OMG.. there are no words on how we made this possible in less than a year.. Why shared this with you? simply because you can do it too.. We started a year and a half ago by opening 2 credit cards…. ( I think I lost you on this all ready, but I promise you it gets better and I dont use that term lightly)… Well, we had a pretty low credit score as it was, had student loans, mortgage and a few other store credit cards so how did we get approved? I don’t know but it didn’t hurt to try, and we did..
Well, here is how we made it possible..
We applied for Chase Sapphire Reserve (meaning just one credit card under my husband name) This credit card offered 50K points if make purchases of $4000 in 3 months, we did just that in less time and saw our 50K and 3K extra points for the charges made. As time passed by we paid all of our expenses using this credit card and another one since we applied for 2 at that same time. We build credit and paid our balances before the credit card statements were sent out.
As you can see the same deal I saw last year is still available as of today.. Always read the fine print (something you learn to do when couponing) The first year there is no annual fee but the following year an amount of $95 will be added to your statement. Adding the benefits you get from this card the fee is so well worth it.
Well back to how we made our trip possible. I will share briefly but will go into details on a future post of how our trip went..
Now that we had accumulated enough points for 2 round trip tickets, we are now ready to start booking our trip.
Ready to book our trip using points
We transfer 50K points to Korean Air which is the airline that provides the least amount of points when traveling to Hawaii. Once we completed the paperwork and transfer our points we then called Korean Air to find availability and book our flight. There are other options you can transfer your points to, that can be a little bit more smoother.
Our flight was booked on the phone with Korean Air but the actual flight airline was Delta.
Our Flight total
Our flight from Florida to the Big Island of Hawaii for 2 people was $44.80 and 50k points.
We were able to reach one of our travel goals simply by making some changes in less than 2 years.
Here was our 2nd plane from Delta (from LA to Kona airport) the flight was about 5 hrs 30 min and by the time we got there it was around 7pm. While we waited for our connecting flight we spent some time on 2 private lounge which we had access to (from credit cards as well)
We had snacks, drinks, starbucks coffee, sandwiches, salads and more all included by being member to Priority Pass all provided by 2 credit cards we had.. (another bonus for applying to the right credit cards)
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Early Morning View
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Searching for Hawaiian Turtles
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Akaka Falls
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Plumeria Flower
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You can see from a couple that was very skeptical if this would work and if this could even be possible we can now testify that doing the research and making a few changes on our daily lifestyle going from using only cash to paying everything with credit cards have showed us that it is possible..
We saved just on the flight alone $1741.20
