I'm a relative newbie to hotel and airline points. After lurking around here for a few months, I decided to try to amass enough points for a mostly free trip to London, and started getting strategic credit cards. Here's what I have.
- Two Hyatt award nights for any hotel category.
- Enough IHG points for 2 or 3 nights, or more if I luck into a Points Break deal.
- Should soon have 50,000 UA points, to which I can add 10,000 from my Chase UR account.

This should get me from Seattle to London and back on an award saver redemption, and at least 4 nights in a London hotel. Only cost for this portion of the trip should be about $200 in fees for the LHR-SEA flight. I'll travel off-season (April?) and my dates are very flexible.

Should work, right? Anything I'm missing?

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Yes, it should work, if you can find Saver award seats on UA or its partners. Have you checked united.com to see what Saver availability looks like currently for April, 2015?

For about the same out-of-pocket cost (or less), you could probably take the Eurostar train from London to Paris or Brussels, and fly home one of those cities -- thereby avoiding the high fees for departures from the UK. @:-)

Nice tip about the eurostar. I'll definitely look into that. Yes, there's currently decent availability on UA for connections through san fran. Thanks so much for your input.

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If you think you can get yet another Chase card, consider the Chase/Fairmont card, which will get you two free nights at any Fairmont hotel worldwide, including -- I think -- the Savoy in London.

Eurstar is about $100 and will save you having to go through London airports. Take a little over 2 hours and will get you from the centre of London to the centre of Paris

While I'd definitely recommend seeing Paris as well if the OP desires, if the Eurostar runs about $100, I wouldn't do it solely to try to save on the LHR departure fees, which with UA look to be ~$215 from LHR compared to ~$93 from CDG. So it's pretty much a wash.

Sounds like you have a good plan in general and I'd go ahead and lock in your dates as soon as you can. Partly depends on how much you want to spend over and above the free hotel nights, for additional days. I wouldn't count on a PointsBreak hotel being anything convenient for London sightseeing, from what I recall in the past it's likely to be one on the outer metro area where you'd spend a lot of time, and possibly some extra transport costs, getting to any tourist sights.

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+1.

But it's also worth noting that there are cheaper ways to get from LON to PAR, if one has more time than money. Megabus UK does the trip in as little as 7.5 hours, and I just found a fare of 15 GBP (~ $25) for a weekday next month.

Good advice from 84fiero: if you are seeing availability on dates that work for you then go ahead and book. I agree that you should not be distracted by talk about travel between London and Paris or Brussels if the plan is to travel "from Seattle to London and back".

It is extremely unlikely that IHG's PointBreaks will help.

Be aware of Easter (Friday 3 to Monday 6 April) and school holidays (roughly the first three weeks in April).

Does IHG have cash & points (I think so). That might help stretch as well.

Also, consider that you may get a cheap place out of the main tourist areas and you'll either be paying cabs or public transportation (and wasting time).

Another good tip, but I doubt I can meet minimum spend in enough time to be sure of getting flight dates. I might give it a try, and if I get the fairmont award nights early enough I can use those instead of Hyatt nights. Would be cool to stay at the Savoy.

I decided against eurostar when I saw that it's close to a wash. I did know about Easter, but not about the school holiday -- thanks.