How We’ve Spent Our Frequent Flyer Miles and Points

Earlier this week, we showed you the plethora of credit cards we’ve applied for over the past five years, and how many bonus miles and points we’ve earned for our small effort. Today I’m going to list all of our award redemptions, flights, hotels and all.

Ha-Ling Peak, Canmore

We haven’t paid for a flight since 2011 when we flew to Calgary and stayed in Canmore in the Rocky Mountains for a week. It shouldn’t surprise you that, even though we actually paid cash for our flight, we still didn’t pay for our hotel that week. It was a timeshare week that was gifted to us from a family member. Got to keep it frugal! Without the free accommodations, we probably wouldn’t have gone.

Andes, Peru

Just like earning miles, there is a method to the madness of spending them. You want to maximize their value. Different airlines are on different airline alliances, meaning you can use their miles on certain other airlines. So certain miles are better to redeem for some destinations than others. Airlines each have their own award charts showing how many miles it will take to fly to different regions. To make it even more complex, there are peak and off-peak awards, routing rules you can avoid or take advantage of, airlines that do or do not charge fuel surcharges depending on the points used… I won’t even start to get into it. There are entire blogs devoted just to redeeming awards. And even after so many flights, I think I’m only at an intermediate level of knowledge on all of it.

Don’t lean on the electric fance

The following flights are all for two tickets, except for the trip to Vienna and Skopje, Macedonia, which I made alone. The cash values I assign come directly from the airline’s website, so take that with a grain of salt. Probably you could find a cheaper version of the same flight if you searched around.

Flights

Flight Airline, Class Date Points Used Cash Value
Albany to Aruba (RT) Delta, Coach Dec. 2012 120,000 $1,108
JFK to Vancouver Cathay Pacific, Coach Oct. 2013 25,000 $884
Vancouver to JFK Cathay Pacific, Business Oct. 2013 0 $3,710
JFK to Switzerland Air Berlin, Business May 2014 100,000 $3,703
Switzerland to JFK Lufthansa, Business May 2014 100,000 $5,500
Albany to Tampa (RT) Southwest, Coach May 2014 51,360 $900
Albany to Baltimore (RT) Southwest, Coach June 2014 20,316 $408
Newark to Skopje & Vienna (RT) Austrian, Coach Aug. 2014 60,000 $1,090
Albany to Orlando (RT) Southwest, Coach Oct. 2014 66,550 $1,110
Albany to Fort Myers, FL (RT) Southwest, Coach Jan. 2015 42,456 $744
JFK to Lima & Cusco (RT) Avianca & United, Business Mar. 2015 140,000 $5,238
JFK to Tokyo (RT) Japan Airlines, First Oct. 2015 250,000 $34,000
JFK to Chiang Mai, BKK to JFK Cathay Pacific, Business Jan. 2017 220,000 $10,192
19 Round Trip Tickets 1,195,682 $68,587

(RT) = Round Trip

That’s basically ten vacations without having to pay for flights. We’ve spent nearly 1 million miles on flights at this point.

Tokyo Conrad

Free Hotel Nights

City Hotel Date Nights Points Used Cash Value
Times Square, New York Intercontinental May 2013 1 50,000 $369
Clearwater Beach, FL Hyatt Regency May 2013 2 0 $858
Toronto Hilton Aug. 2013 3 52,500 $657
Vancouver Airport Hampton Inn Oct. 2013 1 8,000 $80
 Dusseldorf Intercontinental May 2014 1 0 $260
Zurich Hyatt May 2014 2 0 $1,808
Geneva Intercontinental May 2014 1 0 $380
Baltimore Candlewood Suites June 2014 1 10,000 $82
Orlando Waldorf Astoria Oct. 2014 2 0 $538
Soho, New York Four Points Nov. 2014 1 12,000 $460
Naples, FL Hilton Jan. 2015 2 60,000 $538
Fort Myers, FL Hilton Garden Inn Jan. 2015 2 40,000 $490
Fort Myers, FL Hilton Garden Inn, Airport Jan. 2015 1 30,000 $219
Manhattan Conrad Oct. 2015 1 0 $329
Osaka Intercontinental Oct. 2015 1 0 $275
Tokyo Conrad Oct. 2015 1 0 $680
Tokyo Bay Intercontinental Oct. 2015 1 0 $280
 Lake Placid, NY  Crowne Plaza June 2016 2 0 $340
26 Hotel Nights 262,500  $8,643

To be honest, some of those hotel stays were not completely free. The ones where no points were used were “free nights” we received in exchange for paying a credit card’s annual fee, for example the Chase Hyatt card which gave us 2 free nights for the $79 annual fee in the first year, or the IHG card which gives us a free night annually for $49.

In addition to the points-only stays, most of the hotel chains offer “Points + Cash” deals which can be an even better use of hotel points than using only points.

For example, for a 3 night stay in a Long Island Holiday Inn, we could either pay $170 a night or 15,000 points per night, or the Points + Cash deal, $70 plus 5,000 points. Do the math out and the Points + Cash deal is much better. Spending the 5,000 points would save you $100. Spending the extra 10,000 points for the points-only stay would only save an additional $70.

Geneva Intercontinental

Discounted Hotel Nights

Hotel Date Nights Points Spent Dollars Spent Cash Value
Westbury, Long Island, Holiday Inn Sept. 2013 3 15,000 $210 $510
Geneva, Intercontinental May 2014 1 25,000 $70 $380
Skopje, Macedonia, Holiday Inn Aug. 2014 3 15,000 $120 $504
Vienna, Hilton Sept. 2014 3 55,998 $201 $1,059
Tokyo Bay, Intercontinental Oct. 2015 1 25,000 $70 $280
11 Hotel Nights 135,998 $671 $2,733

Holiday Inn, Skopje, Macedonia

Miles & Points Balance

2,995,000 Earned through credit card sign-on bonuses
279,530 Earned through other methods
(1,594,180) Spent so far
1,680,350 Remaining Balance

What are those “other methods” we’ve used to earn miles? One is just normal credit card spending, then there are some weirder ones, like the times I opened up a bank account and an investment account for the bonus miles offers. Recently, there was an even weirder method for earning miles while I will be writing about on Monday.

Here’s another stat. The total Cash Value of miles and points spent above = $79,963

Using that as an average, our total balance remaining is worth $81,676 in travel! Clearly we have not been able to keep up with the amount of miles and points we’ve been earning, so we’ve got a lot of traveling left to do.

Join us… Join us… Join us in the frequent flyer mile cult!

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