July 2020

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Travel in 2020 has been about as easy as riding in a SoulCycle class with a mask on.

That is to say – decidedly not easy.

I’m wistfully looking back on 2019, when each month brought an additional one or two tacks on the trip map hanging in Thomas’s room. Sometimes I wondered if my love of travel was more a love of competition with myself: Which area of the map looks sparse? I think we have an airport there! Any interest in South Dakota, Tom?

This time last year, I had already been in three different countries. I’m grateful we set the aggressive travel goals we did in 2019, because 2020’s docket between January and today was comprised of the illustrious metropolis of Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky (for a friend’s wedding), Knoxville, TN (to be with family after my grandfather passed away suddenly), and – the saving grace – Zion National Park.

We accessed Zion through Las Vegas, a Southwest city, and used points for the whole shebang. While the strategy described below is relatively specific to this particular trip, you’ll be able to extrapolate – there are other trips similar in nature (e.g., fly into Denver and do a summer stay in Breckenridge).

Flights

The Southwest Priority Card sign-up bonus at the time I applied (75,000 points) and the airline’s generous 25,000-point Tier-Qualifying Points gift inspired by the COVID-induced lack of travel proved a potent combination for Thomas and me. (In May, I believe, Southwest gifted all Rapid Rewards Members 25,000 TQPs – these points can’t be spent on flights, but they bumped you closer to status.)

As a result, we’re inching closer to Companion Pass – I believe we’re only 15,000 points away. Normally, I’d burn points on a trip like this one or we’d fly standby, but we had Travel Funds left over from the Great Disappointment of 2020: canceling our March trip to Aruba. I used some of them to book our flights to Vegas. Right now, Southwest is running a 2x points promotion on everything booked and flown through August 31, so we doubled up on the earn.

All told, I believe I spent a little north of $500 in Travel Funds (i.e., Southwest store credit) on two roundtrips from DAL-LAS to get us closer to Companion Pass (and save my sanity by stepping foot on an aircraft).

A few things to note:

• The Southwest Companion Pass allows another person to fly free with you for the rest of the year you earn it and the entire following year. If I earned it today, Thomas could fly free with me (as confirmed, paying Customers) for the rest of 2020 and all of 2021. Right now, he’s my standby Companion, which means we both fly standby for free (due to my Employee privileges). The benefit of earning Companion Pass is that, in order to do so, you have to get 125,000 points – which means once you earn it, you have a fat bank of Southwest currency to spend on BOGO flights.

• If you’re impatient or don’t foresee a way to earn it the organic way (flying a lot), pairing a Southwest consumer card (like the Priority) with a Southwest Business card is almost certainly enough to earn Companion Pass, depending on the time of year. Right now, the Southwest Performance Business card’s sign-up bonus is 70,000 points after spending $5,000 in the first three months and the Priority card (linked above) earns 40,000. Generally speaking, I’d wait until the Priority card goes up to 60,000 points or higher to apply. (For more information about this strategy, visit the Travel Hacking tab.)

• All credit card spend earns Rapid Rewards points that count toward Companion Pass. Right now, grocery spend is worth 3x points. A $200 trip to Kroger would net you 600 Rapid Rewards points.

• The double points offer mentioned above is a solid incentive to book and fly before September. For example, if you were to book a $250 flight that earned 1,500 points (using your Southwest credit card), you’d get:

  • 1,500 points from the flight x 2, because of double points = 3,000 points

  • 2x per dollar spent on the card, which would would be 500

  • For a total of 3,500 points earned on one flight

Trip agenda

Once we landed in Vegas around 11, we suffered through the process of getting a rental car. In the process, I stood behind a couple in line who missed their flight back to Northern California and needed to rent a car – but they didn’t have credit cards. Only cash. A true pickle, if I’ve ever seen one, and one unique to the environment in Vegas.

It took about an hour to finagle the keys of a GMC Terrain from the Dollar counter, but we used Southwest Car to reserve one (thank God, because they were allegedly “sold out”), which earned another 600 Rapid Rewards points and set us back a reasonable $144 for 3 days with a mid-size SUV.

