London Airfare Journey – Capital One Travel Portal

We started out with Venture X and after the sign up bonus and normal spend for 6 months, we had accumulated about 188K points.

Being new to the travel point game and not understanding how to best redeem our travel points or how to transfer points to Airline Partners, we booked our airline tickets through the Capital One Travel since we still had our $300 travel credit to use.

We wanted to travel to from Seattle to London on April 2023, and all the travel sites, Expedia, British Air, Google flights, round trip was north of $1,100 per person for the dates we were looking for.

I signed up for the price watch notification feature with Capital One Travel and got notified there was a deal for $730 round trip per person from Seattle to London. For 3 round trip tickets, after paying to select our seats it cost $2433 Total. We had 188K Miles available which we redeemed for this purchases lowering the cost to $545 which I charged to our Venture X Credit Card. Within a week we go our $300 travel statement credit lowering to total out of pocket cost of the airlines to $245!

London Lodging Journey – Booking on AMEX Travel Portal for a “Hotel Collection” hotel

AMEX had a special in the summer, if you book an room through the AMEX Travel portal and the hotel was a “Fine Hotel Resort” (FHR) or “The Hotel Collection”(HC) and spend over $800, you would get $200 back.

Canopy by Hilton London City was a “The Hotel Collection” hotel, and for two nights it cost $852 after taxes and fees. With that offer we got $200 back in statement credit. Also we got $200 from AMEX Platinum for the annual hotel credit. Out of pocket the two nights cost $452.

An AMEX Platinum benefit is Hilton Honors Gold Status, which gave us free breakfast buffet each morning, I value that at $150. We also got $100 food and beverage credit.

Effective cost of the 2 nights was $202

London Lodging Journey – Transferring AMEX Points to Hilton

We had earned our sign up bonus from AMEX Gold and AMEX Platinum

We found a Hilton Hotel we wanted to stay at for 5 nights that was nearby downtown London and decently priced. AMEX had a transfer special, transfer 1 AMEX point to 2.6 Hilton Points. We needed 252,000 Hilton points, so it cost us 96,000 AMEX points. We looked up how much it would have cost to stay at the hotel, and it was $1399 for 5 nights / $280 per night. The AMEX Points we had to transfer only cost us 96K points / $960

What if we had transferred points to a travel partner instead?

Looking at Air France booking similar time time but for April of 2024. It would have cost us 154K in Air France Points assuming 1:1 transferring from AMEX Points or Venture X. 51K points round trip looks pretty good per person, but they do get you on the taxes. For 3 people, it would have cost us $1050 out of pocket cash and 154K in Points. I did look at the dollar value of the ticket and it was $937 per person or $2,811 for 3 people

Side by Side comparison of what we did through Venture X vs transferring points to Air France

Venture X path looks like the better deal still, we only had to use $245 out of pocket cash, we did have to use 34K more points / $340 value