As I discussed in the previous post, the upcoming road trip would be to Colorado, hitting many national parks and other adventures along the way. Two weeks, four adult (or almost adult) people…. So once we know where we are going, the next logical question is where to stay?
While we enjoy all types of travel, from camping to hotels, tent camping is cumbersome, especially if you have to set a tent in the evening and then pack everything in the car in the morning and get on the road. For that reason we decided to avoid camping during this trip and look for more upscale accommodations (hotels and Arb&b stays).
This is when I made an amazing discovery: having Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) points and being able to transfer them to Hyatt to book very nice Category 1/2 hotels is a godsend! I recently signed up for Chase Preferred Credit Card offer, which had 80,000 UR points if you spend $4,000 in the first three months. The welcome bonus made it totally worthy of its $95 annual fee, as you will see below.
So, the list of accommodations during the trip is as follows:
- Hyatt Place Boise/Towne Square – 1 night, $0 (savings of $249), 5,000 UR points
- Hyatt Place Moab – 3 nights, $0 (savings of $966), 24,000 UR points
- Hyatt House Colorado Springs – 2 nights, $0 (savings of $430), 10,000 UR points
- Glenwood Hot Springs Resort – 3 nights, $1,230
- The Hostel, Teton Village – 2 nights, $350
- Days Inn, West Yellowstone – 1 night, $292
- The Big Loft Suite, Coeur D’Allene – 2 nights, $312
In total, we have reserved accommodation for 14 nights, for the total price of $2,184 and 39,000 UR points (which saved us $1,645, which is not bad at all!).
As you can see, I used 39,000 UR points (less than half of the welcome bonus) and saved more than $1,600. This is my first real attempt at travel hacking, and I am very much pleased with the results. I can see more credit card travel hacking in the future 🙂
The most expensive accommodation is Glenwood Hot Spring Resort. However, the nightly price include the unlimited free access to the Hot Springs pool, which costs $31 per person, $124 daily expense. Other accommodations in the area are also priced at about $250-300 per night, which makes staying at the resort totally worthy. Besides, I wanted to indulge in a nice hotel and start/end my day with soaking in the hot spring pool without worrying about getting there and potentially not buying the passes for a given day.
So, this is our accommodation plan for the upcoming road trip. It ended up being more luxurious than any other road trips we’ve taken, in huge part due to staying for free at Hyatt hotels. We are going on the trip in a week – can’t wait!