Introduction
Tuesday's the big day....Kelsey and I leave on our second big trip funded completely for the most part on miles and points. If you will remember back to October I was struggling to find open award space on AA or any of its partners to be had over the Christmas holiday time. I quickly learned my lesson to book as early as you can if you know you want to take a trip on points over the holidays.
The itinerary we finally ended up with wasn't ideal on its face, DCA-JFK and JFK-Milan in AA coach on Christmas and then London to JFK in AA First on New Year's Day, but when it's just about the only availability you can find...you go for it.
Our original path to get from Milan to London was to take the train to Zurich, Paris and London to hit a few extra sites along the way. For hotel stays we were going to use the four free nights we earned with the Hyatt Visa Card and a mixture of Chase Ultimate Rewards points and Priority Club points that we had on hand. But once we started booking our hotels we hit a brick wall. The famed and many times reviewed Hyatt Paris Vendome was not available for the dates we wanted so we quickly crossed Paris off the list and shifted our itinerary over to Milan, Zurich, Geneva and then flying to London.
We were able to book nights at the Park Hyatt Milan, Park Hyatt Zurich, Intercontinental Geneva and the Hyatt London Churchill and that was the plan until earlier this week when many blogs began finding the Hyatt 50% off sale that JD mentioned saved him a few bucks on his trip to Tokyo coming up. I decided to do some digging to see if it would help us at all as well. What I found was totally unexpected....for about $150 I could book rooms at the Hilton Milan (which is right next to the train station for our train from Milan's airport and our train to Zurich) and the DoubleTree by Hilton Westminister in London. In return I could pull back one of my free nights from Hyatt and 22,000 Hyatt points I had used to book another night...thus opening the door to more stays at luxury Hyatt locations in the spring. I saw this as a great investment because as a Hilton Gold member I will get free wifi and free breakfast so that $150 starts shrinking even more when you think of saved costs. It also was great to save back a few Hyatt nights that I can use again in the future for even better bookings and trips.
I think this shows that no matter how set you are in your reward booking, always keep your eyes and ears open to other possibilities and weigh your options. Though I will end up paying for a few more nights at a hotel than I thought I would, it will still work out in the end. I'm excited for this trip and I can't wait to visit new places that I have never been before. I hope you will follow along and will read the trip report once it's all done. :)
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