Last year we spent a fantastic week in Barcelona and traveling a little by car through France and we only spent about $1500 total for flights, hotels, food and shopping. The sad thing is, we could have spent less if we hadn't rented a car which sucked up a lot of our funds (tip: don't rent a car in France).
Here's what we did and how it all worked so you can do it too!
Plan in Advance
The key to traveling on the cheap is advanced planning. No, I'm not talking about booking early because we all know we should do that when we can but when I know I'm taking a trip, I will try to rack up as many miles and credit card points as a I can up to a year before booking a thing.
If you have a history or problem with credit card debt, this tip is not for you. This only works if you can control your spending and not pay any interest charges!
You want to look online for the best credit card point offers and maximize what you can get for free.
For this trip, I relied on points from two cards American Express Gold and AAdvantage Platinum Select from Citi Bank (these are not referral links - none of the links in this post are affiliate links :)). These were the best choice for our trip because at the time they were both offering big signup bonuses - 50,000 bonus points for Amex and 50,000 miles on American Airlines respectively.
To get the most of your points you will want to:
- Check your credit score. Maintaining a good credit score is key for getting approved for the cards that will give you the best bonuses. I keep tabs on mine using Credit Karma and Mint for free.
- Check what airlines fly to your destination and how many points you need for a flight.
- Monitor what the maximum bonus is for the card(s) you are targeting. I won't sign up for a card unless they are offering 50,000 points at least, or $500+ in value. The top cards will rotate their offers, you can check websites like The Points Guy to see what the top offers are every month when you are ready to get started.
You don't have to use airline cards to get your flight points, you can also book flights through a lot of the big cards like Amex and Chase directly. Usually, you can only get a sign up bonus for a card once every two years (Amex once per lifetime per card, normally).
So that was my thinking when working on our advanced plan, now here's more detail on how we implemented the plan!
Flights
I will be the first to admit with the flights, we kind of cheated. We chose to go to France/Spain because I was going to the south of France for work, so we only had to pay for 1 flight but the strategy we used to pay for the 1 flight can also work for 2. We used the AAdvantage points from the AAdvantage Platinum card sign up for the majority of this flight. The signup offer we got was 50,000 points (they regularly feature this, just watch & wait) for a new card with 3,000 in spending for the first three months.
If you need 2 flights, you would both need to do the sign up to get the points. Since we only needed one, we did a sign up under my name and my fiance will sign up sometime in the future when we need points again.
For the flight to Paris, we needed 60,000 points for an economy flight. We got 50,000 for the signup + 3,000 for the spending we had to do for the sign up, so we needed 7,000 more. I had a few AA points from other travel so we were fine but if you don't you have a few choices to get more:
1) Keep using the AA card but that is 7,000 more you have to put on it (unless you can use bonus categories)
2) Buy some points. 7,000 miles will run you about $200, which is still way less than a flight to Europe. American will also run specials where they give you bonus points for buying points so if you go this route look for one of those.
3) Sign up for multiple AA cards (check the annual fees if you sign up for the premium cards).
We paid $250 + 60,000 miles for my fiance's flight.
Here's the thing about AA's rewards flights, their flight schedules suck. So the $250 we paid was not only for the mandatory taxes but also his domestic connection. The online rewards flight booking option had a 10 hour(!) layover in Philly. I called a booking agent and asked them if we could pay for a domestic connection that wasn't offered as reward flight online and she booked a reasonable connection for $150+$40 booking fee. The rest of the money we spent went to taxes and fees. On his return flight there was also a longer layover in Florida but it was 3-4 hours so he sucked it up.
Hotels
We didn't choose to stay at hotels for most of our stay but instead booked aibnbs.
I love airbnb for while traveling for 3 reasons:
1) Usually it's cheaper per night than a hotel, or about the same
2) Access to a kitchen, especially a refrigerator, will save you big bucks while traveling
3) Fun alternative accommodations
Thanks to my American Express Gold bonus, I got a $250 airbnb gift card, which paid for all of our hotel nights in Barcelona and I had a few $ leftover for the 1 night we stayed in Lyon.
In Barcelona, we stayed outside the city a little in a beach area called Badalona that was a few metro stops to central Barcelona. The fun thing was we stayed on a BOAT! It was really fun and I never would have found it without airbnb. Our host Roland was great and it was perfect for just the two of us and a bargain at around $50/night.
The boat had a fridge, which was key. While we ate out a fair amount because food in Spain is delicious, we had dinner on the boat one evening and breakfast almost every morning, saving us both money and early morning food seeking hassle. I hate having to search for breakfast first thing in the morning!
Car
This was our biggest and most expensive mistake. I had traveled around Germany in a car a few years ago and thought France would be the similar - nope! Traveling around France by car is crazy expensive. I was prepared for the higher price of gas in Europe but not the crazy high tolls. It's a good thing the rest of the trip was cheap! We were paying 20E+ every time we went off a toll road, sometimes as much as 50E!
Our car rental was 400E for the week, which wasn't bad, we could go where we wanted and cheaper than taking a train, or so we thought. Also, thanks to my American Express Gold, we got $200 off, which translated to 170E but holy cow, we spent probably 200E on tolls driving from the south of France into Spain and back up to Paris. Plus gas, plus parking (our airbnb in Spain even included free parking). If it hadn't have been for the tolls, this would have been cheaper than taking the train for us both but looking back, we should've done the train. You live and you learn!
Approximate overall spending:
$250 flights
$100 hotels (part of 1 night airbnb in Lyon and 1 night at the airport hotel in Paris, most of this is that one night at the airport hotel)
$700 approximately car expenses (rental, gas and tolls! Such a mistake, it hurts me to think about!)
$250 approximately for food for the week for the two of us
$300 shopping and tourist activities
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