Originally Posted by
Yoshi212
Firstly, Welcome to FT & Congrats.
There are award booking services that know how to "manipulate" the programs to piece together what you want (based on availability)
Award booking services - a list and some reviews
I would caution against visiting 3 beach centric locations for the trip. Sounds relaxing but after awhile you're repeating yourself. The Maldives, while beautiful, are very expensive, difficult to get to via award tickets, will be very hot, require additional boat rides or flights to get to & from the resorts eating into time. I'd suggest maybe something more adventurous between Greece & Bali. But that's just me you two may be different.
I wouldn’t consider Santorini a beach-centric destination.
I do think that 3 destinations scattered across the globe is too much, especially if the trip length is closer to 2 weeks than 3. That just gets to be too much time spent traveling, and not enough time to really experience a destination. On the other hand, I also tend to think that more than 5 days on the beach starts to get boring, so I would probably suggest one destination where you can explore for a week and a half or two weeks (not necessarily a single city, but a small region) and then a shorter stint on the beach. Activity first, then beach seems to work better than the reverse if you want to go back home relaxed.
Don't expect to use hotel points on Santorini - the chains don’t really have much of a presence there. There are a few boutique hotels loosely associated with the chains (like SPG) but options are very limited. Maldives will be very expensive, requiring huge sums of points, and even then there will be considerable costs which you cannot defray with points such as transfers, very expensive meals, etc.