Joe has been traveling for work much more than he anticipated so far this year, so we thought trying to fit in a week trip would be a good way to ensure some family time! Since we are still new to the Asia travel experience, it is pretty easy to find availability with our dwindling points balances to go somewhere we haven’t been yet. We have been wanting to take the girls to Hong Kong Disneyland (which would leave just the two parks in Paris on the list, until Shanghai opens) and focused our efforts primarily around trying to find something in that part of Asia.
Like most things with Joe, travel planning can be really, really annoying, but this time he actually wasn’t too bad. After our New Year’s trip to 6 cities requiring 7 flights, we agreed that next time we would take a much more simple vacation with one destination. After some discussion, we thought we would try two places over eight days and see if that would be more reasonable. Next was figuring out how to do as much as we could using our miles and hotel points.
As usual, our millions of Delta miles, while actually pretty useful for one traveler, are incredibly difficult/impossible to use when you need them for a family of four. Joe has stopped flying Delta in large part due to how difficult it is to use the miles, but we still earn about 300,000 a year through various credit card related activities, but we may need to rethink putting any spend toward Delta miles. Since we were considering Hong Kong, we turned to our Chase Ultimate Rewards points, which are a transfer partner of British Airways, which partners with Cathay Pacific. We checked availability on the British Airways website, and to our surprise, found pretty good availability from Tokyo to Hong Kong despite being “Golden Week” at both locations. After tinkering around further, we decided to add Taipei as the second destination since it is only a two hour flight from Hong Kong.
Our new philosophy with miles and points amid all the massive devaluations is to use them any chance we have, and occasionally splurge to try out some of the premium cabins we couldn’t otherwise afford. We ended up booking the following itinerary using Chase Ultimate Rewards points transferred to British Airways Avios:
Tuesday, April 29 Tokyo Narita (NRT) to Taipei (TPE)
Friday, May 2 TPE to Hong Kong (HKG)
Wednesday, May 7 HKG to NRT
For the first flight, I will fly with Annie in first class, while Joe and Lizzy will try business class on the upper deck of the Cathay 747-400, which won’t be around much longer as they start to retire those gas guzzlers. Annie is already excited and Lizzy doesn’t know or care, so it seems like a fair way to distribute the seats. The two tickets in First Class cost 60,000 Avios plus $97.14 in taxes and fees while the two Business Class tickets cost 40,000 Avios plus $97.14. To be clear, this is by no means cheap or a great (even good) redemption for such a short flight, but we wanted to the chance to try out these cabins.
We will fly economy from TPE to HKG for the 1h 50min flight, and then all take business class back to Tokyo from HKG. Ideally, we would have liked to have taken First Class from HKG in order to try out the lounge in Hong Kong, but availability wasn’t there on the days that made sense. The four tickets in economy cost 18,000 Avios plus $148 in taxes and fees while the four Business Class tickets from HKG back to NRT cost 80,000 Avios plus $139.34. Again, this was not a great deal by any stretch, but it isn't always possible to maximize miles!
We will fly economy from TPE to HKG for the 1h 50min flight, and then all take business class back to Tokyo from HKG. Ideally, we would have liked to have taken First Class from HKG in order to try out the lounge in Hong Kong, but availability wasn’t there on the days that made sense. The four tickets in economy cost 18,000 Avios plus $148 in taxes and fees while the four Business Class tickets from HKG back to NRT cost 80,000 Avios plus $139.34. Again, this was not a great deal by any stretch, but it isn't always possible to maximize miles!
Next up was the hotel planning. As we have said before, with the hotel status we have at Starwood and Hyatt, we do try to book there because we feel we get good value from the perks offered. We ended up picking the Grand Hyatt Taipei over the W Taiepi for our three nights there. The first night was booked using our annual free night from having the Chase Hyatt credit card, which comes with a $75 annual fee. We booked the second and third nights using free night certificates earned from the recent Hyatt promotion, where if you stayed five nights, you received one free night at any Hyatt category 1-4. The all-in refundable cash rate for the days we were staying was $897 for the base room, so it was a solid use of the free nights.
We then looked to Hong Kong. Without getting into the details of the loyalty programs, we usually look to Starwood for the longer stays at one location since we qualify for Starwood Platinum status by staying 50 nights a year whereas we qualify for Hyatt Diamond by making 25 stays (regardless of nights stayed). We received a certificate (that expires July 31st) from Starwood for requalifying for Platinum last year that gives you 35% off a points stay up to five nights. Another great thing about the Starwood program is that when you stay five nights on points, the fifth night is free. Since we were staying for five nights, we tried to make this work, and lucky for us, things lined up perfectly. We booked five nights at the W Hong Kong. With the fifth night free and 35% off, it was only 10,400 points per night. The all-in refundable cash rate was $410/night, so while this wasn’t an amazing deal, it was good enough under the new philosophy of using the points whenever possible.
Next up is trying to figure out what would be fun to do in Taipei and Hong Kong, but that should be a lot easier than this portion!
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