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Hawaii!
For many of us, especially people who live in the United States, going to Hawaii is a once in a lifetime, bucket list type of experience. Many people really want to go to Hawaii for the beautiful beaches, tropical scenery, and amazing diversity of climates.
For my family and I, Hawaii was definitely on our bucket list. Not necessarily as a once in a lifetime experience, but as one of the many great vacations that we want to take.
However, Hawaii is extremely expensive!
For two people like my wife and I who make middle-class, teacher salaries, going to Hawaii can almost be prohibitively expensive.
I suppose that we could afford a trip to Hawaii. But it would be real tough to spend such a large amount of money on a two week vacation!
For my family of 5, the trip to Hawaii could easily cost $15,000 or even more! Again, we could afford that, but it would make it harder to achieve many of our other financial goals.
So … is there a better way? Can we take an awesome trip to Hawaii without having to spend $15,000?
As you may know from reading this blog, my wife and I are pretty good at using travel rewards from credit cards to make travel easier and cheaper.
- My wife and I traveled first class to New York City for the cost of a pizza.
- My family saved thousands of dollars on our trip to Disney World.
- We have even saved money on dozens of other trips and have written a beginner’s travel guide on how you can save money using credit card rewards.
But could we save money on our Hawaii trip? Could we save enough money to make it possible to go and avoid thousands of dollars in debt?
Simple answer … YES!!
Let’s check out how we did it and how much we saved so far (we are traveling to Hawaii in a couple of weeks)!
The flight
Flights to Hawaii are expensive. I mean … really expensive!
They are so expensive that the flight alone can be enough to prevent most people from going to Hawaii.
And when you multiply one expensive flight by 5 people … then your costs become astronomical.
But our roundtrip flights only cost us $56 … total … for 5 people!
I know that it seems like I’m not being entirely truthful, but our flights really were that cheap! How did we do it? Before we answer that, let’s take a look and see how much the flight would have been without any discounts.
Prices for flights to Hawaii
When you are planning a trip to Hawaii, there are a lot of options of islands to stay on and airports to fly into. We wanted to visit Oahu and the big island of Hawaii. So we decided to fly into Oahu and leave from Hawaii.
Checking out Orbitz showed that the least expensive round-trip flight would cost $5,024. The 5 people in my family would each check a bag, which would cost $30 extra per person, per way, or $300 total.
Therefore, the total flight cost would have been $5,324 for our family.
Our flights to Hawaii
Here’s our flights. As you can see, our flights to and from Hawaii are pretty similar to the ones that we could find on Orbitz.
But here’s where it gets cool. The flights that we booked only cost $5.60 per person, each way, for a grand total of $56! They didn’t cost $5,324!
We also don’t have to pay for $300 in baggage fees because of the American Airlines credit card that we have.
So we saved $5,268 on our Hawaii flights!
How we saved $5,268 on our flights
As I mentioned before, we were able to save so much money because of the great rewards that we got using our credit card. We needed to save up 225,000 American Airline reward points to get 5 roundtrip tickets.
One of the credit cards that I signed up for was the Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select World Elite Mastercard. This card gave me a 50,000 point welcome offer after spending $2,500 within 3 months. This card also gave me a free checked bag for myself and 4 companions, which saved me from having to pay $300 for luggage.
After accruing enough AAdvantage points, I went to the American Airlines Award Chart, which showed the number of points that I needed (22,500 for each one-way ticket). Then I went on American Airlines’ website to book the flights.
The hotels
We have a lot of luck staying at Wyndham hotels and resorts during many of our big vacations. Typically, these resorts have bigger rooms than some of the typical hotel rooms. These rooms are perfect for our family of 5.
We also have used Wyndham reward points to get free hotel rooms. We have accrued these points over the past couple of years by signing up for a Wyndham credit card and also by attending a couple of Wyndham time-share presentations (of course, we didn’t buy a timeshare … timeshares are one of the worst things that you can buy). Typically, you can book a pretty nice Wyndham resort for 15,000 points per night.
Unfortunately, we only had about 55,000 Wyndham points, which would be good for 3 free nights, not nearly enough for a 2 week Hawaii vacation.
However … there is another way to book Wyndham hotels and resorts that allowed us to save a ton of money!
Hotel on Oahu
After looking on the Wyndham website, we decided that we wanted to stay at the Waikiki Marina Resort at the Ilikai. However, it costs $224 per night. With taxes and fees, this is a total of $1,287 for 5 nights. I don’t think that is too bad for Hawaii, but we wanted to save some money. Fortunately, besides using 15,000 points to get the hotel night for free, Wyndham also has a “go fast” option that allows us to use some of our points and save some money.
By using 3,000 of our Wyndham Reward points per night and the “go fast” reward option, we brought our price down to $758!
This means that we used 15,000 Wyndham points and saved $529 for our 5-night stay on Oahu!
Hotel on Hawaii
On the big island of Hawaii, we are spending two nights in a yurt near Volcano National Park. Then we will travel to the other side of the island and spend 5 nights in another Wyndham resort.
Unfortunately, we didn’t save any money on the yurt, although we did get a good deal on Airbnb.
For the Wyndham Kona Coast Resort that we are staying at, we used the same trick as we did on Oahu. Using the “go fast” reward option, we decreased the price of our 1,600 square foot condo from $1,424 to $771.
We saved $653!
Other savings
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to save money on every aspect of the trip. We still rented cars on both islands, had the expense of flying from Oahu to Hawaii on Hawaiian Airlines, and paid for the hotels and yurt that we stayed in.
Honestly, I probably should have paid for the short flight from Oahu to Hawaii by using American Airlines reward points, but I was trying to save some of these points for future trips.
Since we have some other travel expenses, we signed up for a credit card like the Capital One Venture card that allows us to pay for these expenses with the card. Then we can use the points that we accrued to pay for some of our travel expenses. So far, we have accrued points that are equivalent to $814 in travel expenses! Find out more about this card and other great travel cards by clicking here.
Total savings
So … drum roll, please …
How much did we save in total on our upcoming trip to Hawaii?
Flight: $5,268
Hotels: $1,182
Other: $814
Total: $7,264
I know that the trip will still be expensive and we had to save up some money before we could go.
But … Hawaii!
And saving $7,264 helped to make this trip a reality!
So … is it time to plan your trip?
Let us know how you saved money on your trip to Hawaii and some of the can’t miss things that you did by commenting below.
And thanks for reading!
~Nathan
Let’s keep living a great life … with the help of money. So what’s next?
- You can travel for free by using rewards credit cards.
- You can get motivated and get out of debt.
- You can check out the next post or the previous post and continue to learn.
But no matter what you decide to do, let’s leave the ordinary behind and take action today!
2 Comments
Matthew Griffin
How was the 225K American miles earned? I assume you’re churning the Citi Card? And / or Barclays?
Life Before Budget
I have used both the Barclay AAdvantage card and the Citi AAdvantage credit cards to help earn the American Airlines miles. Keep in mind that there is a business and a personal version of each card, so it can be easy to accumulate a large number of miles.