5 Days in Hawaii on miles and points

Another month, another wedding right? While my side of the family is pretty much all married, my wife’s side has lots of weddings coming up. This was my first destination wedding, and you can’t really do better as a destination than Hawaii. We were in Honolulu, and the lodging was a VRBO vacation rental, so no points can be used for that (well maybe A+ but I wasn’t the one booking it.) Here’s how I used miles and points for the rest of the trip though.

Retail Cost – $1275 per ticket so $2550 total

Cash Cost – $559 + $145 ($99 + $46 in fees) = $704 + $150 upgrade certs = $854

Points Used – None

Once again, I used a Bank of America Alaska Visa card $99 companion certificate. Remember, this card is churnable, so really, you should always have a $99 companion certificate handy (especially if you live in Seattle.) Now, I actually could have used points, but it would have cost me 40,000 points per person round trip IN COACH, and I would have only gotten 1.4c ($559 / 40K) of value, which is a terrible value for AS miles.  Now I do need to note that I actually booked this in COACH since the companion cert only works for coach seats. However, a buddy of mine gave me 2 upgradeable certs and I bought 2 more from him. To use the certs, I had to buy upgradeable U class tickets, which was luckily the same price as the lowest coach ticket. If you didn’t have those certs, you can buy them on eBay for $75 each one-way, and for a 5+ hour flight, I’ll gladly pay the $75 for the extra comfort, food, and drinks instead of the extra $300+ cash cost.

Retail Cost – $559

Cash Cost – $11 + $112.15 (manufactured) = $123.15

Points Used – 20,000

So I booked my buddy his flight to Hawaii as well. Since he didn’t have a +1 to the wedding, using a companion certificate wouldn’t have worked. I knew the cheapest roundtrip POINTS option to Hawaii from the West Coast is using Virgin America points. Since Virgin doesn’t fly a Seattle to HNL route, that wouldn’t have worked. However, they are partners with Hawaiian Airlines, and Hawaiian flies a direct Seattle to HNL. I had to look on the Hawaiian site to see if there was award availability. Once I found the flights I wanted, I called up Virgin’s Elevate redemptions desk and told them the flights I wanted. It was pretty painless. This redemption got me 2.2c of value ($559-$123=$436 / 20K).

Now how did I get 20K Virgin miles? Well, back in December of 2014, I could buy AMEX gift cards from their portal to get 2X miles. It cost me $3.95 per $3000 gift card, and so I bought 3.33 of them for $10K which earned me 2X = 20K points ($13.15 AGC fees). I then took those $10K of Amex GCs to a drugstore to convert them to Visa gift cards, which I then loaded my Target Red Card. This cost me $4.95 per $500 and I had $10K, so that’s 20 cards * $4.95 = $99. Now that all of this is no longer an option, I’m just going to apply for their credit card and earn them the hard way – 1 pt per $1 spend.

Retail Cost – $143 initially

Cash Cost – $96 Autoslashed

Points Used – None

No points on car rentals or no good redemptions on car rentals. I wanted to outline how I got this car rental for the lowest price possible. Initially, I had booked this 5 day car rental on http://carrentals.com/ for $143 for a COMPACT CAR through Economy [car rental company.] Who is that? I have no clue. At the time of the booking, Costco car rentals had this for $134. However, I don’t have a Costco card (because I HATE the parking and the crowds at Costco.) Anyway, right after I booked the car through http://carrentals.com/, I then entered in the confirmation at http://Autoslash.com/ Since Economy is too small, I had to forward my confirmation email to Autoslash. Within 30 minutes (I was shocked), Autoslash said they found an INTERMEDIATE CAR through Alamo for $134, basically matching the Costco price. Sweet! Then a week later, Autoslash told me they found a lower price at $119 for the same car. Then 4 days before my reservation, it got it down to $96. All I had to do was cancel my original Economy reservation myself. I didn’t have to do anything with all the latest Alamo reservations (I just used the confirmation number on the $97 RSVP on checkin.) Then when I checked in, they ran out of INTERMEDIATE cars and gave me a free upgrade to an SUV. If I didn’t use Autoslash, I would have paid $143 for a COMPACT car instead of $97 for an SUV.

Total Retail cost – $3,252

Cash Cost – $1,073

Total Points redeemed – 20,000 points

So using my BoA AS Visa card and some upgrade certs, I got my 2 first class flights for about 1/3 of the actual price. I then only paid 22% of the retail cost of the Hawaiian Air flight. Thus, I saved around $2,200 for my flights. I then used Autoslash to save ~$50 on my car rental.