My fiancé and I are planning a trip to Thailand for our honeymoon in December and I am trying to develop a plan now for maximizing our points and accumulating more to keep the costs low. Unfortunately we are going at peak time for Thailand tourism but it’s the only time we can arrange to be away from our jobs for an extended period.
Current points assets:
54,000 Chase Ultimate rewards pts (I applied for the Chase Sapphire Preferred bonus but he hasn’t. I need to use/transfer these by the beginning of 2018 to cancel the card.)
46,000 American Express Membership rewards pts (I applied for the Amex Gold bonus but he hasn’t. I need to use/transfer these by end of 2017 to cancel the card.)
~50,000 Delta pts for each of us (we both applied for the Delta card in the fall)
~25,000 AA pts (me, he has some too but not very many – I applied for the AA bonus ~1 year ago but he hasn’t.)
$100 in Delta gift cards
$200 in American gift cards
This is my current plan:
I will refer my fiancé for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, receiving 10k pts and he will get a bonus of 50k pts after spending 4k in 3 months + 4k pts from the spending. This will give us 118k pts with chase (+ any additional spending we do in their 2x categories). We will transfer all of the points to one of our chase accounts (so we can book our flights together) and book the flights through their portal for a 25% bonus. This will give us $1475 in travel, or about 1 flight (economy flights are around $1700 now but it’s 9 months away). We’ll pay for the other flight but also use our chase cards over the next months in their 2x pts categories where possible to get a little more.
I considered using the Amex pts for our hotels but the redemption values are horrible, so I plan to just harvest those for gift cards and pay for our hotels. In looking at flights using Delta points we needed well over 100,000/person to get a free flight, I am hoping we can book on delta via Chase and then use points for an upgrade maybe.
I have excellent credit and my fiancé’s is good, he might not be automatically approved for the top tier cards. I do NOT want to pay any annual fees and want to avoid manufacturing spending (I’ll do it but prefer not to, and would like to keep it below $500).
Are there other optimizations that you can recommend? Thank you for your suggestions!