2024 Travel Wrapped!

2024 has been an amazing year of balancing work and traveling for us. As the year is coming to an end, we want to recap this incredible year, highlighting some of our favorite moments and sharing some tips to help you extract deep value on your next trip!

1. Travel Statistics

In this past year, we visited 9 foreign countries, 21 cities, and touched down at 25 airports.

We spent a total amount of

617,500

Credit Card Points

earned with natural spending habits¹. These points helped us fly 12 award flights and stay 18 nights at hotels, saving us over

$24,000

in Travel Expenses

2. Top 5 Redemptions

We’ve completed some deep-value award redemptions that added immense value to our travel experience. Here are our top 5 award redemptions! Click the links to read the corresponding reviews or trip reports where we dive into the redemption details.

1. 135k Chase points for 3 nights at Park Hyatt Milan
2. 156k Chase points for 4 nights in premium suite plus connecting room at Andaz Vienna (review coming soon)
3. 40k Chase points for Air France Business Class Flight from Barcelona to San Francisco
4. 4 free nights at London Bankside Hotel
5. 55k Amex points for Round Trip flights to Europe

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3. Top 5 Cities Visited

On the travel side, we thoroughly enjoyed exploring many new cities with different cuisines and unique cultures. Here are our favorite cities we explored this year (click the links to our travel guides):

1. Barcelona / Costa Brava
2. Vienna
3. Florence
4. London
5. Amsterdam

Travel guides for the remaining cities on the list are coming soon! In the meantime, follow our Instagram @deepvaluetravel to check out highlights from each city.

4. Memorable Experiences

• Unique Experiences: The most unique moment for us this year by far was attending the Monza Formula 1 Grand Prix and celebrating the Ferrari win with all the Tifosi! Read more about our summer F1 trip to Europe @ F1 Race Weekends and Cultural Escapes: Discovering Amsterdam, Florence, Milan, and Zurich.

• Cultural Highlights: The Christmas markets in Vienna and Munich take the top spot of cultural highlights. Each night, we visited a different Christmas market and enjoyed many traditional delicacies such as gluhwein, schnitzel, wursts, and apfelringe (travel guide coming soon).

• Natural Wonders: Mount Rigi near Zurich was our favorite natural scenery as it perfectly captures the beauty of the Swiss Alps. We spent a whole day hiking through the green pastures on the hills and soaked in the views of the nearby lakes (travel guide coming soon).

5. Tips and Insights

Points and Miles Strategies:

• Utilize transfer partners! Our general strategy has been simple and effective—transfer Amex Membership Reward points to airlines to book flights, and transfer Chase Ultimate Reward points to Hyatt to book hotels.
• Research award sweet spots for routes of interest. For example, Google “best way to fly to Paris using miles and points”.
• Apply for hotel cards during the free nights promotion. Whether it is a Chase Marriott Bonvoy or World of Hyatt credit card, the free night certificates can save thousands of dollars.

Budgeting and Value Maximization:

• Avoid traveling during peak seasons. We saved a lot of money by visiting cities during their shoulder season. This also opens up more options for award redemptions!
• Don’t force points spending! Redeeming a large amount of points at below 1 cent-per-point value is extremely wasteful. Mix up the accommodations with hostels or Airbnbs for different experiences and maximum value when award redemptions are not available.
• Join loyalty programs to enjoy extra benefits. We have extracted extra value such as free breakfast, room upgrades, and early/late checkouts from our Globalist status with Hyatt.

Thank You!

2024 has been an incredible year filled with unforgettable travel experiences, valuable redemptions, and enriching cultural encounters. We are immensely grateful for our readers’ support and enthusiasm throughout this journey. Your engagement and feedback have been invaluable in helping us create content that inspires and informs.

As we look forward to 2025, we invite you to follow our Instagram account and subscribe to our newsletter for more travel content, tips, and updates. Share your own travel experiences with us, and let’s continue exploring the world together, finding deep value in every trip. Thank you for being part of our travel community!

1. Natural spending habits means that we did not spend more than we needed to hit the sign-on bonuses. We simply planned the spendings ahead of time and pooled together the family’s expenses all onto one card at a time. ↩︎