Originally Posted by camhabib

First let me say that, compared to just about everyone here, I have zero experience with travel. While I fly a few times a year, it's typically on someone else's expense, and I haven't taken a personal vacation in quite some time. While I've used points in the past, this is my first venture into using them for travel purposes.

I'm trying to plan a trip for me and my girlfriend to Paris for a week, a city I've had the pleasure to visit a handful of times, but that she's never seen (she's never been out of the country). I currently have about 60k rewards point on my Amex Platinum, and around 60k on my Chase Ultimate Rewards. I'm thinking of taking it late in May or early fall, but that's all TBD. For the past couple weeks, I've been browsing various travel sites, trying to get an idea of how to work the logistics of the trip out.

So far, what I've found is that it seems cheaper to go through something like Travelocity or the Amex Travel site and book hotel + flight together, than to book everything separately. Separately, the best I could find was flight for ~$1k / person, while the hotel an addition $1k, for a total of $3k. Combined, I was able to find "packages" for ~$1k flight and hotel / person for a total of $2k. Adding a car, etc, did nothing, but arriving and returning on a Monday (vs Saturday for example) seemed to shave a lot off the price. I also noticed that taxes are sometimes more than the airfare. I priced out several flights on sites such as Air France and BA, and the flight itself came to around $500 while the taxes were around $600. I found this interesting, because many of the reward redemption policies state that points would cover the airfare, but I would be responsible for the taxes, etc.

Now, from what I understand, in order to redeem points, I would have to transfer points from my card, to that airline program, and book the flight through the airline (likewise for hotel, which is a bad deal from what I understand). That said, the flight would be around $1k, half of which would be covered by points, the other half would be on me. This, combined with the price of the hotel, would bring the total from $3k to $2k; essentially the same price if I just didn't use any points and booked together. I could "pay with points" using my Amex card, which seems like a bit of a waste of points as they aren't terribly high valued.

I feel like I'm missing something. Is there another way to do this that works out a bit better for me? Any tips or tricks that I'm just completely oblivious to? Any help or guidance is appreciated. Sorry for the long post and completely elementary nature of the problem.