Hi All,

A friend of mine is looking to take his family of 5 to Paris. Which credit card combination would be the best to help reduce the cost. Thanks.

He and his spouse/partner should get the Hyatt card for 4 free nights at any Hyatt (including Park Hyatt Paris Vendome). That's over $3500 worth of rooms.

If your friend is flying to Paris from the continental US, he could fly United for 60,000 miles RT per person. If he and his spouse have money to spend, great credit and he is fine with opening multiple credit cards, he and his spouse could get 2 Chase Sapphire preferred cards (yielding 80K UR points), 2 Ink biz cards (the signup bonus is 60,000 UR points right now, instead of the 50K, which would yield 120K UR points...thats ending in a few days so he'd have to get on that soon), and 2 United cards (yielding 60K UR points). The total spend required for all of those cards in order to get the signups would be $18,000 in 3 months. He would end up with 278,000 UR points (if he literally only used the cards for categories that were 1 point per dollar) - so 22,000 short (he could make up for that by spending wisely on certain cards and making use of bonus categories and UR mall purchases). He could also open 2 Chase Freedom cards which would yield 20,000 points, but I'm not sure that Chase will allow him to open that many cards in such a short time period (he's probably already pushing it with Ink, CSP, Hyatt, and United).

If he could manage to do all of that, the travel and hotel (or at least 4 nights of the hotel), would be virtually free. If he has a lot of time before his trip, he could build up his credit card arsenal more slowly, which would prob yield more successful apps.

Thanks Rhubarb - he actually is using his Marriott timeshare xmas week. So, i know it will be hard for him to get some rewards that week. But, thanks for the information.

Well Hyatt is a totally different brand than Marriott (despite having cards that are both issued by Chase). So if he and his spouse get 2 Hyatt cards, they would get 4 free nights at any Hyatt worldwide, and it wouldn't impact his Marriott stays/timeshare.

Going to Paris for Bastille day and Disneyland for 3.

Amex points (via business gold) transfer air France 50k/each round trip
Club Carlson visa 85k plus some leftover totaling 100k, 2 nights at radisson blu metropolitan de Eiffel, and 2nights radisson blu Disneyland. Used last night free option.

Are there capacity controls or other limits on the free nights? Four nights at the Park Vendome would be nice.