool area, which we really enjoyed. The rooms were spacious but a little rundown, which didn’t bother us too much since we were just sleeping there one night and then moving on. Our room had two full bathrooms and two bedrooms, each bedroom had a single and a double bed. It also had a kitchen area which would’ve been nice if had stayed longer.

There was a questionable shower there with exposed wiring. At first I didn’t understand why there was wiring on a showerhead, but I think it was an instant water heater showerhead. Either way, I’m not sticking my head under a showerhead with exposed wiring – luckily there were two bathrooms and two showers, so we didn’t use that sketchy thing.

Yeah, I’m not taking a shower under this thing. I don’t feel like dying today.

Swimming at the Beach

The sand at Playa Hermosa is fairly pleasant. It’s not a white Cancun style of beach, this is a little darker with volcanic sand mixed in. This makes the water appear dirtier than at a white sand beach, but its really that the sand is just darker.

There is a first row of trees on the edge of the beach, then a path and then the rest of the trees which allow you to walk the beach in the shade.

The water is about as warm as at any beach I’ve been to. It was very pleasant to swim in and we did see a bit of fish activity while we were swimming. The waves were fairly gentle to moderate which also made swimming very pleasant.

Wildlife in Playa Hermosa

In the short amount of time we spent in Playa Hermosa, we spotted quite a bit of wildlife. At our hotel, we spotted an Iquana that was probably 2-3 feet long. There were also quite a bit of tropical birds that were flying around and chatting to each other. The squirrels that we saw were grey and reddish orange.

Two howler monkeys in a tree. You can also see in the tree, a couple of wires. That is the monkey bridges that have been built to allow the monkeys to cross the roads without having to use electrical wires or walk across the street.

What you really need to go looking for are the howler monkeys. If you don’t know where they are, don’t worry, you’ll hear them. I don’t know how many of them live in Playa Hermosa, but there are at least a dozen who spend a lot of time at the tops of the trees. Howler monkeys are known for being loud with calls that can be up to 140 decibels. We had a lot of fun watching them in the wild and they weren’t in the least bit concerned with us.

Dining at Sunset

Playa Hermosa is located on the west coast of Costa Rica, making it a beautiful place to watch sunsets. There are also a handful of restaurants along the beach making it a great place to have dinner on the beach while watching the sunset.

The majority of the seating at Aquasport is in the sand, which is exactly where you want to sit.

The restaurants that I noticed while we were there were La Casita del Marisco, Roberto’s and Aquasport. We chose Aquasport.

There was a large swing there that was in constant use throughout dinner.

I really liked the menu at Aquasport because it allowed us to try a pretty wide variety of food that’s not available in our hometown in Iowa. Alex got the Surf and Surf, which was mahi mahi and shrimp in a pretty interesting sauce. Jenn got the mahi mahi fillet, while I ordered the beef tacu tacu and Emma ordered a chicken causa. We also shared some patacones.

Chicken Causa – a Peruvian dish with layers of potato, avocado and chicken.

Most of the food was very good. The prices were a bit on the high end, but I wouldn’t have expected anything else considering Aquasport is directly on the beach.

A live band played during dinner. They played mostly American pop music covers.

We also had a few chiliguaros, which is a shot that has guaro (a Costa Rican liquor made of sugar cane, similar to unaged rum), tomato juice and tobasco served in a salted shot glass. We chased those chiliguaros with the national beer of Costa Rica, Imperial, which is a pretty descent pilsner.

Rope lights provide great mood lighting after dusk.

We enjoyed our dinner and the fresh breeze as the sun disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. The staff was excellent, the food great, and the sunset was spectacular.

A First Taste of Gallo Pinto

Huetares Hotel and Villas is attached to a traditional Costa Rican restaurant called Coco Viquez. They serve their breakfast the way that a traditional Costa Rican ‘soda’ does. It’s set up as a buffet where you get one plate, you tell them what you want and they fill the plate up for a set price, in this case $10 US, or 5,000 Colones.

There are two sections of this buffet, one with hot foods like gallo pinto, eggs, and sausage, and the cold section with cheese and fresh fruit

Traditionally a Costa Rican breakfast comes with gallo pinto, which is essentially black beans and rice mixed together. Gallo pinto is also not complete without some plantains, some meat – I had salchichon (a type of sausage), and as much fresh fruit as they can squeeze on the plate. We also got some coffee, which they served with hot milk, which is a nice touch to not cool down your coffee, but it was already 90 degrees outside, so I’m not sure it was necessary.

