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Before browsing the photo reports from our trip to the United Arab Emirates, here’s how we put it together using points & miles.
Let’s be honest: only a tiny minority of people can afford First Class flights or stays in palace hotels.
Yet loyalty programs, through the points & miles they hand out, let anyone live these… one-of-a-kind experiences!
And that’s what has always fascinated us: with a few credit card sign-ups and careful optimization of every dollar spent, the dream becomes reality!
In the life of a serious points & miles collector, there are experiences you dream of ticking off, and that we’ve been lucky enough to live over the past few years:
But there’s always “the urge” to go further… to live something unique every time!
That’s how the idea for this trip to the United Arab Emirates came about, right before the 2018 holiday season.
Audrey and I are the parents of Alexandra (3 and a half) and Arthur (1 and a half). Ever since they were born, we haven’t stopped travelling… with them!
It’s quite simple: they’ve come with us everywhere, and we’ve loved every minute of it!
Several times to different parts of France to visit family, to Malta, all over North America and Canada… they even did their own mini world tour in 2017, going to Hong Kong, Vietnam, and San Francisco.
Being parents of young children, living far from our families, means making certain trade-offs: there’s no slipping away for a weekend or leaving the little ones with the grandparents!
Those of you who are parents will understand: every now and then, a couple needs to… reconnect!
So, during a conversation in May 2018, my mother offered to look after the kids at her place in Nice, both of them, for a week just before Christmas.
We jumped at the chance! And that’s how this romantic getaway to the United Arab Emirates was born!
Let’s come back to the unique experiences we wanted to live… and that were at risk of soon disappearing through the points & miles route. Among them:
Why disappearing? Because the options used with points & miles can be seen as “loopholes” in the system… or simply because the airline or hotel no longer finds it worthwhile to offer them.
In this kind of situation, you have to act fast! And as you’ll see in our reports, we came close to missing the A380 on our entire itinerary! Our outbound flight was on a B777:
To put this trip together, we started a little more than 6 months ahead, in May 2018, with the last bookings made in October 2018 for a December 14, 2018 departure.
Here are a few summary tables of the points & miles we put to work across this whole trip.
Audrey and I left Montreal a week apart, which explains the different flights and types of points used.
Here are the programs we used:
To earn Aeroplan miles, the easiest route is through the 4 American Express cards that earn Membership Rewards points:
The most lucrative offer is the referral one for the Business Platinum Card: 75,000 points!
Here, we got particularly lucky. In August 2018, for one day, American Express Canada allowed Membership Rewards points to be transferred to Flying Blue miles. A glitch? A test run before launch?
It was clearly a glitch, even though we regularly call for Flying Blue to become a Membership Rewards transfer partner.
In any case, we took advantage of the opportunity to transfer a few tens of thousands of points to Flying Blue miles… which we used on this occasion to try Air France’s new business class between Montreal and Paris.
Easily the most “fun” part of putting this trip together…! Fair warning… hold on tight, because 4 loyalty programs were used here!
Asiana Club is a partner of Etihad Airways. And as it happens, the Asiana Club award chart is especially generous for flights between Europe and the Middle East:
Here’s what it costs:
Yes, 80,000 miles round-trip in first class on Etihad Airways (you know… the one with the bed 😉 ).
Now, how do you earn Asiana Club miles in Canada? Through Marriott Bonvoy!
The conversion rate is 3 Marriott Bonvoy points = 1 Asiana Club mile. But if you transfer in blocks of 60,000 points, you get 5,000 bonus miles!
So, to get 80,000 Asiana Club miles, you need to transfer 195,000 Marriott Bonvoy points:
But how do you rack up that many Marriott Bonvoy points? Through the American Express Cobalt Card, the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card and the American Express cards that earn Membership Rewards points!
Let’s be upfront: we got very lucky! For more than a year in Canada, you could transfer Membership Rewards points to Starpoints at a 2:1 rate (versus only 3:1 in the United States), then transfer those Starpoints to Marriott Bonvoy points at a 1:3 rate.
Which, in the end, meant transferring Membership Rewards points to Marriott Bonvoy at a very attractive rate of 1:1.5, or 2:3.
So, to get 195,000 Marriott Bonvoy points, we had to transfer:
If you prefer a visual:
So we turned 130,000 Membership Rewards points into 80,000 Asiana miles to treat ourselves to this round-trip in Etihad First Class, worth CA$10,000!
Scotia Rewards points are so easy to use: just charge any travel purchase to your card (flights, hotels…) and you can then apply your points against that purchase!
We earned our Scotia Rewards points by signing up for the Scotiabank Passport™ Visa Infinite + Card: 25,000 bonus points as a welcome offer, 6 Priority Pass airport lounge visits… and no foreign transaction fees on purchases made in foreign currencies!
The American Express Cobalt Card earns “Select” Membership Rewards points. These points cannot be transferred to airline partners, unlike the other 4 cards that earn Membership Rewards points.
They can only be transferred to hotel partners such as Marriott Bonvoy.
When you earn Select Membership Rewards points at 5 points per dollar (groceries, convenience stores, restaurants…), it can be worthwhile to apply them to your travel purchases… and that’s exactly what we did here.
42,000 Select Membership Rewards points saved us $420 on our Easyjet flights between Paris and Nice.
For the hotels, we used only Marriott Bonvoy points:
For two of the nights, we used the free-night certificate from the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card and the Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express Card. This certificate is issued when the annual fee renews.
Since 2 of our cards were up for renewal in August and September 2018, I deliberately chose to pay the second-year fee, wait for the certificates to land in the Marriott Bonvoy account (7-8 weeks later), and then cancel those two cards (in October and November).
So it was as if we paid $120 for this certificate worth 35,000 points. Each of our nights cost more than CA$300… a nice saving!
As for the stay at the Al Maha, a Luxury Collection Desert Resort & Spa, Dubai, it was a genuine sweet spot of the Marriott Bonvoy program that we’d written about a few months earlier.
But this sweet spot stopped existing 1 week after our stay!
Indeed, the 60,000-points-per-night rate included the room… but also all meals (breakfast / lunch / dinner) plus 2 activities a day. From now on, the 60,000-points rate covers only the room! Given that everything else costs around US$800 a night… it’s unfortunately no longer worth going there.
How did we get these 215,000 Marriott Bonvoy points? Largely through sign-ups for the 2 Marriott Bonvoy credit cards (4 cards between the two of us!):
Finally, for our car rental, we chose to use BMO Rewards points.
An inexpensive rental, since it cost us a little under 45,000 BMO Rewards points, most of which came from signing up for the BMO Ascend World Elite Mastercard: it offers 35,000 BMO Rewards points, 4 airport lounge visits, excellent insurance… and is free the first year.
And that’s how we put together this exceptional one-week romantic trip to the United Arab Emirates!
In the coming articles, you’ll find our photo reports on the flights we took and the hotels where we stayed.
Savings this way:
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