Our flights were booked once I received the bonus and then I watched Southwest prices to see if the price would drop. I took advantage of one of their Summer sales and was able to fly 3 people to Hawaii for only 75,000! The out-of-pocket expense was only $44.20!

 

We took advantage of the benefit of 4 upgraded boardings on the way home which was a total of $200.00 charged onto my card. It was erased within a couple of days. We also each were able to use the $8.00 internet as the Southwest Business Performance card allows for 365 charges a year to be refunded. This completely took care of the $199.00 annual fee. This may be a card I hold onto for a bit as it does pay for itself.

Something that I did not plan to do but ended up doing due to an unexpected expense while on vacation, was a travel purchase erase. I used my Capital One Venture X card (which also gives us TSA pre-check access) to erase around 1,000 worth of room charges at our resort. This made me feel better about the unexpected expense although I was sad it wasn’t the BEST redemption.

The cash value for our hotel plus airfare would have been $12,085.30. If you add up the annual fees that we paid we would have been out $553.00 BUT the benefits of these cards outweighed the annual fees, so I feel we paid less out of pocket!

A huge shoutout to Pam and Alex for the consultation! One 45-minute conversation with them helped me get a solid plan! Hawaii has been nothing short of amazing and staying for free made it EVEN better – thank you ladies for always being available to help answer my questions!