Must’ve eaten the papaya before snapping this photo. The papaya was amazing.

It was all very good and the staff was very friendly. I can see why this style of breakfast became a staple in Costa Rica, it’s fast, nutritious and is delicious. This is how fast food should be done.

Small Town Feel

Playa Hermosa is a very small area. We could pretty much walk the entire town in about 30 minutes. There really is only about a half dozen restaurants, a mini grocery store, a few hotels and a beach. I think that’s the real attraction to Playa Hermosa. There isn’t a ton to see, but the views are tremendous. There aren’t a lot of choices of places to eat, but the food is really good.

There were only really two streets to walk on in Playa Hermosa. No tall buildings, not a lot of traffic. It definitely had the feel of a small town.

Because the choices are limited, Playa Hermosa will force you to take it easy. Go ahead and spend a few hours on the beach. Have a long dinner in the sand as the sun dips into the ocean. Relax and unwind. Life is stressful and hurried, but that is not the vibe in Playa Hermosa. You’re not in America anymore, you’re in Costa Rica now – Pura Vida!

Moving Along

With our bellies full of Gallo Pinto, we got into the car for what turned out to be a stressful 4 hour drive to Grecia in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. I’m glad we had a chance to unwind from our flight before attempting that drive.

We spent less than 24 hours in Playa Hermosa, because we were using it as a stop before moving on to the rest of our journey. I have a feeling that we will find our way back to Playa Hermosa, there are a few other places that I would like to visit in Costa Rica, including La Fortuna, Jaco, and Manuel Antonio National Park. I can definitely see this being a stop over anytime that we might go to Costa Rica in the future, if we are using Guanacaste Airport. The proximity to the airport, the gorgeous sunsets, and the great food make it an ideal first taste of Costa Rica.

PointsYeah is a Gamechanger

Posted on March 7, 2024March 7, 2024 by David Cox in Travel Hacking

I’ve only been into travel hacking for a couple of years, but I have been around long enough to know how much time can be spent trying to get a good deal on an award flight. When we were planning our first trip to Europe, United miles was the only way for us to go. It was the only program where we had accumulated enough points in order to book flights for the whole family to Europe. In some respects, that made it easier for me. Just search the United website and nothing else.

Even then, our dates were flexible and our destination was flexible to some extent. When I was checking for available award flights, I would have to make multiple searches based on different destination airports and different dates. Honestly, it didn’t take too long to do these searches, because it was all on one website, and I actually find United Airlines’s website to be pretty good.

However, as we started to venture into more transferable points, such as Capital One Venture miles and Chase Ultimate Reward points, it became much more difficult. Chase alone transfers to 11 airline programs and Capital One has 15 airline transfer partners. Even if you narrow it down to just a handful of programs that you want to check, repeating the steps that I took on United’s website on 4 or 5 other websites can get pretty annoying.

The Rise of Flight Award Search Tools

I must not have been the only person who found myself with this problem because recently there has been an explosion in the number of good online award search tools, often with very powerful and free searches. All of them have their pluses and minuses. They include:

Now, have I tried all of these websites and done a point by point comparison to determine exactly the best website to use? Hell no! I have tried a few of them, but once I started to use Pointsyeah.com I latched onto it pretty quickly. I’m a firm believer that once you’ve found a tool that works for you, there’s no sense in continuing to look for a better tool. If I have a screw to tighten and I’m holding a screwdriver that works, I don’t go run to Home Depot to see if they have a slightly better screwdriver with a better grip. I just tighten the screw and move on with my life. That being said, Pointsyeah.com is a hell of a tool.

Basic Award Searching

Let’s look at a scenario, where you want to visit a friend in Phoenix, and you have a little flexibility on date. You just enter into the search bar your departure airport and the arrival airport, and a date range of up to 4 days. When you click the ‘Yeah!’ button it will automatically search for awards across a variety of airline award programs.

In just a few seconds, you will be presented with the results. In this case, the best deal is with Spirit Airlines for 4,000 points and $5.60 for a one-way flight from Chicago to Phoenix.

The problem with that is, that I don’t have Spirit points, nor a desire to fly Spirit Airlines. Also, that flight is almost 15 hours with connections – no thank you. In this case, you can scroll down, or you can filter out results from Spirit Airlines altogether, since it’s not really an option.

At the top of the screen, you will see a series of buttons that are preset filters. I want to filter out the airlines programs that I know I don’t have points for or transfer partners for, in this case, Alaska Airlines and Spirit Airlines. All you have to do is uncheck the boxes and click ‘Apply’ and view the new results.

