Attainable Awards: Nashville
- toddcrab58
- Feb 5
- 4 min read
If you have read some of my posts and thought to yourself, “Going international has no value to me,” then this post may be for you. My goal with this entire project is to help motivate and teach all sorts of people how to begin to hack some trips, but there are a few groups in particular I want to really help. One of the groups I truly desire to help is families! Growing up, it was always a huge thing that we would go on a week long trip over the summer for family vacation. This vacation could be to a major city to see a few MLB stadiums or to the beach to have some relaxing times near the water. Regardless of where the vacation was, the price for an entire family trip can get quite expensive. Knowing what I know now, I want to help families, like my own, to save thousands of dollars on vacation.
I’m going to run through some of the major costs of a trip and explain how credit card points can assist you throughout the process, especially in ways you may not have realized. The 3 major expenses on any trip, let alone a family vacation, are the airfare, hotel, and rental car. Now, while I know there are tons of other small incidental costs, let's focus on these 3 major ones.
If you’ve been keeping up, the flight reward redemptions can be extremely lucrative when flying internationally, but how do they match up in the states? While you won’t often find tons of exceptional 8cpp redemptions, there is a high chance you can find some incredibly valuable options. For the sake of this article I'm going to show you how you can go to Nashville for a 5 night stay using points and miles.
I’ll use my home airport as an example to sift through some options and the end of May for our timeline to kick summer off with a bang! What is quickly apparent is that there are actually some decent deals available with little effort required to find them. Looking at Southwest, for a family of 3 to go round trip, it would cost $1,051.08! Obviously we are going to try and keep that cash in our pocket and use some points! With a current offer my friend just signed up for, you are able to earn 65,000 points after only $1,000 of spend in 3 months. I don’t know a single family of 3 that doesn’t spend that in one month! Breaking down the points value of this trip, we see it comes out to just over that sign up bonus amount, but the spend required will put you in striking distance. This simple redemption just saved you over $1,000 cash. While I used Southwest (my preferred US airline) for this example, the same premise holds true with the other major airlines like Delta and American.
Assuming we've made it to Nashville, say we are planning to travel around the area and need a rental car to do so. Here is where some soft benefits of travel cards come into play. A card I personally keep in my wallet at all times is the Capital One Venture X. Two amazing features of this card are its annual travel credit and the Hertz President’s Circle status! I want to dive into the Hertz part of this equation first. While there are a bunch of rental car companies, this card allows you to attain Hertz’s highest status just by carrying the card! The President's Circle benefit allows you to choose any car in the status’ lane which typically includes things like convertible sports cars or huge SUVs. This can be an essential benefit for those travelling with kids or wanting a little more fun with the top down, as these premium upgrades can be yours for no additional cost. Unfortunately, Nashville has pretty expensive rentals and this would cost us $568.58 for our 5 day trip. However, we can use the $300 travel credit towards this rental and only be out of pocket $268.58 for 5 days of rental saving over 50%! Some cards have these amazing benefits and it’s all about how to use them.
The final step is finding a place to stay. While there are many options of hotels, certain hotels have much better value than their competitors. You will often hear those involved with points and miles refer to Hyatt as the ultimate hotel chain. I’ll do a full write up on them in the future but for now just know that they have a fixed award calendar which makes redeeming with them a breeze. Tossing in those same dates we have been using and there is a great Hyatt House right in the middle of Nashville next to Vanderbilt (probably a place you’d like to see). This hotel has nights for as low as 12,000 points instead of a cash price of $249. The whole cost of the hotel would be over $1,500 and instead could cost you only 60,000 points (from Chase or Hyatt)! For those wondering, that is 2.5cpp, more than other hotel point values combined.
To wrap on what all of this means, we'll do a brief recap. I’ve mentioned a few different cards and their perks, but the point is that if you are able to get a nice “rotation” or “arsenal” of cards that works for you, then there is a world of potential savings. Whether you want to start off with just one card to help offset just a portion of a trip, or start savings in all realms of travel, the options are endless. In just this example, the cash price combined would have been $3,153.58 but instead with all of the savings would be only $302.18. That's one way to save $2,850 on a family vacation! Don't wait to start earning (and spending) your credit card points.
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