How I Booked a Year’s Worth of Travel on Points

Sometimes, the most challenging part of travelling on points is what to do after you’ve gone through the trouble of earning them.

If you travel as a family or in a group, you’ll need to start off by planning in advance, especially if you’re looking for several award seats.

My family takes several trips a year, and I typically start planning our trips one or two years in advance. Two years gives me enough time to earn the points I need, and then I start booking approximately 11 months out from my travel date, especially on high-demand routes.

In this article, I’d like to highlight the trips I’ve planned out for the year, and how I’ve used my credit cards and award points to offset the costs.

Some of my redemptions may not be the best options or most valuable, but they’re ones that worked well for my family, based on the points that we’ve earned and credit cards that we have.

Big Island, Hawaii

Hawaii is a popular destination for North Americans, and the cost of flights can quickly add up, especially during peak travel holidays.

Luckily, there are many ways to redeem points for travel to Hawaii, and a bit of planning in advance can help you get there for less.

For our flight going to Kona from Toronto, we booked using WestJet dollars and the annual companion voucher that comes with our WestJet RBC® World Elite Mastercards.

Normally, it’d make sense to book a round-trip flight if you’re using a companion voucher, as there’s usually a $399 fee for the companion to use the voucher to Hawaii.

However, a couple of years ago, WestJet ran a promotion in which they offered a special companion voucher with a $0 base fare for a second passenger. All I had to pay were the taxes and fees for the companion ticket, and there was no cost for the base fare.

In the end, our redemption for Toronto to Kona for five passengers looked like this:

• Two companion vouchers
• 439 WestJet dollars × 3 passengers (we chose the EconoFlex fare just in case we needed to make changes)
• $117.10–157.10 (CAD) taxes and fees × 5 passengers

In other words, by making use of our companion vouchers and WestJet dollars, the total out-of-pocket cost for five people was less than $800 (CAD), which is pretty good.

Coming home from Kona to Toronto, we redeemed $1,560 (USD) from our United Travel Banks to cover our United Airlines flights back.

These…