This gives you another set of results, the top one being this Delta Airlines flight. The results here pack a ton of useful information into one tiny area. First, you will notice that the flight costs 8,000 Delta Skymiles and $5.60 in taxes. Secondly, you notice right above the Skymiles total you see the number of American Express Membership Rewards that are needed to transfer those 8,000 points to Delta. There is also (not on every result, but on some) a cash price listed. This is awesome, because you might just look at this flight and say that it’s cheap enough that you don’t want to waste your Skymiles or Membership Rewards points on it, you’ll just pay cash. Lastly, you can click on the down arrow to the right to expand the box to give you details about the flight itself.

But, what if you just want a direct flight? Well just go back to the top bar where all of the filters are and simply click on ‘Stops’ and then click ‘Non-stop only’. This supports multiple filters, so you will be able to search for non-stop only with the airlines that you don’t want to see already turned off.

Once you do that, you will see a number of results that fit the newly narrowed search criteria that you entered into the filters.

What is left is a series of direct American Airlines flights from Chicago to Phoenix for 8,500 points and $5.60. Perfect, now you know what to look for and can log onto the American Airlines website, search for this flight and book it.

Daydream Explorer is Awesome

There is a new feature that PointsYeah has added recently called Daydream explorer which is like a candy store for travel junkies. Rather than searching for individual flights from airport to airport, Daydream Explorer allows you to search airport to region, region to region, airport to country, country to region, basically anything that you can think of. On top of that, it allows for super broad time ranges like a couple of months.

Imagine you’re thinking “I’d like to go to Central or South America in April” – you can search for that and just see what comes up. Let’s say you’re local airport is MSP and you want to go south in April. Just search for MSP to Central or South America from April 1st to April 30th and abracadabra a list of potential flights you could take and their prices pop up.

You will get a bunch of random results that you can sort by price, date or last update. This will allow you to browse a whole bunch of different ideas for taking a trip to Central or South America. You can also use the filters at the top to look for deals with certain airline programs or bank programs. You can even filter by number of stops or set a maximum that you’re willing to pay for taxes and surcharges.

If you’re thinking that you would like to go from New York to Spain in May in business class, just put in that criteria and search again.

A group of results appear nearly instantaneously, allowing for the user to browse through and see if they find anything that they like. The results are so fast and the searches are so interesting that you can easily waste hours just window shopping potential vacations.

Let PointsYeah Send you Updates

PointsYeah also has a feature called Points Price Alert. This allows you to have PointsYeah send you an email when there is a flight available within the criteria that you set.

If I would like to get notified on a specific date if business class seats become available, I can set that criteria. In this case, I’m looking to book a flight home from Europe, and I know that Iberia does occasionally have business class flights available from Madrid to Chicago for 34,000 Avios, so I want to know if those seats become available on the day that I want to fly home. I simply put in the criteria that I’m looking for.

In this case, I want two seats, under 40,000 points and $200 in taxes and fees, per seat. I set that criteria and clicked create and now I will get an email if that Iberia business class award becomes available.

You are only allowed 4 flight alerts on a free account and each day counts as a flight alert. If you want to search this criteria but over a 4 day window, that would count as 4 searches.

Disclaimer

If you haven’t noticed, you will see on these searches that there is an updated date on these searches. The reason for this is because of how PointsYeah works.

What PointsYeah is doing is crawling the various airline websites and doing a ton of searches and saving the results. If they didn’t do this, these searches (especially the Daydream Explorer feature) would take forever because it would have to search each of those websites in real time and crunch that data (the websites would hate that as well, because it would create unnecessary traffic).

They are nice enough to let you know the last time that they searched those flights, because the older the search, the less likely it is to still exist, especially if it’s a particularly good deal. You always need to check the airlines website to see if the deals are still available. In other words, don’t transfer your Chase Ultimate Reward points to Flying Blue before you know that the flight you want to book is still available.

Free Vs Paid Account

Everything that I’ve talked about thus far is part of the free account. Why? Well I use a free account. I find it has all the features that I need right now and that’s just fine with me. However, if you want to have some additional features, you can pay for a subscription.

The main difference between the free and the paid memberships is that you can search for 8 days instead of 4 days on normal searches and you can set up as many as 24 alerts instead of the 4 that are available with the free version. The price of the paid membership is only around $8 per month, so if you find the additional alerts or the expanded date range useful, it might be worth the money.

