biggest travel blunder

Thanks to points and miles, I planned a fabulous free trip to Prague for my entire family. I have had this planned for almost a year now. However, Prague was not in our future. When on a parent Facebook group for my boys college. I realized I had accidentally booked our trip during my son’s Finals.

After an initial moment of panic, I got to work.

First, I knew there was no way I was going on this trip without all of us going. My oldest is a junior in college. I feel like these family trips are going to end sooner than later. I started cancelling hotels and flights so we could see how many points and miles we would get back. We booked these flights in May of 2024, so I knew it would require more points to make a trip to Europe happen.

The hotel was easy; I canceled our reservation in Prague and received all my points back. I was within the cancellation policy. As for the flights, we booked those with Air France. I saw on the website that we would be charged a 70 euro penalty per ticket to get my miles back. Thank goodness I booked round-trip tickets instead of one-way. Our penalty would have been 560 euros instead of 280 euros. It stinks that I had to pay a penalty, but this was my error. It could have been much worse. I got my 166,000 flying blue miles back almost immediately after I hung up the phone with Air France to cancel the tickets.

Next, I headed to point.me to start looking at flights I could get round trip from Europe that wouldn’t take all our points and miles. I immediately ruled out Prague, I could not get decent flights on points and miles. I knew we would need to pivot. I started looking at big European Cities. Our boys have travelled quite a bit and I knew we wanted to visit somewhere new.

After a few searches, I found tickets from Nashville to Paris for 60,000 points each. These were more than I had paid for the tickets to Prague, but considering our trip is close, I took them. When we booked the Prague trip, we looked at a trip to Normandy.

My husband suggested staying in Rouen, a train ride away from Paris. When I looked it up, it looked perfect, and they had a Hyatt Place there that started at 5000 points a night. We booked two rooms there for less than 50,000 points for four nights. We plan on doing day trips from there. One to Mont St Michel and another one to the beaches of Normandy. After a few days in Rouen, we will take a train to Versailles to visit the palace. Then, we will head back to Paris to fly home.

In less than 12 hours, I booked a new trip for my son’s graduation. Thanks to points and miles, I am out around 300 dollars (Air France penalty). However, I was able to plan an amazing trip for our family. We only have to pay for one night of hotel and the taxes and fees from the airline tickets.