Sitting in the UA lounge waiting to board so figured it's a good time to throw up part 1!
Background & PlanningAfter burning a lot of points booking
my MLE trip last August, I got to work on racking up enough points to book trips for a week in May that I had off (between my last exam and graduation) and for my Bar Trip in August. By the time January rolled around, my points stash was full and I went on a booking spree. I’ll leave the booking details for my Bar Trip to that TR, but for this trip (I guess we’ll call it my graduation trip
), we decided to go to Hawaii. I let DW decide on the island and she eventually chose Maui so I went to work on the flights and hotel.
Flights: I know many people have a really hard time finding Saver space on the EWR-HNL/HNL-EWR route in UA J, but I guess I got lucky and found 2 Saver seats in J for the exact date that we needed on the outbound. I went ahead and transferred 60k Amex to SQ and once the points posted to my KrisFlyer account, I called up SQ and booked our outbound flight. For the return, there was no Saver space in J so I booked us Plan B tickets for 40k per person OW. About a week after booking the return flight I got an email that DW’s waitlist request had cleared, so she was good to go. My request still hasn’t cleared and expert mode is now showing F0 so we’ll see what happens with that. We’re taking our 8-month-old daughter on this trip and we booked her as a lap infant so we’re hoping that there’s an empty seat in J and that they’ll let us use the seat for her. ETA: About three weeks before our trip, I logged on to UA.com to check if any Saver J seats had opened up on the return (for my waitlist request) and once I was on, decided to look if any more seats had opened on the outbound as well. Turns out, 2 more Saver J seats had opened on the outbound so I quickly called up SQ and managed to get a rep to put one of the seats on hold so that I could book my daughter her own seat (Dan and some others mentioned that my chances of having an empty seat in J on that flight were slim to none). I then initiated another 30k transfer from my MR account to SQ and once the miles posted, called back SQ to get the ticket for my daughter issued.
I didn’t book the inter-Hawaii flights until the beginning of April because I wanted to wait until my hotel was fully confirmed (I’ll explain this in the next paragraph) so fast forward four months and I got to work on the local flights. By the time I got around to booking, I decided against paying for HA flights through Dan’s corporate rate because it was about three weeks before the trip and the flights were pretty expensive. Instead, I managed to convince UA to add the OGG-HNL leg on the return without charging me the $75 per person reissuing fee for 6k UA per person. Because the outbound was an SQ reservation, I just booked the HNL-OGG leg separately and paid 6k UA + $5.60 per person. My connection is about an hour and a half so let’s hope everything runs smoothly and I don’t miss my flight. I tried getting the agent at checkin to tag my bags all the way through to OGG but she gave me a hard “NO.”
Hotel: We decided to stay at the Andaz Maui and my plan was for both DW and I to apply for the Chase Hyatt card in March, which was 24 months since we last earned the bonus on that card. I didn’t want to risk applying earlier with different FFN and possibly not getting the bonus, so I called Hyatt up in January and reserved the Andaz on a points booking even though I didn’t yet have the points (they allow Diamond members to do this). I told the rep that DW and I were going to apply for the Hyatt card and would use the 4 free nights + 50,000 points for the reservation and she warned me that while the rule that a room can be booked on points as long as there is an unsold base room available, that is not the case for sign up nights for which each hotel can decide how much inventory to release. I told her to reserve the room for me anyways and took my chances that either there would still be sign up night inventory available when the certificates finally posted to my account or that even if there wasn’t, I’d hopefully get them to override their inventory rules and allow me to use the sign up night anyways. Because it wasn’t a sure thing, I held off on booking the local flights until after I was all confirmed with the hotel just in case something got messed up (and because it seemed like there is so much point availability on local flights because of how many flights per day there are).
When I eventually called back to finalize my Hyatt reservation (in April), the hotel was almost entirely sold out but the rep who was helping me called the hotel and got the manager to override the system and allow me to use free nights (it’s amazing how little you have to push them when you’re Diamond). The rep also reminded me (like I didn’t already know!) that I would get an upgrade (subject to availability) upon check-in and that I am eligible for free breakfast. So we we’re all set!
While this trip also had a long wait between booking and actually travelling, it went by a lot quicker than our wait for our MLE trip because MLE was in the middle. By the time we got back from MLE, we only had two more months to wait for our trip to Maui!
Total Cost:EWR-HNL UA J: 30k SQ + $5.69 per person (3 seats)
HNL-OGG WP Y: 6k UA + $5.60 per person (2 seats)
Hyatt Andaz Maui: 4 CC Sign Up Nights + 50,000 Hyatt Points (6 Nights)
OGG-HNL-EWR WP Y/UA J (Plan B): 40k UA + $5.60 per person (2 seats)
To be continued...
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