Aloha cousins,

a brief trip summary, how to keep it "somewhat reasonable" for a family of 4 including young boys (under age 10)

for the past few years we have been in the practice of flying MSP-HNL using NWA's first class (world business class seat, non-stop flight) product. we got sort of spoiled but then this year the miles and dollars started to run a bit low... so I was thinking maybe Flordia this time rather than Hawaii.

Then what do I see at My Yahoo's fare tracker? a $280 (pre tax) fare from MSP-HNL round trip. So I book it. but it's united, coach, connecting in DEN on the way out and ORD on the way back. But heck, at that price...

a bit less than $1370 for airplane tickets, family of 4, three of whom are new United flyers and so they earn double miles on this 8,000+ miles round trip (around 56,000 total miles earned for the family, including me)

Minivan rental from alamo for less than $300, I signed up for quicksilver ahead of time but it didn't do much good, these Alamo people are horrible, at least at the HNL location (off site, need to take the shuttle). But eventually ended up with a nice minivan including... a first for us... on board DVD video for the kids. So we would soon be making a stop at K-mart to pick up a copy of Shark Tales for the kids to watch, turned out to be very helpful on long road trips/bad Waikiki traffic/etc.

I took the family to Oahu this year from Dec 1-9 and we stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village using points... 6 nights using a hilton 175,000 point ALON2 and 2 extra nights at 40,000/night. We used the valet parking, fairly slow to bring back the van many of the times... much different than when staying at HWV where the car was at most 5 minutes away. Also HHV no longer allows you to call down for your car, you must be present.

Being in what must be the last days of my Diamond status, I got a nice upgrade at HHV to a x30 one bedroom suite in the Tapa Tower, having called ahead to let them know we prefer a big room/suite to a beautiful view. Also we got the "free" breakfast each day, but ended up upgrading to buffet for $3.xx each (hot buffet for kids, cold buffet for adults, hot for adults would have been an $8.xx upgrade instead of $3.xx). This cost for the cold upgrade issue is new at HHV, it used to be that Diamond/Gold would just pay when upgrading to hot. Now what you get free is a "served continental" which means 2 donuts/whatever, juice, and coffee/tea. Not too interested in that, we'd all like a bit of protein to go along with those carbs.

With valet parking and a few surfing lessons charged to the room, we ended up spending less than $500 at the Hilton. Less than $400 actually, because they took a few bucks off after the second middle-of-the-night-sounds-like-an-air-raid-false-alarm from their smoke detectors.

Our biggest out of pocket spending was on shopping, around $700 or so, then dining between $500 and $600, including several fairly nice places - Kobe Steaks, Top of Waikiki, etc... it sure helped to have the Entertianment book and Fine Dining card, and we made good use of the early bird/sunset specials whenever possible --- which mostly it was since we came to HNL from central time and so spent most of the trip getting up fairly early, 0300 at the beginning and 0500 by the end of the trip -- as a result wanted to eat dinner and sack out fairly early as it was.

Spent a bit less than $200 at the Safeway and Foodland buying Poke, Bottled Water, and various other food and beverage items. It was interesting to see that they now charge 5 cents per bottle "deposit" on beverage containers but there is no mechanism to turn in the bottles for money. Why not just be honest and call it a tax? Although there is some sort of bulk recycling of glass, plastic and metal, aparently, and we did see people scavanging for these items.

Gas was a bit more than we were used to in MSP land but we're already used to gas in Hawaii being expensive, we were just through that whole Katrina gas price thing, and truth be told only needed to pay for one tank of gas - $50 - so who cares. No big whoop.

Taxi ride one time was amazing in price, shows what a value the rental car and high priced gas is. I took the boys down Waikiki on several days, them on their roller skates and skate boards, me walking behind with the roller bag filled with water, snacks, camera etc.... One day we decided to taxi it back to the hotel and it was $10 by the time I put on a modest tip. This for a less than 3 mile one-way ride. The taxi rates in Waikiki are 35 cents per 1/8 mile.

We skipped out on the Sea Life Ctr this time around but did visit the Waikiki Acquarium, somewhere that the Amex Plat. concierge had recommended. That place was very nice and super reasonable price to enter, and no extra charges once there expect for whatever you might buy at the gift shop.

We also did not lu'au this time around, wanting to do Paradise Cove again but deciding against the nearly $200 price, especially since the boys were not doing so well after dark and the thing didn't even start til 1730.

We did Pearl Harbor on December the 7th, completely free including parking, except for the few ice creams we purchased. And the same day we saw Manoa Falls, which cost a grand total of $5 in parking.

We made a nice trip to the north shore and spent some time at Waimea Bay Beach. Also Snorkeling the last day at Hanauma Bay and a nice hospitality room before take off in the Hilton's posh Alii tower.

All told, less than $3,500 of documented expenses and even including whatever tips and no-recipt cash purchases we made, stand a good chance of staying under that $3,500. Not a bad deal for 8 nights on Oahu for a family of 4, I think. The only ways to make it much cheaper would have been airfare with points (I guess we may have been able to do that but not likely for 4 seats and not enough points to do the 70,000 mile/seat "rule buster"). Or to go without the van/parking/gas but I think that's a real nice value, unless your intention is to stay in Waikiki the whole time. None of us wanted to do that.