My original dream was to take three months to backpack Europe. I thought that I would be able to do a lot, get a feel for different cultures, stay in hostels, see the world and live the dream. When you're a college student, you can do that since you've got summers off. As an adult...well, it may be frowned upon to ask for more than a week off of work.
Thankfully, my husband has accumulated a lot of time off in his job. He's worked at his company for almost 7 years and with that comes the perks. We both talked about how much time he may be able to take off, and in the end, he only asked for 11 days off. That meant we could be gone a total of 18 days! [There was a holiday in there, too.]
I knew that this vacation would not be a cheap one. Several years ago, we decided to get a credit card that would help us pay for vacations. Please hear my heart when I say this...I am not advocating that you go out and get another credit card. I don't encourage you to go into debt. We paid cash for this vacation (and everything else in our life) because we pay our entire credit card off monthly, and I'm not saying that to brag, either. We do not spend money that we don't have. We do want to be a good steward of the money God has given us, and I do want to see the dollar stretched. We got the card to accumulate points to pay for parts of vacation. Our bank doesn't give us a very great ROI, but the credit card gives us what we want...the ability to travel for less.
We have had this card for 2 and a half years. My husband found it one day after hearing The Points Guy talk about it. Previously, we had a Southwest card that helped us rack up airline points. But after my husband stopped traveling for work, we gave it up. We didn't earn near as many points with it anymore and it wasn't worth the cost to us. We do still have some points left though, so it will help with a future domestic flight...probably to go cruising. HA!
Anyway, we talked it out and eventually applied for it. We got accepted and our cards were sent to us. Sidenote: we live in Oklahoma where we have to pay tolls. This card gives us $300 in travel credit every year, and it basically pays for most of our toll fees. That in itself was a huge perk. We started accumulating our points and it started adding up. I didn't even pay attention to our points until I started planning this vacation. We originally talked about having our points pay for our airfare. However, before we heard about Scott's Cheap Flights, we decided that we would rather the points pay for our hotels.
Chase has certain hotels that you can exchange points in return for a stay. I started researching and researching the different hotels and looking into our "points budget" that we had. We had almost 250,000 points that we could use. That was about 14,000-15,000 points per night. I had a running list of hotels in our budget range--and then I would add more because some of them would run deals. I'm a huge fan of review sites, so I used TripAdvisor to help give us a snapshot of what the majority of people said about the hotels. I also took into consideration the areas and hotels that Rick Steves talked about in his travel guides. [Spoiler: those travel guides were the best investment for our trip.]
Our criteria for hotels:
- at least 500 reviews on TripAdvisor
- at least a 4-star rating on TripAdvisor
- close to the things we wanted to see and do OR
- close to public transit
- a safe part of town
- in our "points budget"
- breakfast is always a huge perk
I've got to be honest, when we start researching something, we research it to death. I think we looked at hotels for a month before we actually booked something. But in the end, it was all worth it. We used every last point that we had accumulated and spent less than $150 on 16 nights of hotels. We loved every hotel that we stayed at, and being able to stay in hotels was amazing. Don't worry. I'll share the hotels with you later as I recap the trip. ;)
Having a specific travel card made this trip a lot easier and more affordable for us. It's not necessary, but it was a perk.
Other Posts in this Series:
London #1
Other Posts in this Series:
London #1
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