Why I love PointsYeah

I always find it funny when people say they have a bucket list of places they want to go. The reason for that is that if I actually sat down and wrote a bucket list, it would be unbelievably long. I could probably think of at least 2 dozen places it Italy that would make that list. The biggest problem with a list like that is that the more I travel, the longer the list gets. As we visit places, we always hear about other places that we hadn’t heard of and that list just keeps growing.

What PointsYeah does for people like me, is to allow those of us with flexible places and dates, to dream a little better. Maybe you didn’t know that for 37,500 American Airlines miles and $44 you can fly from Chicago to New Zealand. Well you do now, and it only took a quick search to find out.

You might never have thought you could do that trip, but now you know whether it’s possible or not, and you did it without making multiple searches on multiple websites. Just one search gets it done. PointsYeah is an absolute gamechanger for me, I love it.

Points Check February 2024

Posted on March 3, 2024 by David Cox in Point Check

We’re inching closer every day to our spring break Costa Rican adventure. Honestly, this is a trip that I probably wouldn’t have dared to do a year ago. When we first started to do international travel (it’s only been a year – we’re still newbies!), every logistical step in the process was something that we needed to examine. How long will we be waiting in customs? Is that layover long enough? How do the trains/busses/taxis work from the airport? Will we be understood if we don’t speak the local language well? Each trip that we take gives us a little more confidence in the process and our abilities to handle those logistical issues.

The biggest logistical hurdle this time is driving a rental car in a foreign country, especially Costa Rica. There are horror stories all over the internet about scams at the rental car counter. Also, driving habits apparently are a little different in Costa Rica and the roads sound like they will be questionable off the major highways.

It’s easier for us to mentally prepare ourselves for what could be stressful driving and perhaps a difficult time at the rental car facility when we don’t have to mentally prepare ourselves for the logistics of flying. I feel like there are parts of travel that we’ve started to understand pretty well and it opens up my mental energy for new experiences. This is really important when you don’t want the negatives of travel to overwhelm what I’m anticipating to be an amazing experience with waterfalls, beaches and volcanoes in Costa Rica.

Hold!!!

Jenn and I have been planning a trip for us with her parents and our good friends who live in Nashville. The biggest logistical issue for this trip was landing around the same time in Rome with us using 3 different flight itineraries. That part has been done, but we’ve only managed to book the flights to Italy, not the return flights.

However, every time I try to bring up the fact that maybe we should book the return trip, Jenn turns into Kirstin Bell from the Carvana commercial and just tells me “HOLD!” I think she’s waiting on the perfect flight home that costs something like 1,000 points in business class with a stopover in Madrid. I’m sure we’ll find something decent since it is off-peak from Europe, but she’s making me nervous. I guess there are worse things in life than getting stranded in Italy.

Anyway the flight we booked to Italy cost us 20,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points each transferred to Flying Blue plus about $90 in taxes and surcharges and $50 each to stopover in Amsterdam for a day. Stopovers are supposed to be free and I go into greater detail as to the $50 charge in this post about Flying Blue Stopovers. I would’ve paid the $50 charge anyway, but it would’ve been nice to know ahead of time.

The redemption turned out to be pretty good. The price of a comparable flight was $658 (with the $50 stopover fee included), so the 20,000 points we used reduced the cost of the flight by $518 each, meaning we got nearly 2.6 cents per point for the Chase Ultimate Reward points which are normally valued at 2 cents per point. You gotta love how great the deals have been on Flying Blue lately.

We also double booked some lodging in Costa Rica. We kept going over the logistics of landing at the Guanacaste Airport at a little past noon, going through passport control and customs, then renting a car and driving more than 3 hours to Grecia, outside of San Jose and trying to do this before dark. It gets dark in Costa Rica around 5:30 and it’s not recommended for people who aren’t familiar with the roads there to drive after dark, so we decided that maybe we should get a hotel closer to the airport and make the big drive the next day.

We ended up booking a local hotel in Playa Hermosa, which is less than 30 minutes from the airport. We booked it through Capital One travel for a little over 16,000 Capital One miles. These are redeemed at exactly 1 cent per point, which isn’t a fantastic redemption of Capital One miles, but it served it’s purpose and now we will get a little beach time while in Costa Rica, when we hadn’t planned to spend any time near the coast. We probably could have shortened our stay at the Airbnb by the day that we are in Playa Hermosa, but it feels wrong this late to change our reservation, and frankly it was only $75 per night at the Airbnb. This also ensures that we can check in at any time the next day.

