This past weekend I had a (very) mini vacation that perhaps would be more satisfactory for some of my interlocutors here. Free flights are fine in terms of starving the profit beast, but there's no doubt they are horrible for the environment. How about just getting a hotel nearby with a nice pool and some free breakfast? This was how I spent this last Saturday. Total cost with food and movie rental was about $30 for the one night. Not bad for 4 people.It started with a Marriott Rewards credit card. They gave me 70K points, which is good for almost 5 nights of lodging, depending on the hotel category, and they additionally gave me a voucher for a free night, and that voucher expires in early February.
So I kept saving it thinking that perhaps an opportunity where I would need it would come up, but nothing did. So I decided to use it anyway. Take my wife and kids to my old stomping grounds, Ann Arbor, Michigan where I went to school. We could wander around campus and take in the views, then back to the hotel for swimming or whatever.
So that's what we did. The family loved it and are looking forward to more of the same, which is likely since I don't often need a hotel but can easily acquire free nights via credit cards. Just an idea I thought I'd share.
3 comments:
Good idea!
Cool - you should check out this site if you haven't already to get lots of free airline miles. http://millionmilesecrets.com/ I got around 200k last year pretty easily. Even more options for free miles if you have an LLC on the business side. You can exchange airline miles for flights, staycations, or if you really want to be ninja about it, convert those miles into cold hard cash and then hire some VAs to do some work/research for you in your quest to take down abuses of Capitalism. ;-)
Wow Jonathan, that somewhat surprises me that you would be so good at that. I can say that my haul of miles is quite similar to yours, but I thought I was like the only one. Yeah, I have seen that website and others. It is worth keeping tabs on them to see the best deals. Sometimes nice sign up bonuses come along. Like my Marriot 70K points. 50K is more typical, but it gets bumped ever now and then.
You may or may not know that Southwest points can be used to buy gift cards, so with them if you have more miles than you would need you can get a cash back thing going essentially. I paid for Christmas this last year that way.
The best solution though is to consume less, as Ex might point out to me here. I'm working on that.
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