Kauai Coast, photo by Andrew Ingersoll

Dear Rick:

I stumbled across your blog back in the summer, and after doing some research, decided to sign up for some credit cards with big sign-on offers as you suggested.

My wife and I signed up for the Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) / American Express card back in August, and I also signed up for the business SPG card as well, and rapidly accumulated 75,000 + points with spending we would have done anyway, and also received some other nice bonuses.

In late October, we took a vacation to Hawaii, not planning it very far in advance due to uncertainties in my Army unit’s decisions on extending my active duty orders.

We arrived in Honolulu Oct. 14, without reservations to go anywhere else. As we discovered, October and November are not peak travel periods in Hawaii and we generally found most events and hotels had availability without booking 6 – 12 months in advance which can be the case in the summer or around Christmas.
Once we arrived on Oahu (Honolulu) and settled in for a few days, I called American Airlines about using award miles to fly my wife, child, and I to the big island of Hawaii (Hilo), then flying onward to Kauai (Lihue), then finally back to Oahu. American stated “award seats” were available on Hawaiian Air, their alliance flying partner, on the days I chose, but only for the 5am and 7:45 pm departure flights from Honolulu to Hilo, on the big island. Those times were inconvenient for me as they were outside the rental car company operating hours; besides, who wants to wake up at 3 am to get to the airport while on vacation? I thanked the American agent for the info and declined to make a reservation, thinking I would find something better elsewhere later.

I checked the Hawaiian Airlines website for flight availability on those days, and guess what? There were 8 -10 flights departing daily, almost hourly from 5 am through perhaps 8 pm for Honolulu to Hilo – but why had American only offered me two choices, two weeks away from the flight, during non-peak season in Hawaii? The best rate Hawaiian Air offered to fly from: Honolulu to Hilo, then a week later from Hilo to Lihue, Kauai, then a week later back to Honolulu was approx $300/person x 3 = $900 total.

Due to trying to fit certain resort availabilities in with my time schedule, I waited a week before calling again to American to book my award travel. When I called them back, one week before my desired Oct. 27 flight to Hilo on the “Big Island,” they informed me NO award seats were available! So I called Continental, whom I had plenty of points with. Continental/United told me “no award seats available” for any days close to my planned departure. Screw them, I thought – I know there are open seats – they are just restricting them. I thought, let’s see what SPG has on their web site, since I heard so many raves on your site about how flexible their points were.

Checking on the SPG site, I discovered a new service, “SPG flights.” For those unfamiliar, SPG allows redemption of points for hotel stays, rental cars, merchandise and airline miles … but normally the air miles are a transfer to the carrier of your choice – but this would be worthless in this case as the airlines I have miles with or their partners were restricting seats! But I checked on the “SPG flights” feature – it allows direct booking on the SPG site – like Expedia or Orbitz – with the ability to intermix airlines carriers for your trip, if needed – and with NO blackout dates, as far as I could tell!



Arlene, Jason and Max

 So, only two days before my desired departure date, choosing Hawaiian Airlines as our carrier, I booked the Honolulu – Hilo – Lihue – Honolulu trip for three persons using 75,000 “Starpoints” – in the middle of the day when I desired to fly! Granted, this worked out to a little more than 8000 miles redeemed per person per leg, more than a standard 5000 mi / leg American Or United redemption, but the other carriers were non-choices!

In addition, the SPG flight booking option allowed us to earn miles on Hawaiian Airlines – even though the distances were short, the principle is nice! Finally, these SPG bookings included ALL taxes and airport fees.

As part of this process, I had to transfer approx 12,000 Starpoints from my wife’s account to mine (fee-free) and SPG took about 2 business days to do this for me. I called their customer service to inquire about this and they were very friendly and have some of the best customer service in this industry!

We also used the SPG AMEX credit card to book rental cars on Hawaii, as the card will pay for rental car damage your regular car insurance will not, without paying for the rental car company’s overpriced collision damage insurance add-on. Nice feature!

In summary, we flew to and from Hawaii from the eastern US free, and then flew inter-island between three islands for free, without restrictions, as well. The SPG card will stay in my wallet!

Rick, thanks for your tips! This has saved us a ton of cash!

Jason from Pennsylvania
 
Thanks Jason.. We got stuck with that no availability deal this year as well and had to get up at 5AM in Kona. Although expensive, you solved a vacationers nightmare. Thanks for the tip.

The SPG Card.