How I Booked a Trip to The Maldives
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EDITORIAL DISCLOSURE:
Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
*Terms apply to American Express benefits and offers. Enrollment may be required for select American Express benefits and offers. Visit americanexpress.com to learn more.🏨 The Hotel
I had two non-negotiables for this trips....the first and most important....I wanted to stay in an overwater room. I mean, it's The Maldives. I know I'll never get back there so I have to live it up one this once in a lifetime trip!
Considering the overwater rooms available on points, I knew that the Conrad Maldives has a Sunrise Water Villa available for the standard award rate (120,000 PPN). Which means it is one of the lowest priced rooms they have, AND you could use a Hilton Free Night Reward for this room too! 🎉 Win-win.
Over the water. Private pool. Direct ocean access. Perfection. 👌🏼
Once I determined what hotel I wanted to book, I set my sights on earning Hilton points for my stay.
You can earn Hilton points two ways: from cobranded Hilton cards offered by American Express®, or you can transfer American Express® Membership Rewards® points to Hilton at a 1:2 ratio. This means that when you transfer 1,000 Membership Rewards® points to Hilton, you’ll end up with 2,000 Hilton Honors points! I transferred over about 45,000 points when I was booking our room since I needed about 90,000 more points to be able to book our 4 nights.
Since I booked 4 nights on points, we got the 5th night totally FREE. 👏🏻 This is an awesome perk for those with Hilton Honors Elite status (Silver, Gold, or Diamond). Keep in mind that if you use a Hilton Free Night Reward for all or part of your stay, that would not qualify for the 5th night free. It must be booked fully on points for this perk.
In total, we spent 480,000 points for these 5 nights.
These are my top two personal card recommendations for earning Hilton points. And the best time to open one of these cards is when they have elevated offers that come with a Free Night Reward, so keep an eye out for those! 👀
💳 Hilton Honors American Express Surpass® Card
💳 Hilton Honors American Express Card
And if you're close to 5/24, you can't go wrong with the business card option (my husband and I have both opened this one!).
💳 The Hilton Honors American Express Business Card
*Thank you, THANK YOU for using my links to apply! 🩷
✈️ The Flights
My second non-negotiable for this trip...I have to fly Qsuites at least once! It's the flight I had been dreaming about for so long. And it ruined me to all other business class, but it's worth it. 🤪
Almost exactly a year prior to the trip (the best time to book for the best chance at finding availability for your dates), I started the Qsuites hunt. You can book Qatar flights in many places so it's important to know where to look. Some options are:
Qatar
British Airways
Alaska Airlines
American Airlines
👉🏻 I knew that British Airways and Qatar opened up their calendars the earliest (355 days and 361 days in advance), so that was my first search (yes, a regular, old-fashioned manual search 😬🔍) to find our dates. I ended up finding the route we wanted and on our desired date on British Airways, so I booked our outbound flight first!
Since availability can be hard to find, my strategy was to have a nice stash of flexible points ready to go when I finally found a flight to book.
The Flight Home
For our journey home, I was not able to find good availability for business class so we flew Qatar economy home (which was a big bummer! 🥴). I booked 2 economy tickets through Alaska Airlines for 42,500 points per person and $170 in taxes.
Positioning Flights
Since we live in Phoenix, it can be hard to find good award flight deals from our home airport, so we usually end up booking a positioning flight for these long haul trips! Our go to for these cheap/short flights is usually Southwest, especially since we currently have the Southwest Companion Pass.
For all of our positioning flights, we spent a total of 17,465 Southwest Rapid Rewards points and $22.40 in taxes.
Card Recommendations
These are the cards I opened first to earn a HUGE chunk of super valuable points that can transfer to British Airways, Qatar, and Alaska Airlines (if you transfer the points to Hawaiian first and then move the miles to Alaska). 👇🏼
💳 Open this business card first
💳 Open this business card second
You can also opt to open the personal versions of these cards instead, but I like that the business cards don't count toward 5/24 and the welcome offers are higher!
My second recommendation would be to earn Capital One Venture Miles which can also transfer to British Airways.
💳 Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card
💳 Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card
💳 The Tools
There are a few tools that I have used and frequently recommend to help find availability for some of these flights and hotel options.
MaxMyPoint.com is my go-to for all things hotel. They have easy to use calendars, search all of the major hotel chains, and you can even set free alerts!
Their calendar will show you the prices and available room types for each night so it's just a few simple steps to find those lowest priced dates.
If you're looking for your flights, there are two tools that I use on a regular basis when I need a little extra help finding the flights I'm wanting.
✈️ Roame.travel ➡️ Find a super in depth blog post and tutorial on how to use Roame here!
✈️ Seats.aero
Seat.aero has a really cool feature called Qatar Qsuites Finder which can be your key to snagging those hard to find seats. You can filter the results by country, and if you have the Pro version, you can search a full year of availability!
💰Cost vs. Savings
While I would NOT call this trip nearly free, it was steeply discounted.
Never in a million years could we have afforded this trip to the Maldives without points and miles. So being able to use the points to offset the costs of things, like hotels and flights, made this once in a lifetime trip a reality. 😍
💵 Total cash rate of this trip without points and miles seriously blows my mind. Total cash rate for all flights and 5 nights at this resort was $28,324.
But what did we pay? Our whole trip was booked for the bargain price of just $781.40. 🤯
Points and miles saved us over $27,000 one this one trip. And you can do this too. So send me any questions you have and let’s start planning your dream trip to this bucket list destination! ✈️🏝️☀️
Side note: I cannot say thank you enough for using my links to apply! I earn a commission for those applications at no cost to you, and it helps keep all the free resources and support coming! 🩷
EDITORIAL DISCLOSURE: Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
