It is surreal to be writing this blog. A little under one year and a half ago I was living my life not even knowing there was a whole points and miles world out there, and now here I am writing about booking a trip for 2 to Paris and London for only a few hundred dollars!
Below is the points and cash breakdown for our 8 day and 7 night trip to Paris and London next summer.
Hotels
I booked both hotels through Hyatt using my Chase Ultimate Reward points. I made sure to do my research and as soon as the schedule opened for hotels I booked them. It’ll be helpful to book your hotels a year in advance because Hyatt has a small footprint in Europe, so once someone takes the points rooms, they’re gone. Hyatt opens their calendar up to 395 days in advance, so my advice to you would be to stalk their page and as soon as you see it available, transfer your points and book it.
That’s how I was able to book the category 8 Park Hyatt Paris Vendome for 4 nights. Each night was 45,000 points, so we paid a total of 180,000 points. Right now when I looked up the cash price of a room in that hotel it was going for $2,038 per night!
For London I booked the category 6 Great Scotland Yard Hotel for an additional 3 nights at 25,000 points per night. Cash price per night is $599.
7 nights is costing us 255,000 Chase points and $0.
Flights
I tried to book flights as soon as the airlines released their schedules, which is about 11 months from when you want to take your flight. If you will struggle with this because you’re still trying to build points you can book flights 6-9 months away and still find availability so do not worry. It’s just a personal rule of mine to try to book as close to a year out as possible.
I did my research and found these airlines to be the best deal. I used a mix of Chase points and American Express points. Which airlines you use will depend on where you live and which airlines fly out of there. To do your research you must create free accounts with the airlines to be able to see their points flights cost. Once I decided which flight I wanted, I transferred my points from Chase or American Express and booked immediately.
LAX to Paris– I booked our flight with AirFrance. Cash price for 2 people for this flight would have been $2,474, but instead I paid 79,000 points and $126. Each flight was costing 46,500 points but since American Express was holding a 25% bonus when you transferred points to AirFrance, it ended up being less than that. I only had 59,000 amex points in my account so I transferred that and then I had to transfer the rest from Chase for a total of 79,000 points.
Paris to London – I also booked this with AirFrance. Cash price would have been $356 but I paid $78 and 18,000 Chase points.
London to LAX – I chose to go with Virgin for this return flight because it was the cheapest points flight. Cash price would have $4,446 but instead I paid 30,000 points and $559.
3 separate flights for 2 people cost us 127,000 points and $763.
Bringing our grand total to $763 cash and 382,000 Chase and American Express points
