Small Savings = Free Trip to Europe

How Small Everyday Actions Can Buy A Vacation

Hey there Money Saver! Welcome back to another week of How to Save A Buck, where we explore ways of saving money in personal finance, credit cards, and investing! Check out my archive here!

Seven lounges, five airplanes, and 2 hotels. Total cost? A few bucks.

Well, not exactly, but my recent trip to Europe cost me only a fraction of its normal cost.

How? Discipline on small everyday actions, and utilizing credit card tactics.

Read on to discover the true cost of this trip, and what I paid out-of-pocket for an unbelievable European summer vacation!

vacationer in Europe

Remember: credit cards are useful tools, as mentioned in previous posts. Their points are exactly what I utilized for scoring this amazing vacation deal.

Lounging Around

A free breakfast? Yup. As a Chase Sapphire Reserve (CSR) holder, I can access Priority Pass, a network of lounges and restaurants. One of those is Bar Symon, a diner in the Cleveland airport. You get $28 of food at no charge. If I bring a guest, that’s an extra $28. That’s a $56 free breakfast that went down easy! (Note: as of this writing, this restaurant perk has been eliminated from the CSR.)

As an international business class ticket holder, my companion and I visited the United Polaris lounge at ORD. We dined for lunch, had a few drinks, and enjoyed their facilities. I estimated this saved us about $80 given the cost of food & drink.

We also stopped in at the SAS Scandinavian lounge at ORD, the Plaza Premium lounge at Budapest airport, the Air Canada Maple Leaf and Lufthansa Business Class Lounge in Frankfurt, and finally the Chase Sapphire lounge at JFK. We got access to these lounges either due to our Priority Pass membership or having business class tickets.

The Chase Sapphire lounge at JFK airport

That’s 7 total lounges and I estimate each visit was more than $50, and likely less than $100, so let’s average $75. That’s approximately $525 in savings.

Savings in Your Sleep

For Vienna, Austria, we monitored hotel costs for a few weeks. As an American Express Gold Card holder, I have access to the Hotel Collection, an elite group of hotels that offer premium stays or services (when booking via Amex).

Logging into my Amex account, I noticed the S/O Hotel offered a rate of $250/night, which was $100 off their initial rate of $350. In addition, it gave a $100 hotel credit eligible for certain charges, including food/drink.

So, not only did we save $300 for 3 nights on the room rate, we saved another $80 that we spent on cocktails and breakfast.

Nearly $400 in savings on a card that I pay almost nothing for!

view of Vienna from the S/O Hotel

Business Class or Bust

In my effort to fly business class across the pond round trip, we got lucky. With kids at away camp and a flexible schedule, we waited until about 3-4 weeks before departure to book our flights.

I pooled credit card points from Chase and Amex and transferred them to United and Air Canada. The United transfer allowed us to book business class on Austrian Airlines on a direct flight from ORD to Vienna. This was a total of 176,000 points (88k pp). The cash value of the ticket? $5,500 per person.

For Air Canada, the option to fly Singapore Air came around for a crazy total of 60,000 points each. This is an insane deal when the cost of this ticket in cash is about $3,500, and represents a value per point of almost 6 cents (3,500/60,000 = 5.8 cents).

business class on Singapore Air

In total, that’s $18,000 worth of business class airfare that I paid only a couple hundred dollars for (airport surcharges and taxes). All by using my credit cards at specific times, paying them off each month, and strategizing for the best way to spend them.

I saved over $19,000 by leveraging these tools and keeping a disciplined program of maxing out the value on my credit cards.

Patience is key = I’ve waited a few years to be able to spend these points, and I tried to execute it in a specific way to squeeze value out of each point.

Some of it was luck in terms of timing and what was available, but hey, small savings = a “nearly” free trip to Europe!

Save On,

Chris