Hey all. My kiddo woke me up way too early so I thought I’d use this time to (try to) catch up.
I haven’t been around much because I’ve been busy, but also so exhausted. The long weekend didn’t really help, despite staying local, what with spending time with the kiddo and trying (finally) to get our home in order for the new year. Is it still only January?
The churn goes on!
I finished my CS Platinum and Hilton Aspire MSRs way too quickly, and both SUBs posted promptly. I got a 15k MR/$2k MSR retention offer on my Gold, despite spending over $30k on its 4x categories last year. Not great, but not bad considering it’s a card I’m keeping anyway. I guess the takeaway is spend, but don’t spend too much on only the bonus categories? I’m taking the MSR on my Biz Platinum a little more slowly, and spending organically where it makes sense on the rest of my Amex cards to keep the pop ups away. Meanwhile, DW is on her way to building up her MR balance. She finished the MSR on her 45k MR Green and we used the Away credit to get a blush pink carry on for DD that she happily wheeled around on our trip to Hawaii. DW also finished up her 25k MR Biz Green and picked up the tiered 75k MR Biz Gold recently. DW also got the Hyatt card, and I plan to get my own sometime after I get back under 5/24. It’ll be a long couple of months until then.
On redemptions, I don’t know if it’s premature to say, but we bought DVC at Aulani —
with points. We’re still doing the paperwork and the balance isn’t due for a few weeks, but yeah, we've got our DVC account and points and – it’s happening!
This is something DW and I had thought about for years, but the timing or budget never seemed right. Meanwhile, we’ve spent some part of our last four holidays at Aulani as well as an impromptu trip there last October, and too many thousands of dollars on Disney Gift Cards. And we’ll likely keep returning to Aulani as long as we continue to visit family in Hawaii. It just made sense. And it really is our happy place. We looked into resale, and we took a tour while at Aulani (and scored $150 in Disney Gift Cards), and in the end we felt more comfortable buying direct and adding on via resale later. And hey, we'll get a "blue card"! Although we’re probably getting a little more than half the value going direct vs. resale, being comfortable with the purchase was important, and we’ll get the 2019 UY points that we've noticed are [along with 2020 UY] often stripped from a lot of contracts on the resale market, and that gives us some time to find a resale contract that’ll work as an add-on. We just had to make the money work. So I’ve cashed out 1.2 million MR and 500k UR to fund our purchase, and we don’t have to worry about anything out of pocket or when we'll "break even." We’ll hit several MSRs with this purchase, and pay for it with cash from points. It’s a tidy circle.
I never thought about using credit card rewards to buy DVC, but then
@hulagirl put the thought into my head. Thank you for the inception,
@hulagirl.
And special thanks to
@calypso726,
@3 DD love princesses,
@PolyRob,
@speedyfishy,
@wendow,
@kmc8826,
@striker1064,
@vanjust14,
@bernina, and anyone else I might’ve missed for all the encouragement and advice along the way.
I was looking at award space on United for next Christmas over the weekend, and wow dynamic pricing is really in effect. Last year, I was able to book saver award seats to HNL for 22.5k miles per person, each way. This year, economy saver awards are running 45k miles per person, each way. I think I’m going to have to try a different approach this year.
But hey, while I was clicking around United’s schedule, I noticed I could fly my family to Japan over Thanksgiving week for 35k miles per person, each way. So I’m going to! (I think we’re going to be in Japan while
@ten6mom is still there!) It’s crazy to think United will fly us all the way to Japan for fewer miles than it would take to fly to Hawaii. But here we are. So a little past midnight, with my ladies asleep, I made a snap decision to forego our family tradition of spending Thanksgiving at
Disneyland and taking the family to Tokyo instead. If we spend Thanksgiving Day at Tokyo Disneyland, that still counts right? Anyway, I booked our flights using United miles. Sadly, no lie flat seats for us. I’m flying a family of 3 and have a little redshirt who’s not in the game yet, so I need to budget our points and miles. I’ll be using my airline fee credits to bump us up to Economy+. I transferred some UR over to Hyatt and booked three nights at the Andaz Toranomon Hills for 30k/night. I used Hilton points, and booked three more nights at the Hilton Tokyo Bay for 80k/night. I need to math that last one out. Anyway, it’s an amazing feeling to have planned all this out in less than two hours, and very humbling to realize I have the points and miles to do all of this. I ran all this by DW in the morning, and she eagerly agreed it was a good change of pace. But before then, it was 2 a.m., and like my man Ted Mosby said,
Keep on churning on!
Taxes and fees are part of an airline ticket purchase. Imho maybe they give it to you via chat if you try something along the lines of X amount of fees on AA haven’t been reimbursed yet. “Selecting seats” in MCE by chance or paying for bags? Because that’s covered.
Agree with the unpredictability. Until things post with Amex, all I'm doing is 
