Originally Posted by
FTaddict
Excellent advice. I haven't booked the hotels yet. Any suggestions for some really good hotels?
I have about 124k Club Carlson points, 30k Marriott points, 18k IHG points, 42,000 Amex MR.
Also have 100k AA miles balance left so I can use those on hotels if I'm getting a really good value?
P.S: Also have $400 of rewards in Barclay Arrival Plus card.
Wow, you decided to go without checking whether any of your points would work or how much hotels would cost???
Club Carlson has no hotels anywhere in Hawaii. So your Club Carlson points are useless.
30k Marriott points is not enough for even
one night at any hotels on Kauai, and they don't even seem to have award availability left in case you wanted to use more points (you can only book awards when the "standard" room is available; if the cheapest rooms are sold out and only more expensive rooms are available, that can rule out booking hotel awards).
IHG does not have any hotels on Kauai either, but at any rate 18k would not be enough for a Hawaii hotel if they had one there. (The only hotel they have on another island is 35k points a night, because once again it's a resort.)
And no, AA miles for hotels is generally a very poor value, compared to saving it for a flight.
So basically you saved on the flight, but now you're likely to pay almost as much for the hotels as the flight would have cost had you paid for it. (It's tricky to find decent hotels in Hawaii below about $200 a night even booking well in advance, and btw I don't even know if you can find any hotels with free breakfasts on Kauai, because there basically is no such thing on Maui. So expect to pay for
all meals.)
So I don't understand why you went ahead and booked this flight for so close in, despite much advice not to, despite not having done research on hotels, despite not having done research on things to do once you get there.
One thing to keep in mind: While most airlines charge you a fee to cancel and award reservation, many airlines don't charge a fee to change the date of your travel, as long as you keep the origin and destination the same. So if you're finding that hotels are going to put you out of your budget, you could "effectively cancel" the trip for now by taking any award flights you've booked already and moving them for now to any date with the same award availability within the next 10 months, and then once you pick a new date (after you've done more research and after you know what you want in terms of hotels, length of trip, etc) you could move it a real date (that has availability).