How I got a $20,000 Honeymoon for free?

How I got a $20,000 Honeymoon for free?

My Honeymoon Travel Plans

[caption id="attachment_463" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Stephi and Jason"][/caption]

Normally, I don’t write too much about my personal life on here, but for this post we’ll go there.  On New Year’s Eve, 2004, I met the sweetest and most caring girl in the world.  I know everyone says that, but this girl is THE BEST!  The two of us got engaged last year.  The wedding is December 18th (yes, next week) and we leave for our three week honeymoon shortly thereafter.

 

I want to start by thanking Rick of FrugalTravelGuy.com for getting me started in this world and always being there to answer all the questions that would come up!  Thanks Rick!

 

The Honeymoon. 
Three weeks of Air France Business class flights to Rome, Barcelona, and Paris, 4 & 5 star hotels, a luxury vacation rental, and whatever activities we want.  I recently priced the flights on Delta’s site, and the flights were taking would have cost us a total of just over $18,000.  Add in a few thousand more for the hotel and apartment rentals and we’re well over $20,000 in travel expenses.
What did I pay to book all of this?  Nothing, I actually made around $70.  How?  Let’s look at it.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Rome"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="422" caption="Barcelona"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="357" caption="Paris"][/caption]

The Flights
The Air France Business Class flights were purchased through Delta’s website for 100,000 frequent flyer miles each.  So 200,000 miles total were spent.  These were obtained last year through a promotion where you could open a checking account to obtain 125,000 frequent flyer miles.  Two accounts were more than enough to obtain the miles needed.

The Hotels
I knew I wanted 4 and 5 star hotels the whole way, but I wanted some flexibility in choosing what brand hotels.  For this, I had opened the Capital One Venture Credit Card.  They had a promotion last year where they would match the number of miles you had in a competitor’s frequent flyer account.  From what I remember, I had them match either my Delta account or my American Airlines account.  Both accounts had over 100,000 miles on them, helping me earn 100,000 Venture points.  The card, which I love, earns me double miles on everything.  After putting a large amount of spending on the card, I earned a comparable size of miles bringing my balance even higher.  I booked the hotels on Priceline’s Name Your Own price for the 4-star hotel, found a good rate on a 5-star hotel via Kayak.com, and booked the garden apartment in Paris on AirBnb.com’s website.  All of these purchases went on my Venture card and I used my points to reimburse my travel purchases.  Your Venture points can be used to pay for purchases you charge to your card if they are deemed as “Travel” category purchases.

The Activities
This is where the Citi ThankYou Premier card came in.  After signing up from this card from Citi and getting the 50,000 point bonus, I put a few thousand more in spending on the card bringing my balance up somewhat higher.  These points really can be used for ANYTHING, as they say on the commercial.  I browsed through some of the travel packages they offer and booked a few tours and tickets for some things, but left about $500 of points free to book other activities that interest us while we actually are in Europe.  I booked them all on their sites after browsing to them through FatWallet.com (a site that offers cash back for online purchases), which is where I scored the roughly $70 cash back.
Only expense left is food, which I will have to cover!  I could have taken it a step further and bought some Groupons for restaurants over there, but that crosses into over planning.  I’ll be using my Chase Sapphire Preferred card (which had a sign up bonus of 100,000 points) and pays double points on dining.

-Jason of TWiBT