Would you love to take your family on a trip from the U. S. to Europe…
…but after calculating the cost of flights, hotels, and food, you’re thinking this trip might be later than sooner?
Or, if you do go, will you only be able to do free activities once you get there?
Our last trip to Europe was looking that way until we realized that if we stayed in Europe longer, we’d actually save thousands and thousands of dollars and have more fun on our trip.
I’m going to lay it all out for you in this blog post so you too can lower the cost of flights, hotels, and food while staying bougie and having a lot of extra money left over to spend on fun activities and shopping.
I know it’s going to help so many of you to save lots of money, create a trip that you love and remember more positively.
And if you use TalkBox. Mom to talk in another language with your family, you’ll actually be able to go on your language trip and use the language you’ve been using at home with TalkBox.Mom.
If that’s not something to get excited about, I don’t know what is.
Keep reading to find out exactly how we took a month-long vacation to Europe, which saved us more money than taking a week-long vacation to Europe.
Now let’s jump in!
Whenever our family goes on a trip, and that is most of the year, there are four main categories that we budget for. Transportation, accommodation, food, and fun.
Our goal is to always lower the expense for transportation and accommodation so much that we’re using our everyday food and fun budget on our trip.
This means that we’re not spending any extra money outside our regular budget.
This has allowed us to travel almost nonstop for 13 years with our kids just by being strategic.
And I’ll share with you how to get my Dynamic Cost Calculator for family trips at the end of this blog post so you can be just as strategic.
For this trip to Europe, we wanted to fly into Rome and go down to Naples to go to a tiny island off its coast to see where my sister-in-law’s family is from.
Seven years ago, my brother married a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde woman with braided hair and a grandpa from Italy.
They have three beautiful kids and one on the way, and she has cancer.
If your family can too relate to the cancer journey, I am very sorry.
It has been an opportunity to do things now instead of later, and going to Italy could not be an exception.
So when I found out that she’s been wanting to go, I wanted to make sure it happened ASAP. Not in maybe years from now, because cancer or not, you never know.
Except, here comes the curveball. The soonest time for their family to go was during spring break.
If alarm bells aren’t going off in your head, they should be. This is high season, especially for Rome, because of Easter.
The timing of this trip was first set to blow up the transportation category of our budget because flights during spring break? Ciao! So let’s start there.
Lowering the Transportation Budget
First, the flights to Rome from Dallas were about $1,200 per person, and for the five of us, that’s already at least $6,000 that we’re spending on flights, and not on having fun.
That is devastating. I would much rather do every activity I want in Rome for $6,000, and only pay the fees on flights…
Or even a shopping spree there for $6,000. It’s $6,000.
I 100% don’t want that money going to flights.
Typically, booking a flight with points will remove the price tag and just keep a fee, like $50 to $150 per person.
If you’re not familiar with strategic ways to earn miles and points, you might think that we’ve earned our points and miles from flying a lot or from using a credit card for years and years and years.
But this isn’t how we build millions of points to use for our family trips.
We use strategies to target sign up bonuses for credit cards where we take our normal expenses in our everyday budget, put them on a new card for three months, and then get the 50k, 60k, or 100k plus points for meeting the minimum spend with the card paid off, not carrying any balance.
This is a topic for another day, and, in fact, something I’ll be talking in detail about on day one of TalkBox.Mom week at the end of this month.
With that said, it’s possible to get hundreds of thousands of points a year, if not over a million.
However, remember those alarm bells I was mentioning? There were practically zero availability to use points around Spring Break and Easter at a reasonable rate. Not worth it.
Sadly, using miles for flights can be tricky if you want to fly during peak travel times and destinations such as Easter in Rome.
The reason that our family can travel so much while staying within our regular budget is because we book trips when there is a points deal for at least the flights.
With my sister in law needing specific dates, this just wasn’t possible.
Or so we thought at first.
My husband decided to see if he could find any deals on flights with points to anywhere in Europe.
Just get us over there.
With some flexibility on our part, he found a deal to Spain one week before our trip to Rome, where he could redeem four economy tickets and surprise me with a business class ticket.
That’s right. It was cheaper for me to fly business the week before than to pay for tickets to Rome the next week.
I could lie flat, sleeping in peace all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
And if you’re doing the math here, that means that my husband sat in the back with the kids and I’ll just say it was the easiest flight with kids in my life.
Thank you, Hector.
You might be thinking, “Well, wait a second, that’s just one flight. You still have to get to Rome, and you still have to get home.”
True, but I also said we spent a month in Europe.
We spent 7 days in Madrid, 11 days in Italy, and the rest of the month in Germany because it was cheaper to fly Germany a month out after our trip started than to leave Rome right when the week trip would have ended.
Our five tickets from Dallas to Madrid, Madrid to Rome, Rome to Munich, and then Munich to Dallas,
20 tickets total came to a total of $383 per person or $1,915 total.
This is about two thirds less expensive than the week long trip would have cost in transportation.
And on the points side, we used 307,000 points.
