We have another parent’s weekend coming up in October 2022, and this time Daniel and Jessie are tagging along.
Hmmm, where to stay???
Luckily, myself, Rob, and my mother all got offers at the beginning of the year to earn a free night (at any property) for spending $8k by 2/28 on our American Express Hilton Honors Aspire Cards.
After putting much of Rob’s business spending and some Greek life dues on all three cards, I am happy to report that we had three free nights to play with.
I decided to try to use these new free nights for our upcoming stay in LA and was pleased to learn that there is a brand new Conrad Hotel in LA that is beginning to accept reservations in May. I was excited about this as we liked the FREE Conrad we stayed at on our trip to Singapore a few years ago. And, yay, standard rooms were available at the LA Conrad for the weekend in October. So, I easily used these 3 Free Night Awards to book one room. Note, I can add myself as a guest in the room under my mom (right on the Hilton site), which allows me to check-in. Also, note that I need to contact the hotel to link these three separate bookings to stay in the same room all three nights. Traveling for free requires a little bit of extra work at times, but I’ll take it!
Now, our kids are a bit too big and messy and annoying to stay in the same room with Rob and me at this point. So another room was a must. For this second room, I cashed in 270,000 Hilton Honors points for three nights (standard rooms require 90,000 points per night), but I had a stash of Hilton Honors points already after all of the spending on the cards, as well as being able to get the points from Rob and my mom via points pooling. And for the amount I was short (about 200,000), I easily transferred 100,000 American Express Membership Rewards points into my Hilton Honors account, which yielded me the additional 200,000 points I was short. (Amex pts transfer to Hilton Honors at a 1: 2 exchange rate now).
As for my savings on the rooms….each room would have been about $650 apiece. So $1950 per room.
As for my free night certificates-that is free travel worth $1950!!
As for the points I used….. let’s do a value calculation in which I lost value but am good with it because I did not want to shell out the $!
Amex points are valued at about 2 cents per point, and I needed to transfer 100,000, so that is $2000 in Amex points I used. And Hilton points are usually valued at about .6 of a cent, and I used 70,000, which is about $420 in value.
So, yes, I used about $2400 in value of rewards for a room that just would have cost $1950. But like I said, I am ok with that. Sometimes, I am willing to lose some value to travel for free.
And as for our flights…
We each used 63,000 Delta SkyMiles on the direct flights to and from LA. And we automatically get the upgrade to comfort seating because Rob is PLATINUM MEDALLION on Delta-yay! We are loving that. These flights would have been about $1,000 apiece (on Comfort), so about $4,000 in total! As for value, Delta SkyMiles are valued at about 1.5 cents per mile, and we used 252,000 or about $3780 in value. I consider this pretty much a wash. But I’ll consider it $4000 in free travel.