A Shiny New Amex Gold Card

American Express Membership Rewards is a beloved program in the points and miles space. It has a ton of great transfer partners and has amazing opportunities to accumulate a massive amounts of Membership Rewards points very quickly with enormous signup bonuses, great bonus spend categories and other Amex offers. Up until now, I’ve avoided Amex because their cards tend to have high annual fees.

I applied for and was accepted for the American Express Gold Card. It has an annual fee of $250 and earns 4x on dining, 4x on groceries, and 3x on flights booked through Amex travel or directly through the airline. It also has $120 Uber Cash and $120 Dining Credit every month which is good at a handful of restaurants or Grubhub (so it’ll get used on Grubhub, if at all). Those credits are doled out monthly so it’s really $10 per month for Uber and $10 per month for Grubhub.

I applied with the bonus offer of 75,000 membership reward points and a 20% rebate on dining up to $250 back. The 75,000 membership reward points are awarded if I spend $6,000 in 6 months. There was also an offer for 90,000 membership rewards points without the 20% rebate, but I thought this was a way to get an Amex Gold card for essentially no annual fee, since spending $1,250 on dining for the $250 rebate is practically automatic for us and is equal to the $250 annual fee.

Anyway, On to the Point Check!

Card Used	Spend	Points Earned	Point Value	Points Per $	Return on Spend
Citibusiness AAdvantage	$1,139	1,139	$17.65	1.0	1.5%
Capital One Venture	$706	1437	$26.74	2.0	4.0%
Wyndham Business Earner Card	$581	3,069	$33.76	5.3	5.8%
Citi Custom Cash	$540	2,539	$45.70	4.7	8.7%
Ink Cash	$531	2,639	$54.10	5.0	10.2%
Citi Premier	$491	935	$16.83	1.9	3.4%
Marriott Bonvoy	$198	995	$8.36	5.0	4.2%
Total	$4,184	12,753	$202.99	3.0	4.9%

This month’s spending not devoted to earning a signup bonus

We still haven’t managed to stop accidentally spending on our Citibusiness cards. They are practically useless for normal spend, and the problem is that when we are done with a bonus, we forget to remove them from all of the places where we’ve set up default payments. The most painful one here was when we ordered a dishwasher through Home Depot’s website and somehow managed to use that card instead of a card we are working on a bonus for. $700 worth of spending that could’ve gone toward a bonus, dammit.

Our spending was quite elevated this month because of the dishwasher and we also bought a new couch since the kids and the dog had managed to slowly kill the old one. Aside from the non-bonus spending in the chart above, Jenn spent a little less than $3,400 on her US Bank Altitude Business Connect card and earned a little more than $43 in cash back.

This left us with a grand total of 257,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points, 115,500 American Airlines miles, 75,100 Capital One Venture miles, 38,400 Citi Thank You points, 31,800 Marriott Bonvoy points, 24,900 United miles, 6,900 Hyatt points, 5,100 Delta miles, and $700 in cash back. According to the valuations determined by the Points Guy, these points are worth a grand total of a little less than $10,800.

Flying Blue Free Stopover Isn’t Really Free

Posted on February 17, 2024February 17, 2024 by David Cox in Travel Hacking

We’re planning a trip to Italy for the fall with friends and Jenn’s parents. This requires a little bit of coordination between the parties, especially since we are all booking with different methods. Remarkably, even though Jenn’s parents and our friends were flying from different airports, the last leg of their journey is on the same Delta flight from Atlanta to Rome. Now it was up to us to try to match that time to land.

The best thing to do would’ve been to use Delta and get on the same flight, but we don’t have a lot of Delta Skymiles and their only transfer partner is American Express Membership Rewards and we don’t have any Amex points. Delta was not going to work but Air France (Flying Blue) had a flight landing just 10 minutes after the Delta flight.

The Problem with Short Layovers

Unfortunately, that had an hour and 25 minute layover in Paris (CDG), and that seemed pretty risky considering we would have to go through passport control, then security, and then find our gate in a busy airport I’m not familiar with. I would put the chances of success at about 50/50. Not good enough for me – especially with Jenn’s luck (she has had delays of 2 hours, 5 hours and 8 hours respectively on her last three flights)

A little off topic here, but why in the hell do airlines offer these tight layovers? You know you all suck at getting your flights in the air on time. I once sat on the tarmac for half an hour watching two mechanics trying to fix a seat that wouldn’t recline – on a 2 hour flight. Suck it up buttercup, I got places to go and your inability to move your seat 3 inches back is not my problem. Strap yourself in and lets go!

