Points Planning for Maui

One thing we’ve learned since getting into the reward points traveling game is that it takes a lot of planning ahead.  So even though we just finished booking our big trip for May, it’s already time to start planning our next adventure.  While we’d love to book another 2 week multi-city trip, it’s not very realistic with our work schedules to take this much time off in the same year.  That being said, we are going to be working toward a free trip to a single location for this fall…Maui.

Being that Lacey and I have just begun planning for this trip, it would be perfect timing for any of you that are interested in taking a similar vacay, to start planning with us.

After receiving some excellent tips from our friends in regards to rewards traveling to Hawaii, Lacey and I have settled on our initial plan.  Here goes…

Step 1: Getting free Hotels

We just signed up for the Chase Hyatt Card.  The reward bonus for this card is 2 free nights at a Hyatt property.  We’re looking forward to using these rewards to stay at the beautiful Andaz Maui.  With Lacey and I both signing up for this card, we’ll obviously receive 4 free nights total.   We’re only looking to spend 5-6 nights in Maui total, so this Hyatt card is going to take care of most of our hotel costs for this trip.  This card has $0 in sign up fees and only has a spending requirement of $1,000 over 3 months to receive the 2 free nights.  Pretty awesome!  We’re still going to work on getting 1-2 more free nights for the trip but haven’t yet decided on where we want to stay.  I have my eye on the Grand Wailea Resort from Hilton 😉

Step 2: Get Free Flights

Once we get the reward nights from the Chase Hyatt card for the hotel stays (likely 2 months-ish from now), we’ll start working on our free flights.  The tentative plan right now is to use the British Airways card for our travel.  British Airways partners with American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, as well as some others that should help give us some solid options for traveling from Boise to Maui.  The rewards we’ll receive from the sign up bonus should be enough to get us to Maui, but if not, there are a few different cards we could get from partners of BA to help supplement our airline points.  As we’re still a couple months out from signing up for the BA card,  this plan could very well change depending on any new rewards offers that other airlines may come out with this spring.  We’ll keep you posted if we find any better options.

Step 3: Get Free Stuff in Maui

Thanks to some awesome advice from our new friend Bryce at 10xtravel.com, we now know that if we take the Capital One Venture card on our vacation with us…and use it for all additional expenses at the hotel (food, spa service, excursions, etc.),  the reward bonus of 40,000 points we’ll receive from this card will help us wipe out up to $400 of expenses during this trip.  Pretty awesome tip!  There are obviously exclusions and exceptions that you’ll want to read about before assuming the types of travel expenses this card will take care of, but if used correctly, this card will be a huge help.

To wrap it up for now, Lacey and I are super excited at the opportunity to travel more this fall.  We’ll keep you updated on our progress towards Maui.  Let us know if you have any questions, tips, or anything else you’d like to share.

 

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