Here are 6 ideas for using 250 thousand membership rewards points for a family with children
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One of the purposes of our site is to help people maximize the benefits offered by the major point collections on the Italian market.
In this article:
Making the points by shopping at the Coop and turn them into tickets in business or accumulate points Payback by getting gas at Esso and groceries at Carrefour can lead to significant savings in hotel reservations.
We thought we would put together a series of content that would provide ideas and practical examples of how you can use membership rewards points that are accumulated by using American Express cards.
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After Have assumed a scenario for a single traveler, In this article we want to think about a family with 2 children.
Small premise. I am a family man and in my portfolio I have, among others, the American Express Green Alitalia the reason is simple. This card has two advantages that alone can be worth thousands:
- It allows me to have the milesback, or the cashback of 20% Of the miles used to book award tickets with Alitalia. This means that if I book 4 economy tickets to New York with Alitalia and I spend 200k miles, 40k will immediately come back to me
- It guarantees me one companion a year. When we set in our goals for award tickets with Alitalia, one of the actions we take is to load all the expenses on Alitalia cards, that way, when we you reach 15k euro transacted in a year, we will have a free companion ticket.
But let's come to the 5 ideas for a family to use 250k membership rewards points
Idea #1, parents in Business and children in Economy in Los Angeles
Finding 4 business seats on the same Alitalia flight is practically impossible: before the pandemic it was possible to find a maximum of 3 seats on any of the 4 flights to the Big Apple, tomorrow, when everything is back to almost normal, it will be even more difficult as Alitalia will have a maximum of 2 flights and it will be difficult for more than 2 business seats to be released in Magnifica class.
That is why the first advice is to book 2 seats in business and two in economy. If the children are still young to make the flight alone in economy class, you can split up: 1 adult and 1 child in biz and 1 adult and 1 child in economy.
To detach these 4 tickets we will need 260k miles, since the conversion from membership rewards is 1:1, we will need to use as many MR points.
This is where being an owner of American Express Alitalia Green comes to our aid. By booking the first two tickets in biz (value 160k MM), we will immediately receive 32k MM as milesback, which we can immediately reuse to book the two seats in economy (value 100k MM) and again receive 10kMM back.
By doing so we will have used 208k MM instead of 260k MM, provided you do not have one or two companion tickets available, in which case you can cut down the cost of award tickets considerably.
To all this we will of course have to add the cost of taxes of about 300€ per ticket.
Idea #2 5 days "mooching" in a suite at Bangkok's Millennium Hilton
As we have already explained, Membership points do not only convert for airlines, but also for hotel chains such as Hilton and all its brands.
Sleeping 4 in one of the suites of this 5-star hotel before the crisis cost never less than €300/350 per night.
Expense completely resettable by converting 1:1 MR points to Hilton Honors: each night costs 51k HH points, but being enrolled in the Hilton loyalty program you will be able to take advantage of another very important benefit, that of being able to stay for 5 premium nights while paying only 4. This means that you will not have to use 255k HH points but only 204k to stay 5 nights.
Idea #3 Five tickets to go to Rovaniemi in Santa's house.
This more than an idea is one of our success stories. We have told about how we can achieve 5 Economy tickets with Finnair to fly, under the Christmas holidays, in the peak season to Finland.
For tickets that can cost much more than a Rome/New York, we will just need to convert 150k MR points into Avios we will then detach five round-trip award tickets to the small stopover in northern Finland. To this we will have to add only 188€ total taxes.
Idea #4 4 tickets to the United Arab Emirates
They are currently one of the few destinations open to all tourists in the world, although for the Current DPCM are not accessible for tourism by the Italians, but things they change quickly for both good and bad.
However, this does not prohibit the idea of planning a trip in the near future. With MR points for going to the Emirates, we have two ideal choices:
- Transfer MR points into miles and book a flight to Abu Dhabi with Etihad through Alitalia
- Transfer MR points into Emirates Skywards miles and book through the Dubai-based company
In the first case we will have a cost, for 4 economy tickets of 240k MM and about 70€ tax per ticket.
In the second case, again for 4 economy class tickets we will have a cost of 180k Skywards miles, worth 225k MR points, plus 366€ in taxes
Idea #5 Sleep for free in Disneyworld
If you have children who dream of going to Disneyworld, any in the world, you know full well that admission tickets cost an arm and a leg and sleeping in one of the hotels just as much, if not more.
But sleeping in an official hotel brings many benefits such as early entry before the park's general opening, the ability to take advantage of privileged "queue jumpers," and much more.
We have already told how to sleep for free in Tokyo's Disneyland, here we want to move to the original Disneyworld, the one in Orlando, Florida. There are dozens of hotels that can be booked and paid for with points, for this article we chose the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort.
Technically, this hotel Is a Sheraton, so in the Marriott family, to be precise a category 6. Staying at this property that is within walking distance of the Boardwalk area of DisneyWorld Orlando can cost 40 to 60k Bonvoy points. The conversion from MR points to Bonvoy points is 5:4, this means that to stay three nights in low season we will have to transfer 150k MR points thus managing to save on the room, the cost of which is never less than 200/250$ per night, in high season it can easily reach 400$.
Idea #6 six economy tickets to the east coast of the U.S.
We talked about it In an article in recent days, turning MR points into Iberia Avios allows you to redeem economy class tickets at a lower price than Alitalia and most importantly find even 4 seats or more on the same flight.
Thanks to the off-season fares you will be able to get tickets to Miami, Boston, Chicago and New York from 34k Avios, or 42,500 membership points. So with only 255k MR you will be able to redeem 6 seats instead of the 5 with Alitalia.
Do you have better ideas of how to use dots in your family? Tell us in the comments.