When I met Eleni, she was – to put it lightly – somewhat skeptical about the utility of collecting points and miles. Even recently, as we watched June of Honey-Boo-Boo fame collect dozens of coupons and use them to stockpile thousands of rolls of toilet paper, she jokingly compared the absurdity of June’s extreme couponing to my practice of “extreme male couponing” in the form of collecting points and miles.
I’m cautiously optimistic, however, that this honeymoon has turned Eleni into a believer. I’m not expecting any guest posts in the near future, but Eleni’s suggestion that I should talk to her sister about starting to collect points for her upcoming honeymoon was as close to “You-were-right-all-along-and-I’m-so-sorry-for-the-years-of-mockery” as I’m going to get. Plus, she was quite fond of her lie-flat seat on our flight to Honolulu:
Our mixed first/business class round-trip United flight between New York and Honolulu cost us 90,000 miles each at the “saver” rate. We had both taken advantage of targeted 50,000-mile signup bonuses for the United Explorer card last summer, so those bonuses covered 100,000 of the 180,000 miles that we needed. The other 80,000 miles were comprised mostly of miles we had earned the old-fashioned way (by flying), but we also topped off our United accounts by transferring a few thousand Ultimate Rewards points from our Chase Sapphire Preferred cards.
After a short hop from Honolulu to Kauai, we arrived at the St. Regis Princeville. Our five nights at the St. Regis were funded entirely with Starpoints, the vast majority of which were earned with our Starwood American Express cards. At the time we made our booking, the St. Regis was a category 6 property that cost 20,000 Starpoints per night.
Note: The St. Regis Princeville was one of the properties that moved up a category in Starwood’s 2013 category adjustments, so each night now costs 30,000 Starpoints.
When you redeem Starpoints for free nights, the fifth night of the reservation is free – so the five nights cost us only 80,000 Starpoints. If we had paid in cash, the best available rate was $650 per night (plus tax), so each Starpoint yielded well over 4 cents of value in this redemption.
Our view at the St. Regis Princeville.
From Kauai, we’ll travel to Tahiti and Bora Bora. Flights to and from French Polynesia are very difficult (and/or costly) to purchase with miles, so we paid cash for our flights from Hawaii to Tahiti and Tahiti to Bora Bora.
We’ll continue our Starwood-heavy honeymoon with a cash-and-points redemption at Le Meridien Tahiti, which is a category 5 property that cost us 4,800 Starpoints and $90 per night (we booked before the changes to the cash-and-points program became effective). At this time of year, each night at Le Meridien Tahiti typically sells for about $300, so this redemption will also yield over 4 cents per point. A cash-and-points redemption for a category 5 property like Le Meridien Tahiti now costs $110 and 6,000 points, however, so the same redemption would yield just over three cents per point under the new cash-and-points scheme.
Finally, we’ll be staying at yet another Le Meridien in Bora Bora. There was no cash-and-points option for this resort, and redeeming for free nights was not feasible because Le Meridien Bora Bora is one of the category 7 properties that is exempt from the normal 30,000 – 35,000 Starpoint range – and charges a whopping 135,000 Starpoints per night! We were, however, able to take advantage of the option to obtain a 50% discount off the rack rate for an overwater bungalow for a mere 1,000 Starpoints (total, not per night). This option isn’t discussed much because the discount is taken off the most expensive rate available for the room, and the resulting price is often comparable to, or in excess of, the best available rate, but it proved very useful in this situation. We weren’t gunning for a Starwood trifecta by any means, but we wanted to stay in an overwater bungalow in Bora Bora and the discounted rate in this instance was our best option.
So we’re burning through a lot of points and miles on this trip, but generating huge values on each redemption. Our Starwood and United accounts took particularly big hits — but better them than our bank accounts, right?