In this series I explore real-world examples of just how much you can travel with the points of one credit card sign-up bonus. Whether this destination interests you or not, my hope is that you can take the learnings and get inspired to create your own amazing trip using miles and points.
Motivated by an upcoming trip back to Hyatt Ziva Cancun with my family, in this example I am looking at a cold winter weather escape for two people from Pittsburgh to Cancun in January. As a bonus, the Priority Pass membership that comes with the Sapphire Reserve card will get you into The Club lounge at PIT (that I recently reviewed) as well as one of the departure lounges in CUN.
If you are interested in some other examples from this series, check out these in the series: Orlando, New Orleans, Paris, Sedona
Earning the Points
With the current highest points offer for the Chase Sapphire Reserve, I wanted to show a trip that took advantage of the huge 125k points welcome bonus. After hitting the minimum spend, we will have at least 131k points to play with.
Building the Trip
This trip is pretty straightforward using just 2 Chase transfer programs and traveling with those programs. No airline alliance or partner award charts necessary. In fact, I just helped some friends book a similar trip and with a little guidance to find the hotel options, they booked everything themselves in just a few minutes. For this example, we will use JetBlue and Hyatt.
In this case I started with the hotel. I found several Dreams properties (now part of World of Hyatt) available for 23-29k points per night on the Hyatt map view. Once I locked in on the specific property I wanted, Dreams Sapphire Resort and Spa, I checked out the points calendar to see if any dates in January were peak or off-peak. Seeing that every day of the month was 23k points per night gave me flexibility to find the flight options.
4 Nights in a Deluxe Junior Suite King room will cost 92k points, leaving us enough to get our flights booked with our remaining Chase Ultimate Rewards points from the Sapphire Reserve sign-up bonus. The cheapest cancellable cash rate was $1722 all-in, making this a decent value redemption of around 1.9 cents per point value. Note: Hyatt all-inclusives cover 2 guests when booking on points. If you plan to make this a family trip it will cost more points, or you can sometimes pay a cash co-pay for kids in the same room. Contact the property to plan ahead in those cases.
Now, for the flights. I used pointsyeah.com to search a range of dates in January. There were some cheap Spirit flights (no thanks!), but filtering to flights available via Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners I found some nice JetBlue options.
The cash price was surprisingly reasonable at just $371 round trip. When you factor in the pretty high taxes flying to Mexico, we are getting right at 2 cents per point, a solid, but not spectacular value from our Chase points. Note these are Blue Basic fares; Blue fares which would include seat selection were also available for a slightly higher amount of points or dollars.
Conclusion
So there you have it; a full 4-night all-inclusive vacation with flights, hotel, food, drinks, and activities for 2 people booked with the points of just one credit card sign up bonus. While not the best redemption in terms of cents per point value, this is a great winter getaway for some great weather and one I have done myself at least 15 times across the range of the Hyatt all-inclusive properties in Mexico.
TL;DR: With the points of just one credit card sign-up bonus, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, we were able to build a nice warm-weather winter getaway for 2 people, covering flights and an all-inclusive hotel.
