United's Excursionist perk has been around for many years but I've found surprisingly very few people know about it. This perk allows you to add a free one-way award on a multi-city ticket booked with miles, similar to the free stopover perk that many airlines offer. When booking a roundtrip flight in and out of the same region using points, this perk allows you to book a free flight within that same region - perfect for a vacation where you are planning to visit 2 destinatio

When I tell people my favorite Hotel program is Hyatt, the first question I usually get is "why not Marriott?" Anecdotally, I've felt that since the merger with SPG the continued devaluations have just gotten out of control. For example, In 2019 we stayed at the Ritz Kyoto for 60,000 Marriott points per night. Looking at the 2025 calendar, there's one night going for 96,000 points at the low end and some nights reaching as high as 152,000 points. Hyatt has had it's share of d

The first half of 2024 was as busy a 6 month stretch as I can remember. Between work, class, and a couple personal trips I was on the road nearly every week. Thankfully, I was able to enjoy the Chicago summer as I traveled much less in the second half of the year - a couple work trips and a handful of weddings. Our hotel branded credit cards came in handy this year with how many weddings we had. The free night certificates make the annual fee worth it in my opinion and we uti

This is how I traveled to Lisbon Portugal on points for a 4-night long weekend.

My 2023 looked quite similar to the previous year with only two more flights than 2022 and only 8,000 miles more. We took a couple...

Our original honeymoon plan was to spend a week in the Côte d'Azur and end with a few days in Paris as Gwen had never been before. Due to the constantly changing COVID restrictions, we moved our planned trip from June to September and spent a weekend in St. Kitts right after our wedding instead. During this time, France introduced a mobile pass you needed to enter all public venues to prove either COVID vaccination or a negative test every 3 days. For those outside the EU wit