Hey everyone. Been looking at these forums for a few weeks now and would like some help. Looking to spend 10 days combined in Barcelona, Paris and Rome in late August or early September 2013. Our home airport is ROC, but can easily fly out of YYZ or New York City airports with the right deal. What cards do you think would give us our biggest bang for the buck and any advice would be appreciated. Thanks for your help!

I will be doing a similar journey but not for honeymoon and in May. Infact I will be travelling with my one and half year old daughter and wife. I am heading to Madrid for 3 days using AA miles from JFK(total of 40K, I paid fare for daughter) and taking a Iberia flight on AA miles from Madrid to Rome, staying for 2 days, travelling to Venice via train (again purchase tickets), finally travelling via train to Paris, stopping in Zurich for a day. Will be flying out from Paris to JFK using AA miles (again 40K plus cash purchase for daughter). Total damage in terms of Miles, 100K (travelling in economy) plus staying in Radisson Blu Madrid (44k clubcarlson pts/night), Radisson Blu in Rome (50K pts/night), Hilton Venice (50k pts/night) and finally Radisson blu in Paris and Versallies Hilton (50K/pt). I think you can start with AA advantage card and try to grab as many pts as you can with ClubCarlson promo, which should be coming up sometime in May or hit hard on Hilton cards (AMEX, Citi, BOA and BOH via Hawaiian airlines) and Chase Ink and Sappire card.

Welcome to FT and congratulations!

I don't have time right now or probably over the next few days to offer detailed advice on flights, hotels, credit cards, etc, but I do strongly suggest that you both get the Hyatt Visa card. After some initial spending (of maybe $1,500?), you'll each get two free nights at any Hyatt in the world. The Park Hyatt Vendome in Paris is one of the best Park Hyatts in the world and one of the best hotels in Paris, so you could end up with four free nights at a great property. The rooms aren't all that big (which is the case for many hotels in Europe), but it's otherwise a fantastic place in a great location. Look at the Miles Buzz and Hyatt forums for more info about the hotel and the credit card.

Also, wherever you go, email the hotel's reservations office a couple of weeks in advance, very politely explaining that you are on your honeymoon and that anything they can do in terms of room upgrade or other perks would be very much appreciated. Don't demand or expect special treatment, as there will be no guarantee. But it can't hurt and can sometimes help to ask.

It might be a bit late to sign up for cards for the flights at this point. Hotels you should be okay.

If you can spend $10k pretty quickly (wedding spending?) I might recommend both of you sign up for the Citi AA Visa and Amex using the two browser trick, then put $2500 on each card quickly. That'll get you each 100k AA miles, which you can use for: ROC-BCN, FCO-ROC in business class. Looks like there's still good availability on these, though it's on BA so you pay some fuel surcharges. Looks like for two tickets it'd be 200k miles + $535 or so. Still not a bad deal.

Then you can buy economy seats BCN-CDG, CDG-FCO. Random dates I picked priced this out to around 320 Euro. Or you can both sign up for a Chase Sapphire Preferred as well (but more spending required, $3k on each) and get business class tickets on those for 40k per person (transfer miles to UA), if there's availability (looks like there is right now). Another possibility here is if you quality for the 55k UA targeted offer out right now, that will lower the spending requirement.

So... if you can both get 2 Citi AA cards + a Chase Sapphire Preferred and meet the spending requirement quickly ($16k total), that would get you business class seats on the whole trip for the miles + around $800.

Wow thank you guys for all your help! Should I apply for any of these cards the same day so my credit does not get pulled more than once?

The spending I don't think will be a problem as we will start paying for all the wedding stuff very shortly.

nadir576 - I see you got flights for 20K each way in May, I priced the same flight in September and it was 30K. Any chance the September flights decrease to 20K or is that just a more expensive time of the year to fly?

Your credit gets pulled for every application.

I would vote for cutting out 2 of the cities and go just to Paris. The first and last days are mostly lost due to travel and then you lose time traveling from one city to the next. Ten days sounds like a lot of time, but it is really not.

While this is not the FT way of traveling, I think it would lead to a better honeymoon experience.

You could do Rome also, but that might mess up a later Italian vacation.

Just my 2 cents.

I second the above. Go to Paris, stay there for as long as you can, than choose some places to visit such as: Mt Saint Michel, Strasbourg, Brussels/Brugge, Chartres and the Loire Valley, etc. You could stay the whole period in Paris and would not see everything the city has to offer.

I would not be hopping too much, it is your honeymoon and you would not like to be spending a lot of time with check-ins and check-outs. But I understand that each individual has different travelling styles.

In our Honeymoon last October, we stayed 4 nights in Siena and 5 in Perugia in Italy to explore south Tuscany and Umbria. If I were to choose France and hadn't been in Paris, I woud split between Paris and same place in the countryside.

First of all, CONGRATS!

In 2009 my bride and I spent three wonderful weeks in Krakow, Budapest and Vienna. All our airfare and hotel in Vienna were "paid" with miles/points.

I would suggest both you and your fianc� signup for the Starwood and either AA or UA personal and business cards. Now you will have to achieve your respective minimum spends in whatever manner you two can do on your own and or through creative tips on FT.

I strongly agree with one of the other posters who suggested you concentrate on just one large city if you only have basically one week. We Americans try to do too much extreme sightseeing by hitting multiple cities in too short a period of time. By staying put or just doing two cities, you can also experience the city more plus reduce your stress by not having to pack/unpack, change hotels, and travel in between such cities.

Have fun and here are a few links to get you started.

