Hawaii & Asia Trip Planning Part 1

Since I haven’t really been blogging as much as I wanted, I decided to start again about my future trip in September!

Now I’ve been planning to go on a vacation sometime during the summer but this came up:

Vivian has been wanting to go on a beach vacation while I’ve been wanting to go to somewhere in Asia so this was a great deal. I’ve also been saving my Chase Ultimate Rewards Points over the past several years so that the points could potentially payoff my entire flight trips, either through redeeming it by transferring to their airline partners (such as British Airways, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic) or redeeming flights through Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel Portal which allows 1.25 cents per point.

While looking on Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel Portal, I encountered an error that caused the cost of the flights to half while the cost of points used to redeem remained the same. This glitch occurred quite frequently whenever I searched for two people on the Chase Travel Portal and then change the dates after the page finished loading.

If the flights were $344.41 per person, it would be a steal to fly this cheap! But unfortunately after going to check out, the price of the ticket came out to $688.81 which was pretty close to the $651 deal shown on FlightDeal.

The total came out to $1337.64 for two tickets but after using my UR points with the Sapphire Preferred bonus, this came out to 110,210 UR points. Usually UR points are valued at cost of 1 cent per point but from point redemption, each ticket was 55,105 UR points or approximately $551.05!

Now a bonus with booking Chase Sapphire Preferred is are the Travel Protections they include such as:

• Trip Cancellation/Trip Interruption Insurance (reimbursed up to $10,000 per trip for pre-paid, non-refundable travel expenses which also includes UR points used)
• Travel Accident Insurance (accidental death or dismember coverage of up to $500,000)
• Lost Luggage Reimbursement (damaged or lost checked or carry-on bags are covered up to $3,000 per passenger)
• Trip Delay Reimbursement (up to $500 per ticket on unreimbursed expenses for any delays for more than 12 hours or require an overnight stay)
• Baggage Delay Insurance (up to $100 a day for 5 days for baggage delays over 6 hours on essential purchases)

Now if you want to start stocking up on points for a trip in few years, getting a Chase Freedom would be a good idea. This link gives you $100 or 10,000 UR points after spending $500 and also $25 for adding an authorized user. The referral link also gives me 5,000 UR points if you choose to use it.

Usually around Christmas time though, this bonus does go up to $150-200 and sometimes extra for an authorized user. So if you want to get a larger bonus for later, wait until Christmas time!

For the Chase Sapphire Preferred, the typical bonus points currently is 40,000 UR points after spending $4,000 and 5,000 UR points after adding an authorized user. There’s also an annual fee of $95 that’s waived the first year. This referral link also gives me 5,000 UR points if you choose to use it.

When I obtained this card, I got a special offer where I had to spend $2,000 for 40,000 UR points. The usual offer back then was to spend $3,000 but it has since increased to $4,000 now. The bonus also used to be 50,000 UR points instead of 40,000. If you have bills coming up to pay soon that could cover this much spending and you would like to use this card within the next year, you might as well try to get this card now. Otherwise, you could wait in the future for a special offer from Chase if you currently have a credit card with them such as the Chase Freedom. The $2,000 spending requirement offer will probably never happen again at the rate Chase reduces the bonus points and increases the spending requirement, although $3,000 might be a possibility.

On the next post, I’ll be posting about the other segments of my flights through Korean Air and EVA Air.