Here’s a quick update on my travel hacking in 2018. This year I went to:
- Singapore
- Ecuador
- Portland
- Atlanta x2
- Oregon Coast
- Upstate New York
- (Planned) Costa Rica
- (Planned) Mexico
It wasn’t a travel hacking extravaganza like last year since a lot of these flights were a better deal to buy in cash, but I was able to decrease my costs in the following ways:
Costa Rica Trip
We’re going to Costa Rica to celebrate my Mom’s 60th birthday! This flight originally cost $730 and I bought it for 41,000 Delta Skymiles and $80 in taxes for a redemption of 1.58 cents/mile, which is slightly higher than Delta’s valuation according to The Points Guy!
SAVINGS: $650
Mexico Trip
We were originally going to go to Kauai to celebrate my 30th birthday, but the house we wanted fell through and we didn’t find anything that excited us as much as that one, so we looked into other options with our only criteria being “it’s warm and not too far.” After looking around the world we settled on Puerto Vallarta! This flight originally cost $722 and I bought it for 46,000 Delta Skymiles and $96.26 in taxes for a redemption of 1.57 cents/mile. Very nice.
SAVINGS: $625.74
Additional Savings
Earlier this year I had a little over 13,000 United miles that were going to expire. I looked into my options and since I wasn’t flying United any time soon or any of their partners I thought that was all I could do and resigned myself to just letting them expire…mostly out of spite (I don’t love United). But luckily another option presented itself. I discovered that I can trade miles for other things, such as gift cards.
Even though it’s not as good of a return as using miles for flights it was more than nothing. So I used the miles to get a $50 Amazon Gift Card that I used to help buy my free Kindle (scroll to the bottom for that update) and a $23 Chipotle Gift Card that will set me up for approximately 50% of my annual Chipotle costs. Mmmm – delicious.
SAVINGS: $73
TOTAL 2018 TRAVEL HACKING SAVINGS: $1,348.74
Not as wild as previous years, but that’s almost my entire monthly budget. I’ll take it!
How has your 2018 been? Have you had any discount wins?
Delta is usually stingy with their miles, so it’s great that you were able to get valuations better than the Point’s Guy.
Since I travel a bit for work I am still in the status chasing mode and haven’t really done vacations with our points.
I did use them recently to have my sister come into town last minute when I was in the hospital and got a $440 ticket for only 25,000 miles (1.76 cents). And this summer I had to go to the UK for work. Dragon Gal joined me and I was able to get get an $1,800 ticket for only 60,000 miles plus $200 in taxes (UK really gets you on the taxes!). Both of these were with United.
Happy Holidays!
And you say you haven’t really done flights with points?! Those are some awesome deals! I’m so glad you’re feeling better! Happy Holidays indeed!
Thank you for the tip about the United miles for gift cards- I had no idea you could do that and I have some miles expiring soon too!
Yes indeed! Let me know how it goes for you. So happy I could help!
If you can transfer United points to a friend…. I am here. Crowdsourcing for points (and currently saving points for a big trip).
Those are some awesome trips in the books.
Usually that incurs a fee, but I’ll keep it in mind for the future lol! Where are you going on your big trip? And thank you!
We are working on a trip to Japan.