Sorry about the rant – the other option was to arrive in Rome 3 hours later, around 3 PM. Not only would that have been a massive inconvenience for our fellow travelers, but our plan was to take a train to Florence on the first day, and when I added up all the time to get through passport control, take the commuter line to Rome Termini, transfer, then take a train from Rome to Florence, we would be getting in very late. Assuming we all only sleep a little on the plane, we might be dragging our suitcases through Florence trying to find our Airbnb with the mental acuity of a toddler on Benadryl.

The better option was to go a day early, but with timing of the flights and the fact that FCO really isn’t that close to Rome, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to enjoy the extra day in Rome, we probably would just end up sitting in a hotel room. But what if we stayed in Paris or Amsterdam on the way, instead?

Flying Blue Free Stopovers to the Rescue

A quick google search pulled up this article by One Mile at a Time that points out that indeed, Flying Blue offers free layovers. We pieced together an itinerary that flew KLM from Chicago landing in Amsterdam at 7:10 AM and a second flight that leaves Amsterdam 26 hours later which lands in Rome a mere 20 minutes after our companions. The nice thing is that since we will go through passport control in Amsterdam, and they will be going through in Rome, theoretically we should be ready to leave the airport in Rome around the same time.

Perfect, now we just had to call, and by we, I mean Jenn since the points were in her account. She wasn’t happy about that.

She was on hold for about an hour, but when she got on, the agent understood what Jenn was trying to do, and got it all booked. The process on the phone wasn’t exactly quick, but she was probably off the phone in about 15 minutes after the agent picked up.

Free Stopovers Aren’t Exactly Free

When Jenn got off the phone, she said that the taxes were higher than we expected. We looked and sure enough, the taxes were $139.70 per ticket instead of the $85.90 that is listed online. The difference worked out to be exactly 50 Euros. So it appears that the “Free Layover” is going to cost 50 Euros per ticket, unless it’s 100 Euros per call.

They do have the fact that higher issuing fees do occur by phone, but when you click on the link for an explanation, you get a dead link. So my assumption is that it costs 50 Euros per ticket, but I don’t know for sure.

Booking Stopover Online isn’t Possible, Yet

Currently there isn’t a way to book with a stopover on the website. I would assume that they might add that in the future, but for now it’s by phone only. This means that you are going to have to do a considerable amount of research on their website to pick out the flight segments that you want and then communicate this effectively to an agent who is most likely in France or the Netherlands. This can lead to confusion, which Jenn found out, when she gave my birthdate to the agent the American way, month-day-year, and the agent entered the birthdate the European way, day-month-year.

It also means that until they can add a free stopover feature to their website, you will be paying the fees associated with making an award flight redemption over the phone. My limited experience with how agile tech development is with airline point programs suggest it might take some time before you see that feature on their website. For now, prepare to pay for the stopover.

Which Cities Can you Stopover with Flying Blue?

I assume that these stopovers will only work in their hubs. I doubt that they would let you fly, say Chicago to Paris to Barcelona, then get a free stopover, then Barcelona to Paris to Munich. However, they will allow you to stop in Paris if flying from Chicago to Barcelona when the normal layover would be in Paris. So that will limit any stopovers to just Paris or Amsterdam. The article from One Mile at a Time does indicate that it should work with partner airlines booked through Flying Blue, so there are actually other possibilities besides Amsterdam and Paris, but for the most part, that’s how you would typically use them.

Stopovers can be as short as 24 hours and as long as 1 year. That offers great flexibility, but I imagine that most people are going to use this as a way to visit Paris or Amsterdam for a few days and then move on to another location. With this stopover rule, you could pretty easily put together an itinerary where you go to Amsterdam for a few days on a flight from the US, move on to another European city for a few days and stop in Paris for a few days on the way back. That’s a pretty easy way to get a sampler platter of Europe and the prices could be around 40,000 points (transferable from Citi, Amex, Chase, Capital One and Bilt), around $240 for taxes and $100 for booking by phone. That’s not too shabby.

Making Lemonade out of Lemons

For us, it was a way to make lemonade out of lemons. We didn’t want to land in Rome that late on the same day as our fellow travelers, and getting in at 3 PM the day before left us with not a lot of time to enjoy Rome. However, 26 hours in Amsterdam with the opportunity to adjust our sleep to the new time zone, sign me up. We’ll get to walk along the canals and have dinner in downtown Amsterdam and still make it into Rome right at the right time. That’s some damn good lemonade.