Starwood Personal:
http://www304.americanexpress.com/ge...&AFFID=k547977
Starwood Biz:
http://www262.americanexpress.com/bu...dit-card/29790

AA FlyerTalk thread:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...nks-first.html

UA CC application link:
https://www.united.com/web/en-US/app..._to=thatsaplus

Additional handy sites if you aren't using them already:
http://www.freefrequentflyermiles.com/index.htm
http://www.frugaltravelguy.com/
http://thepointsguy.com/
http://boardingarea.com/blogs/viewfromthewing/

I am not so sure about flying from YYZ but NYC opens quite a number of opportunities. I personally like the Chase UR Cards (Sapphire Preferred, Ink Bold). Think about the cards for future travel needs also, not just for this trip. UR can be transferred to an airline in all 3 alliances and SouthWest (Not sure if southwest matters to you or not). I value UR points a lot, like many others. Star Alliance have numerous options from NYC airports to Barcelona. I will look into the routing and reply you again. I am not a pro at routing but very interested in that stuff.

Congratulations! I will also be taking Mrs. Heryanta on a delayed honeymoon trip for 14 days in mid-August.

About six months before our wedding last year I signed up for Citi Forward and Citi TY Premier. I used the Citi Forward for all of our restaurants expenses (like rehearsal dinner) and used my TY Premier card for the multiple trips we took cross country to plan (we live on the West Coast, wedding was in the East Coast).

Citi Forward gives me 5pts/$ spent on restaurants while TY Premier gives me TY points equal to the miles flown when you purchase your airfare with the TYP card. The TY points can then be redeemed for non-refundable flights at a rate of approximately 1.3ct/pt. After about a year I have about 199k thank you points. I'd say roughly 150k come from those two credit cards.

My wife has the United explorer and we'll be using United miles to get from LAX to EWR to spend a couple of days at the in laws (the top of our wedding cake is sitting in their freezer!).

I will be using the TYP for our EWR-BCN and AMS-LAX legs. The rest will be used to redeem Marriott gift cards which I plan to use for our hotels (AC by Marriott in Barcelona and the Mariott in Zurich).

TYP is not as valuable as UR or MR as you can't transfer them into airlines loyalty accounts; which is very useful for business/first class international travels. However, in my specific case it allows me to pay for a big chunk of our honeymoon trip in Europe after 'only' collecting points for a year.

Good luck and enjoy!

+1 to both of the above. I'd suggest cutting out at least one of your three cities and preferably two of them. And while all three are great, Paris really is special...the most romantic city my wife and I have ever been to...even putting aside the various tourist stops and the fantastic food, it's just a wonderful town to stroll around, stop for a coffee or glass of wine, people watch at cafes, etc.

If you do want to complement Paris with a second destination, find another place that's a relatively easy car or train ride away. I've read very nice things about Brugge (in Belgium), but haven't been there. Amsterdam and London are also great cities that you can easily get to by train from Paris, but both are also very large cities; perhaps for your second destination (in addition to Paris) you'll want a smaller city or a bucolic place in the countryside.

You can of course try to score both hotel points and airline miles at the same time via cc sign-ups and spending, but it's probably more of a priority to get sufficient airline miles together ASAP, since award flights go more quickly than award rooms. And it would be very nice for the two or you to fly business class (i.e., J in FT lingo) rather than economy (Y) if at all possible. From what I've read, forget about Delta as it is the toughest USA carrier to redeem for award flights on.

In terms of accumulating enough miles to fly J each way, you could accumulate miles on both AA and UA since you can then redeem them to fly AA (or its One World partner airlines) one way and UA (or its Star Alliance partners) the other way.

Overall, though, for this trip, you might see if you can get enough on UA to go both ways. I've read anecdotal reports that UA award availability is somewhat better than AA. Plus if you were to use your AA miles for flights on BA it adds some considerable extra fees you'd have to pay, due to BA award redmeption policies. Plus UA J seats are 180 degrees lie-flat (plus have better in-flight entertainment systems and screens) while AA's are at an angle. The one consideration in favor of AA is that over the past year UA has not been as good at dealing with irregular operations (weather delays, mechanical problems, etc. that can delay or cancel flights), but the chances of those happening to a particular flight are not great. One other factor in favor of UA (or focusing on US) is that US has the best J seats flying transatlantic, of the major USA airlines.

Anyway, with all of that in mind, think partly in terms of which credit cards can get you enough miles for one or both ways on a given airline (or airline alliance). Starwood is good for AA and UA but not very good for UA. Chase Sapphire is good for UA but possible for AA or US. If you have decent credit, you might well be able to each get two AA ccs (with sign-up bonuses) but only one from UA.

Finally, as indicated above, be open to getting business credit cards as well as personal ones. Starwood and AA are pretty lax about defining a business...you basically just have to give them a business name, which literally can be your own. Chase has Ink business cards to complement its Sapphire personal card, but can be a bit more stringent about your having to prove you have some kind of actual business.

Hope this helps!

PS: Very useful links by NICEDUDE66. Good places to start exploring your options.

August isn't the best time to be in Paris--more tourists than Parisians. What about splitting your time between Provence and Italy?

Actually, I'll beg to differ on this, DC. The first time we went to Paris was in August, and it was great in that it was less crowded than it usually is...not that it's the kind of city that usually feels overcrowded. More than enough restaurants and cafes open, Parisians around and things to do. The overall feel of the place was as though everyday was Sunday, which was actually quite pleasant.

Now, in August one runs the risk of a heat wave, but that applies to most of Europe in August. And even the couple of very hot days we experienced were not overly oppressive. The only advice I'd give on that score is to read reviews to ascertain whether a given hotel's air conditioning is sufficiently strong to deal with a heat wave.

Less crowded, yeah, but I just don't find that the true character of the city really comes through in August.

In August, I'd much rather be in Provence...