Well almost free. I didn’t feel like using up all my Jet Blue points right now since most of it was free. I ended up purchasing the flight back with money.
My wife and I have been talking about taking a short trip because my free night from my Hilton Ascend card is expiring soon. I should have just used it in Thailand last summer. She has never been to San Fran and since I recently received 50,000 points for opening the JetBlue business card, I thought we could try out JetBlue Mint seats. Since JetBlue points go by the value of the ticket, I looked for the cheapest Mint flights. They were $499 (just over 30K points) each a few nights a month. I mean nights! I am not scheduled to land in San Fran until 1:45am pacific time. Since this flight is regularly 30 minutes delayed, I will be lucky to land at 2:15am. Anyway, it ended up costing me 60,400 JetBlue points and $11.20 in taxes for two seats in Mint to San Fran from Boston. I used her Chase Sapphire Reserve card on the taxes because the card offers trip cancellation and interruption insurance, trip delay reimbursement and lost luggage reimbursement. I already receive free checked baggage with Mint seats in case we want to check a bag.
For the return flight from San Fran, I bought two coach seats with my JetBlue card. I didn’t really want to use all the points I had for this trip. Two coach seats cost us $256.40 including taxes and fees. The reason I used my JetBlue card for this one other than the extra points was that you get free checked baggage when booking with the card. So if we do bring a checked bag it will be free both ways now.
Since I am 6’4″ and can’t stand coach seats (yes JetBlue has the most legroom in coach) there was no way I wasn’t getting extra legroom seats for a flight from the west coast. I also didn’t want to pay for them. So I waited until today to move our seats to extra legroom. Now that it is a new year, my Amex Gold card has given me my $100 credit back for airline fees. I also have the Bank of America Platinum rewards card that also gives you a credit of $100. It would cost $99 each for extra legroom. To get the credit from two cards at once, I moved my seat first and used the Amex card. Then went back in and moved her seat and used the Bank of A card.
I don’t think I mentioned the Bank of America Platinum Rewards card in my last blog. The reason I got this card last spring was that I received 50,000 points for spending $3,000, received credit for Global Entry and $100 in Airline Fees. The card is only $95 a year so they are essentially paying you $5 every year for the card. In the first year, they are paying you $605. 50,000 points are worth $500 and you get the Global Entry fee waived. The great thing is I already used the $100 airline credit last summer since they give it to you right away when opening and now that it is a new year I have the credit again. I could actually cancel the card when the annual fee posts and end up with +$705 from them. haha.
Now for staying in San Fran. I had that free night certificate from the Amex
Hilton Ascend card. I called and used that for one night. I had enough Hilton points for two more nights but when I tried to book it online it was showing me 120,000 Hilton points for two nights. I tried one night and it only showed 60,000 points for one night and 52,000 points for the other night. So I had to book those nights separately. I had to call the Hilton to let them know the three reservations are actually one. I will remind them again before we go.
Anyway, I still needed to book one more night and I didn’t have enough Hilton points. I was just going to pay for the 4th night. I look it up and it is sold out. I start searching other hotels and the ones that are not sold out were charging $1,300 a night. I was like WTF! I learned one lesson from this booking. I should have looked into seeing if anything was going on that week in San Fran or made sure I could book the hotel before booking the plane ticket. I came to find out that a huge cybersecurity conference is going on all week and all the top companies will be in town. Thankfully my friend Jeff lives in the San Fran area and I may be able to sleep my last night at his place. If for some reason I can’t sleep at his place then I guess I will just have to make a tent and sleep on the sidewalk like half of the locals do.
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