Family European Vacations on Points
My youngest is graduating next year. When my oldest graduated he picked London for his graduation trip. I flew us all to London for free and then paid for our Hotel In London. The hotel in London had an executive lounge (free for Diamond members). The Hilton Executive Lounge included free breakfast for our family and heavy appetizers and drinks in the evening. I tried to eat as many meals in the lounge as possible to save money. Now that my boys are older and we are on totally different sleep schedules almost all our trips require two rooms if it is the 4 of us. To book European travel it is best to start early so I knew that in June of this year, I would start looking for point availability for next summer.
Mid 2023 I started collecting Membership Rewards (American Express points). I got sign-up bonuses for both the Amerian Express Gold and Platinum cards. I knew flights to Europe would be a lot of points for a family of 4 and the best way to do this would be to use an Amex Transfer partner. My oldest is a freshman in college. I got him an American Express Gold card to buy his meals on campus. I get 4 points per dollar for his meals. Thanks to an 18-year-old boy’s appetite these quickly added up. My motto is “No point left behind” for a reason. I then switched my Rakuten Account from cash to Membership rewards. Points are worth more than cash when you transfer them to American Express Travel Partners. These added up quickly and when it came time to book airfare for next summer, I was pleased to see I had over 400k membership rewards.
The next question is who do I transfer these to and how many? This used to overwhelm me. i would spend hours doing searches to make the most of my points. I was about to purchase a membership to a site that helps you figure this out. I was still debating it when American Express announced a partnership with point.me to get this for FREE! when you have an American Express Platinum card. Here is a link to the website Book Travel with Points | Award Flight Search & Booking | Point.me. So instead of doing hundreds of searches I could put in my dates and it did it for me. It was so easy! I cannot believe I used to be so scared of this part. I booked 4 flights to Prague from Atlanta on points. We just had to pay taxes on the flights.
When I start looking at hotels I always look at Hyatts they have the best points program. When I started looking at hotels in Prague I found an old monastery that is now a hotel. It gets great reviews and it was 3,500 points a night, yes 3,500! I ended up booking a suite for us and a regular room for the boys for a total of 66,000 points for 6 nights. If I had booked this with cash it would be over $2500.
