Point Guard

Last week was Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s my favorite holiday, if for no other reason than it’s the one day of the year when my normal gluttonous ways are not looked upon with horror and disgust (wholly warranted btw). Rather, they’re met with some measure of amusement, bordering on respect. Or so I like to tell myself.

And while I normally like to experiment in cooking and try new foods/dishes, when it comes to this holiday, I am a staunch—if not outright hostile—traditionalist and want nothing more than: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, roasted vegetables, and pies. Recipe variance is OK, but the menu is sacrosanct.

Thanksgoing

But this year, for the first time, I voluntarily and happily forewent our normal Thanksgiving meal. You see, Dear Reader, in our old city in the Midwest, Thing One (The Elder) and Thing Two (The Younger) were off from school only on Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving week. In our new city, they have the whole week off. If I had my druthers, the kids would be in school Monday–Wednesday. I’m hardcore on education like that. But we can’t change things.

In light of this, last year we considered—but ultimately bagged the idea of—taking a trip for the week. But as Thanksgiving week approached this year, it dawned on me that due to some planned vacations that the ‘rona pandemic put paid to, I’d taken very few days off this year. And as I prefer not to take time off in December for various reasons, this realistically would be my last opportunity of the year to travel in 2020.

One of said cancelled trips this year was to have been to southern Utah, a place that makes me hop about with childlike delight. As that also was to have been the placed we’d have visited for Thanksgiving week 2019, it was the first destination that I thought of.

So I asked The Missus if she’d be up for taking a trip to Utah. She was. Then I asked Things One and Two. They either said “OK” or shrugged. Either way, I took it as a “yes.”

But . . . but . . . but . . . the ‘rona! Aye, that’s what I thought, too.

We’re being fairly conservative in light of people being selfish idiots that little bug. But here was my thinking: ‘rona numbers are bad where we live. Even something as simple as a masked-up trip to the market carries some risk. Aside from essentially quarantining—which we’ve considered, but dismissed as far too excessive—there’s risk everywhere. So, I figured that if we travelled to a sparsely populated area and spent the vast majority of our time outside and wherever we were staying for the nights, our risk of contracting the virus would be low. Or at least, hopefully, not materially different than it’d be if we went about business as usual at home.

Welcome to the Hotel Calif . . Utah

Now, camping in southern Utah at this time of year is for sure doable. And I’d happily do it, But daily low temps are low (teens are normal, and single digits aren’t out of the question in some places), and the chances of high temperatures in the 20s and 30s are real, if rare. Acknowledging that the rest of the family would dismiss camping in that weather out of hand, I looked into hotels.

Why hotels and not an AirBnB or VRBO or the like? One word: points. We have a bunch, and big trips that we’d use a lot of points for are on hold because of the ‘rona.

I discovered that while popular Utah destinations such as Moab and Springdale we’re booked up, there were some hotels elsewhere that looked to be in decent jumping-off locations. I identified workable hotels, called to ask about their ‘rona precautions, and looked on TripAdvisor to see if any commenters had anything to say about each respective hotel’s measures.

After finding a Hilton property in the general vicinity of a slew of great places, including Zion National Park (ZNP), I found that I lacked enough points to book the whole stay.

Oh no! What to do? Never fear. Points are here!

The Missus also had a lot of Hilton points. Because Hilton allows one Hilton Honors (Hilton’s points program) member to transfer his or her points to another Hilton Honors member, we transferred enough of The Missus’ points to my account to pay for the entire hotel stay. Voila! Stay-paid-for-entirely-with-points accomplished! And off on our merry way were we.

A wrinkle in time

The trip went fine, until we got to ZNP. We’d been once before, but forgot that parking inside the park is limited, and shuttle buses are the primary means to get around.

Those shuttles are great in normal times. But these are not normal times. For one thing, as it turned out, we were not the only people looking to get away last week. Whoda guessed? 😉 Judging by the license plates, I think most California residents (and, not unexpectedly, Utah residents) had the same idea as us. So ZNP experienced record attendance for the week. And the shuttles were operating at about 1/2 capacity and by advance ticket purchase only. Those shuttle tickets were a hot commodity.

We’d intended for ZNP to be the main focus of our trip. But given our inability to get shuttle tickets, and our skittishness about being on shuttles at all, we had a little conundrum on our hands.

Oh no! What to do? Never fear. Points are here!

I decided to call Hilton to see if we could break our stay early and reserve a stay at another Hilton property in Utah using the points I’d no longer be using. Hilton was willing to play ball but couldn’t transfer the points back into my account for three to five business days. We explored workarounds, but the brick wall as to the three-to-five-day challenge was insurmountable.

Oh no! What to do? Never fear. Points (kind of) are here!

Both The Missus and I also have Marriott Bonvoy-branded credit cards. One benefit they offer is an award of a free night on the account holder’s account anniversary. The offer is forfeited if not used within one year of being awarded.

The Missus and I each had an anniversary night to use. With no other trips planned before they’d expire, this offered a great opportunity to use them. Marriott indeed had a property in the area of Utah we were looking to go to, and rooms were available. Boom! Hotel stay booked.

We travelled to the Marriott-branded propert and completed our trip. That very helpfully allowed us to visit Capitol Reef National Park, the last of Utah’s Mighty Five national parks we’d not yet visited. Takeaway: Go if you can. It’s fantastic.

So we enjoyed a week away, with the price for our accommodations (and, for all intents and purposes, our breakfasts, too, as those were free with our stay) amounting to a grand total of $0.

Buddy, hack it

I have to say, of all the benefits I’ve experienced since discovering FIRE, travel hacking is near the top of the list. We love to travel, and although the associated cost wasn’t close to the biggest expense in our budget, neither was it a pittance. Travel hacking has, in just the four years I’ve been doing it, saved us tens of thousands of dollars. Much of that from one travel hack I’m particularly proud of, but also from several others.

But wait, there’s more! By spending less to travel, we’ve been able to travel more often and/or to farther-flung locations (in pre-‘rona times). We’ve also been able to shovel increased savings into investments, where those dollars have been good little soldiers, earning dividends and (knock wood) so far appreciated in value.

What I may love most of all about the travel hacking we’ve done, however, is the massive no- or low-cost flexibility it allows for. Our trip last week was a great example. Pre-travel hacking, we very well may have paid an advance booking discount price to save some money. Those prices are nonrefundable. So we’d have been stuck at our original Hilton-branded hotel, unless we were prepared to eat the cost of the days we ultimately spent elsewhere. Not the end of the world, but neither ideal nor without cost. And even if we were able to convince Hilton to refund money that was advertised as nonrefundable (unlikely), we’d still have had to pay for the Marriott stay.

Lesson and learn

I was in our Hilton hotel room when I went through the motions of breaking our Hilton stay and booking our Marriott stay. The rest of the family heard my end of the phone conversations. After all was said and done, Thing One remarked, “Wow! How do you keep all that straight?” Aaaah! A teaching moment, I thought to myself.

I said to Thing One, “Well, if we’d have booked this stay with dollars, we’d have been about $1,000 lighter. Paying with points, our stay was free. And when our trip went a bit sideways, I thought about options that wouldn’t require us to spend any other money. With a decent amount of money on the line, one tends to remember these things.”

Thing One I think still likely thought my efforts were an awful lot to go through to save some money. But I’m hopeful that she filed this experience away in her head and, when it’s her money on the line, remembers it and looks for nontraditional solutions or ways to otherwise save money.

And in the end . . .

Utah doesn’t make the national or international news much. But as it happens, it did during our stay. Unfortunately, the object that gave rise to the news was far from the area we visited. But I for sure felt its command to visit (and stay in) the state.