Hyatt is the Best Value for Your Money
Big Rewards with the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card
Easy Points Conversion
Over $1,000 in Rewards
More Travel Hacking with Another Credit Card?
Welcome back to another exciting installment of our journey into travel hacking! If you’re new to the concept, “travel hacking” is all about scoring free or nearly free travel deals by leveraging big credit card sign-up offers and optimizing reward points.
After reviewing our yearly expenses, I realized we needed to save money on our family vacations. We love traveling to new places, so if I could apply even a few travel hacking strategies, it would be a big win.
To recap, in our first post, we set a goal to travel to Orlando, Florida to visit Universal Studios and other attractions. Our first mission was to score free flights. By targeting the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card and combining the 50,000 Chase Ultimate Reward point intro offer with points from our everyday Chase Freedom card, we landed $1,400 in free airfare. Mission #1 accomplished!
In the second post, we moved on to securing a free hotel stay. After exploring various credit card offers, we found that another Chase card provided the best deal.
So, did we achieve Mission #2? Absolutely! And we’re covering that in this post. But we didn’t stop there. We also completed Mission #3 by getting a rental car for free. This adventure is adding up to thousands in savings, and we’re still not done!
Here’s how we managed to get our hotel and rental car for almost nothing:
From our research, Hyatt hotels had the best rewards program in terms of point-per-dollar conversion. We chose Hyatt Place Orlando Universal for several reasons. Interestingly, the more luxurious Hyatt Regency Orlando down the street cost more per night and didn’t offer free parking or breakfast, proving that pricier doesn’t always mean better.
Out of all the credit card offers, the Chase Sapphire Reserve card was the best choice for booking this Hyatt. Despite the $450 annual fee, the card offers a plethora of benefits:
A total of at least $1,600 in rewards for a $450 fee—almost quadrupling your money. Plus, you earn 3x points on dining and travel, which suits our spending habits perfectly. We quickly met the spending requirement and scored 100,000 intro points.
Signing up for the Hyatt Gold Passport program was super easy and free. After getting my Hyatt membership number, I transferred the necessary points from Chase to Hyatt instantly. We booked the hotel without spending a penny beyond the credit card fee.
The retail price for the Hyatt would have been $1,238, but we saved $788!
Then, I used our Chase Sapphire Reserve $300 travel credit to book a rental car. After comparing several travel websites, I found Budget had the best deal: $277 for a week with a Ford Explorer, ideal for our family of four. The travel credit was applied instantly, reducing the cost to zero.
So far, between airfare, hotel, and rental car, our total retail cost would have been $2,915. We spent only $450, saving $2,465!
But we’re not done yet. We still have about 65,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points. We might use them for $650 in cash for amusement park tickets and food, or save them for 2018 travel plans.
Come January, we’ll get another $300 travel credit, likely used for airport parking and baggage fees. Given how easy these savings have been, I’m considering another rewards bonus. Many travel hackers open multiple cards per year to leverage these deals, and though I won’t go that far, one more card might make this vacation truly unforgettable.
Stay tuned for more!