After I pointed out the scenic landscape to Thomas (“And that’s the casino where I got lost in the basement when I was an intern in 2016!”), we left the Vegas Strip behind us and drove 2.5 hours east to Utah, where Zion National Park exists as a monument to salvaged summer vacations everywhere. The plan was to spend two nights in Zion (for one full day of hiking), then meander back to Vegas for a day and night at the Cosmopolitan.

(This is where “safe-ish” comes into play – the National Park was pretty safe, and we swore up and down we wouldn’t venture into the Cosmo’s beeping and twinkling casino, but approximately 28 minutes after arrival I was stationed in front of a penny slot pulling the lever like a deranged retiree. Luckily, the casino ended up just being unhealthy for our ATM limits, not our respiratory systems.)

The hotels

We booked a (pretty nice!) La Quinta about a mile from the park entrance for about 17,000 Membership Rewards points per night (34,000 points total). Remember: Membership Rewards is the portal associated with American Express cards. Right now, the Platinum card (the one I have) offers a sign-up bonus of 60,000 points.

The room would’ve set us back about $300 had we paid in cash, making it an average to below-average redemption value. (I typically eyeball it: I shoot for redemptions where 100 points = $1, so a room that costs “$200 per night or 20,000 points” would be a good deal in the AmEx portal.) I wasn’t so much concerned this time with the redemption value since I had banked a fair amount of AmEx points – I mostly just wanted to flex my travel hacking muscle and leave my living room.

The star of the points show on this trip was the Cosmopolitan. Here’s why:

• It met my criteria of a good redemption value: $160/night (a steal for the Cosmo) or 16,000 points.

• It was a member of the “Fine Hotels & Resorts Collection,” a high-brow echelon of properties that AmEx dubs fancy enough for its Platinum cardholders to meet this coveted distinction. Functionally, this means:

  • You receive a $75 daily breakfast credit for every day of your stay.

  • You receive a $100 spa credit (which would normally amount to two guest passes for the Cosmo spa, an absolute adult theme park of water features and eucalyptus-scented regalia) – unfortunately for us, COVID had shuttered the doors of the spa during our visit.

  • Guaranteed early check-in and late checkout.

  • A free suite upgrade.

So we redeemed 16,000 points for the cheapest room at the Cosmo and were upgraded to a suite with a view of the Vegas Strip upon arrival because we booked with Platinum. Because everything at the Cosmo is priced as though you’re carrying a wad of Monopoly money, we used our $75 breakfast credit at their inappropriately named breakfast restaurant for lunch on arrival and again in the morning for room service. The $100 spa credit went unused.

The takeaways

All in all, I spent about 50,000 Membership Rewards points on a three-night trip, with one of the nights being a solid redemption value and the other two being average.

Had we paid in cash for this extravaganza…

• $300 in Zion for the room

• $160 at Cosmopolitan for the base room

• $150 at Cosmopolitan in food credits

• $100 at Cosmopolitan for the upgrade (i.e., that’s how much it would’ve cost in cash to upgrade)

$710.

We got a $710 vacation for $0 because we used 50,000 Membership Rewards points. The card offers a 60,000-point bonus right now. The annual fee is $550.

This means if you were to use the bonus for one trip of this nature and never again for the rest of the year, you’d have gotten your money’s worth for the fee that year. A full breakdown of the Platinum benefits is in the Travel Hacking tab.

Repeatability

This is the third trip we’ve gone on completely subsidized by Membership Rewards points. The first was a weekend trip to San Diego at the US Grant, a 5-star hotel in the FH&R Collection that came with the same perks the Cosmo did, and the second was a four-day trip to Grand Cayman (the points completely covered our accommodations at the Shangri-La B&B).

The value of this card is hard to overstate. My full deep dive about how I extract thousands in value from the Platinum card can be found here.

Learn more about the Platinum card

Editor’s Note: Opinions expressed here are mine alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included in the post.