Spring Break Trip to Maui…

Lisa and I honeymooned in Maui in November of 2016.  We absolutely loved it but… we missed the whale season, so we knew we wanted to return and it was just a question of when.

Well, I no longer have a Hawaiian Airlines credit card, so without any activity on my Hawaiian Miles account my 87,297 miles will expire in December of 2021.  Hawaiian Airlines miles aren’t particularly useful unless you’re going to Hawaii or possibly continuing on to Japan, South Korea, Australia or parts of the South Pacific.

Complicating things is the fact that you need to fly from a limited number of gateway cities on the mainland, which right now is New York, Boston and eleven cities on the west coast.

In addition to those limitations, Hawaiian Airlines points are generally worth less than a penny, so I don’t see myself getting another Hawaiian Airlines card anytime soon.  It’s time to use those miles for our return to Hawaii:  Spring Break in March of 2021.

Since Lisa’s daughter just moved to California, we decided to stop in for a few days since it’s on the way.  The plan is to fly from our home airport of Sarasota (SRQ) to Fresno (FAT), fly on Hawaiian Airlines to Maui (OGG) from the closest mainland airport they serve and then return directly to SRQ.

Sarasota to Fresno  The first thing I did was check Flight Connections to see what my options were to get to Fresno.  Flight Connections is a great tool – enter the From/To information, set your filters (airline alliance, class of travel, airline and number of stopovers) and you will get a map of your options.

In our case, we could fly to FAT either on American Airlines via Dallas, or Frontier or United via Chicago.  If there had been more options, I would have also checked Momondo.  It’s pretty much a straight shot to go through Dallas (DFW) but I ended up checking the United routing as well just in case the number of points was dramatically less.

Read related:  Resources for Booking Flights for additional options

American is a member of the oneworld alliance, which includes British Airways.  Alaska Airlines currently has a side agreement with American and will be joining One World in the coming months.  So, I could use British or Alaska miles to book on American because of the inter-airline relationships.

I have quite a few British, Alaska and American points so I checked all three.  British wasn’t showing any availability, but Alaska was showing flights for 25K miles but requiring two stops; not optimal.  On American, the best schedule on Friday was 24K each, but on Thursday it was 10K each!  Ok… we could go one day earlier and save 28K miles.

What about Frontier and United?  I don’t like Frontier because it’s a cut-rate airline that charges extra for everything.  This often means a lower level of service and comfort for only marginal savings, if any.  If this was a short-hop flight I might consider it, but not cross-country.  Besides, even though Frontier flies into both SRQ and FAT, they didn’t show any flights available.  That leaves United.

United is a member of the Star Alliance and that means I again have several options for using miles since I have sizeable balances in the United and Avianca frequent flyer programs.  Avianca, like British, didn’t show any flights at all.  United had connections but at 25K each for their best schedule plus an extra two hours to go through Chicago, I took a pass.

So, that means Sarasota to Fresno on American for a total of 20K miles for both of us.  That’s an incredible deal.  I can’t remember the last time I booked a 10K trip on American.

Flying Hawaiian to Maui  Next up, what’s the best use of our Hawaiian miles to get to Maui?  Routes from a number of California cities show one-way fares using 40K miles each.  The 2 closest gateway airports to Fresno are Oakland and San Jose.

We’ll have a car while in Fresno so the easiest and quickest option is to drive to San Jose…  ♫ ♩  Do you know the way to San Jose? ♩ ♬  (sorry, couldn’t help myself.)  That’s about a 3-hour drive and catching a morning flight means getting up at o-dark-hundred, so instead, we’ll drive over the night before and stay at an airport hotel for the one night using either Marriott, Radisson or International Hotel Group (IHG) points.

That sounded like a decent plan but I still hadn’t checked Hawaiian to see how many miles it would cost to get to Maui.  Holy cow – it’s only 20K miles each from San Jose (SJC) to Maui!  That’s amazing.  I don’t have enough miles to go first class so what do I do with the other 47K miles since they are going to expire?  Invite friends!

We have a Zoom Happy Hour every other Tuesday night with the couple we’re going to Europe with in December so we suggested that they join us.  It took all of two seconds for them to say “Yes!”  This is gonna be great.  Had we paid for the one-way Hawaiian flights, they would have been $170.00 each, which is still pretty darn cheap.

Getting Home  Now we have the flight to Fresno and on to Maui taken care of and we just need to get home.  Back to Flight Connections.  I got the same result as my first search… American or United.

United was a bust but American has decent itinerary options through Dallas.  For each of us, using Alaska would be 40K miles and British would have consumed 30K miles, whereas using American miles for the same routing was only 20K each.  This is a no-brainer; American it is.

Had we paid for the four segments on American (to Fresno and home from Maui), it would have cost us $1,840. That means I got over $ .03 per point for using my 60,000 points.  American points are typically valued at about $ .015 per point, so this is a great booking.

For the whole trip, I will spend 100K miles for both of us to fly SRQ to FAT, SJC to OGG and OGG to SRQ.  I’m pretty happy with that.  I put the American schedule on a one-week hold (one of the things I really like about American – most airlines charge a fee to place an itinerary on hold) and verified that our friends were absolutely committed to the trip before booking the flights on Hawaiian.

The only things left are accommodations and rental cars.  Rental cars should be easy so I’m not going to worry about that until later.  We’re not big fans of staying in hotels and prefer Airbnb or VRBO to rent a condo or house for the week, especially since there will be four of us.

We found tons of options through both search engines which kind of surprised me since we are arriving and departing on a Monday.  I guess Hawaii has been hit so hard by COVID that the island-wide occupancy rate is close to nil.  We found a fabulous two-bedroom, two-bath condo on VRBO right on the water outside of Lahaina for $325 per night.  Divide that between the two parties and we’re again getting a great deal.

If you know anything about Hawaii hotel prices, that’s dirt cheap, especially since that allows us to eat in for breakfast, make lunches to take with us if we want and we’ll probably cook a few dinners in the condo as well; that adds up to a lot of savings vs. staying in a hotel and eating out for every meal.  For comparison, the Marriott Courtyard is $350 per nite per room!

Total Cost?  When using miles, you still have to pay the airport taxes.  The total for six flights (three each for Lisa and I) comes to a whopping $34.  I also paid for upgrades on the flight to Maui ($80 each) but my Bank of America Premium Rewards VISA has an annual $100 travel credit so the net cost for that was $60.

Throw in accommodations at $162.50 per night and our week-long Spring Break vacation in Maui is going to cost $1,231 plus car and food vs. $3,038 had we paid for our flights.  Playing The Points Game saved us $1,807.

This is going to be a great trip and if you’re interested in going to Hawaii, now might be the time to start planning while flights and accommodations are literally wide open.

Brian

As an avid traveler, Brian has explored and enjoyed cultural encounters in over 40 countries while spending many years refining The Points Game — using credit card sign-up bonuses and other tricks to get nearly free travel.  Getting the most out of every trip is an art and Brian launched My Travel Traxx to help others enjoy the art of travel.