Here’s a breakdown of exactly how many points we used per flight and the cost of the fees:
British Airways Miles
DFW – MAD 4 Econ: 85,000 + $388
DFW – MAD 1 Biz: 42,500 +$130
MAD – Rome 4 Econ: 33,000 + $101
MAD – Rome 1 Biz: 16,500 + $31
Avianca Miles
ROME – MUC 5 econ: 40,000 + $150
AirFrance Flying Blue Miles:
MUC – DFW 5 econ: 90,000 + $1,115
Lower the Accommodation Budget
Now let’s move on to the accommodation budget because staying in Europe for weeks longer also adds to the accommodation category of our budget, right?
No, it didn’t.
I hope you’re falling out of your seat right now because it is getting crazy.
The reason that Madrid was top of our list for flying in seven days sooner was because there’s a beautiful Thompson Hotel there.
And if you get credit card sign up bonuses with Chase Ultimate Rewards, the best value transfers are to Hyatt. And Thompson is under the Hyatt umbrella.
We use 20,000 Hyatt points per night to book two rooms, one for our kids and a connecting suite for us for seven nights at a total of 280,000 points, accompanied with a suite upgrade certificate for one of the rooms.
We were in the two-bedroom family suite, which also has a beautiful living and dining room and beautiful bathrooms. These rooms usually cost €900 to €1,200 a night or €6,300 to €8,400 total.
And we got that for free.
We also chose Munich, Germany for its Andaz Hotel, which is, you guessed it, a Hyatt property.
Munich is one of my favorite cities in Europe, and I highly recommend visiting.
And we really wanted to go because we have so many friends there from living there for a couple of years.
We wanted to see all of our friends because it’s been over 12 years since we’ve been back to Munich as a whole family.
At the Andaz, we got a total of 24 nights.
That’s two rooms over 12 nights.
Per night, we spent between 20,000 to 23,000 in points per room, totaling 416,000 points plus a couple of free night certificates we had and two suite upgrade certificates.
We got a king suite connected to a two-bedroom twin, and it was gorgeous. There were four bathrooms, an eating area, a sitting area, a study area. It was absolutely beautiful.
Both rooms would have been around €800 to €900 per night, or total €9,600 to €10,800.
I told you it was getting crazy, and unlike using airline points, there are no fees.
We didn’t pay anything.
Lowering the Food Budget
The last category in our budget that we were able to save money on by staying in Europe for a month instead of a week was our food budget.
You might have thought it was the opposite, but these points just keep getting better.
As you can probably tell, Hyatt is our favorite hotel line. Not only is the transfer value for points worth it, but they have beautiful hotels all over the world which makes them a no brainer to book.
Such a no brainer that combined with special strategic offers, my husband and I are each able to get Hyatt’s elite globalist status every single year.
And my favorite perk is the free breakfast at their high end hotels. Usually these breakfasts cost at least €25 or dollars per person, and we get them for free, inklusiv.
In Madrid, these breakfasts were a five course meal.
First, appetizers of all acorn-fed, dry-cured ham with freshly baked bread, accompanied by jams and jellies.
Then pastries from their bakery, like chocolate croissants.
Then a lighter breakfast choice with vegetables.
Then a second choice, like an egg dish, like eggs Benedict with sauce on avocado toast.
And finally, a giant dessert, like a full plate of waffles with ice cream.
If you almost died hearing all of that, imagine how we felt after eating this breakfast for seven mornings.
We were so full that we only needed to eat a light dinner each night like a pizza or two shared dinner kebab plates for €15.
So not only did we save €875 on breakfast, we also spent less on groceries and eating out than we typically do on our regular monthly budget.
The twelve mornings we had in Munich were also similar, but think: luxury buffet meets sausages and giant pretzels.
This breakfast spread had fresh herbs to make your morning tea, a huge spread of fresh pastries and bread coming out of the oven hot, tons of hot plates like bacon, white Wurst, vegetables, and the most exotic yogurt, fruit, and muesli bar imaginable.
Plus, you could order special egg dishes straight to your table.
Again, this breakfast was included every morning and filled us for almost all of the day, saving us at least €875 on breakfast and money on lunch and dinner.
With all of these savings, we ended up being able to spend more money on activities while we were in Rome, where we took time off of work completely to have fun with my brother and sister in law and their kids.
And we were able to do fun activities before we worked half days remotely in Madrid and Munich, really creating an unforgettable month for our family where we got to use our Spanish, Italian, and German while learning about history, spending time with family, and visiting old friends.
In total, on this trip, we saved up to $27,000, and we used 1,003,000 points.
I hope to do it again soon.
How in the world did we get all of those points? If you’re interested in knowing how to strategically amass lots of points for unforgettable family trips, be sure to save the date for TalkBox. Mom week happening at the end of this month.
On day one of TalkBox. Mom week, I’ll be walking you through our exact strategy for points and answering your questions.
I hope you had fun with me in this video seeing how we replace money on our budget with points, and that you’ll try out a few of these for yourself, if not all, to decrease the cost for flights, hotels, and food.
If you’d like to grab the dynamic cost calculator I use to quickly see how much each category is pulling from our total budget so I can spot where to save, go to talkbox.mom/costcalculator.
You’ll also see an example with real costs from our Madrid trip and how we break down the costs with percentages of our kids ages so that they can contribute to the trip as they learn life skills.
I would love to hear in the comments what activity you would love to do on a trip if you weren’t spending money on flights and hotel.
I will see you next time with a brand new blog post.
Until then, I’m Adelaide from TalkBox. Mom, where you start talking in another language with your family the same day you start.
Leave a comment