And I’ve always wanted to take my Mom to Wimbledon (we’re a tennis family).
We had a trip booked a few years ago but it was canceled due to COVID.
I recently booked another trip for this summer & we are all so excited!
And, to top it off, we won the Wimbledon lottery and received 2 tickets on the front row of Centre Court. We’re pumped!
We are going to start the trip by flying up to Boston and spending a few days there first. We’ve heard that it helps with jet lag to take the daytime flight to London from Boston.
We booked the flight to Boston using Southwest points & our Companion Passes (where both of our daughters fly for free).
The first time I booked the trip to England, I booked with United Airlines. But this time I decided to book with British Airways.
For all 4 of us to fly from Boston to London & then back home was 29,250 points each.
I didn’t have British Airways Avios points, so I transferred 29,250 x 4 people = 117,000 points from my Chase Ultimate Rewards portal to British Airways since they are travel partners.
While you may be impressed by the low point total to get to Europe, British Airways charges a hefty tax even on points tickets. We could’ve paid that tax by also redeeming Chase Ultimate Rewards points, but we decided to just pay cash and save the points.
Because we are staying so long in England, we found that staying mostly in Airbnbs on points would use fewer points than booking hotels with points. Chase has a great feature in its Rewards Portal called “Pay Yourself Back” where we were able to redeem Chase points to pay for the Airbnbs. Because we received 50% more value with the points using our Chase Sapphire Reserve card, we were able to get great redemptions on the Airbnbs we chose for most of the nights we’re staying in England. We’re just staying in a hotel during our trip to the Cotswolds.
Here are our accommodations:
- Airbnb in London (7 nights) = $4,876
- Airbnb in Bath (2 nights) = $1,042
- Hotel in the Cotswolds (5 nights) = $2,255
- Airbnb in Windsor (2 nights) = $1,333
The total cost for our accommodations, had we paid the cash price above, would’ve been $9,506 for the 16 nights, but we were able to cover all of it with points and stay for free.
There’s likely no way we would’ve taken a trip this long if we didn’t have points accumulated from the Travel Hacking principles I teach in this newsletter, in my Free Hawaii Trip PDF guide, & in my Travel Hacking Course.
Paying for your future vacations with points is a great way to “earn” extra money by keeping money you would’ve otherwise spent traveling with your family.
