2-Week Adventure in London, Paris, and Lisbon Under $1000

Europe!

This past winter (Dec 2023), my brothers and I embarked on our first trip to Europe. We started planning this Europe trip about 5 months in advance. Prior to this journey, we’ve had some success in hotel and flight redemptions and have been spending more time researching flight redemption. But unlike the previous trips, this was going to be a longer (2 weeks) trip in foreign countries that we had yet to visit. What better way to put all our credit card points and award travel knowledge that we had been accumulating over the last couple of years into good use. Very quickly into the planning process, we realized this was going to be the epitome of deep value travel. And this was the trip that finally pushed us to start this blog.

Trip Detail

Our process of planning generally follows the following guidelines:

1. List out all of the cost items
2. Get a cost estimate for each item
3. Pick the one with the highest cost
   1. Identify all constraints for this item (location, dates, budget, constraints, and other reservations)
   2. Find and book the best value option
4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 until completion

Our dates were limited to mid-December til the end of December because of finals at school and to maximize PTO around the holidays. Although the winter season was not as popular as the summer, the flights were still expensive near the holidays. Our strategy was to identify as many major cities as we wanted to visit, and then come up with an itinerary based on award flight availability. The benefit of European travel is that inter-European transportation is very affordable and has tons of options through budget airlines and trains. So we just needed to focus on getting great redemption on the trans-Atlantic flights. 

Flights

For our first trip to Europe, we wanted to stay within major cities in Western Europe. London and Lisbon were our top choices, drawn by the vibrant football culture in the UK and the delightful blend of weather and cuisine in Portugal. In addition to London and Lisbon, we also considered Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Frankfurt as possible destinations. We mainly used British Airways, United, and KLM websites to search for award flights for each of these destinations (it is very useful to know the redemption sweet spots out of your home airports aka common cheap award flight routes). Because the three of us were flying out from different airports (SFO, LAX, ORD), we had an added constraint on flight search. But finding decent award flights in economy seats turned out to be fairly straightforward. Within a few days, we found ticket availability from SFO/LAX/ORD to London Heathrow airport, with each ticket costing 35k Avios points + $150. American Express happened to have a 30% transfer bonus to British Airways (27k MR pts -> 35k BA pts), so we booked it pretty quickly and started looking for our return flight. The return flight proved to be slightly more difficult as we couldn’t find a good deal right away. We remained optimistic and, for the next month, would check the airline websites every few days. And surely, an amazing deal popped up on our radar: Lisbon to SFO (layover at Paris CDG) economy seats for 17k KLM points + $161 each. 

For 44k American Express points and about $300 cash, we were able to secure our round-trip plane tickets to London and out of Lisbon, our preferred destinations. All in all, the flight search process was the hardest and took about 1.5 months to complete, but once we figured out the airline’s sweet spots, the rest of the job was simply routinely checking for availability in the routes under our consideration.

Hotels

Now that our flight and trip duration were set, we moved on to planning the finer details of the trip. The benefit of visiting Portugal is that it is a very budget-friendly country. We were able to find great Airbnb options and saved them to a list while we planned out the rest of the trip. London, on the other hand, is very expensive. We first checked the cash price for the hotel and Airbnb, then checked the points redemption rate for Hyatt and IHG since we had a stash of points in these two reward programs. However, all of the options were quite expensive. Knowing that we would be spending a few thousand collectively on this trip, we turned to the credit card market for help this time. It just so happened that Chase Marriott Bonvoy was doing a 5 free nights deal when you spend $3k in 3 months. One of us applied to it and put enough spending (daily spending + other trip costs) on the card within a month to get the 5 free night certificates (FNC). With the 5 free nights, we were able to book 1 night at the Kensington Residence Inn’s standard suite and 4 nights at Bankside Hotel, Autograph Collection (large guest room with extra sofa bed). The total cash value of the 5 nights in London was about $2000 USD (~1500 British pounds). It was, perhaps, the best $95 annual fee we have ever spent.

At this point in the planning process, we realized we might be able to add an extra stop between London and Lisbon. After scanning through flights to Lisbon from a few cities, we decided to add a 4-day stop at Paris. Eurostar tickets from London to Paris seemed reasonable to us, and flights from Paris Orly Airport to Lisbon were also pretty cheap. For stays in Paris, we exhausted our hotel tricks (it is quite difficult to find award nights for 3 people), and resorted to booking private rooms at a hostel. Our hostel search was quite straightforward: the hostel had to have a metro stop in the inner city zone and ideally have a private room. We ended up selecting Jo&Joe Paris – Gentilly for its high ratings and decent location to the city center as well as Orly airport.

Once the more difficult bookings were decided, we circled back to our Airbnb list in Lisbon. The only criteria we had for Airbnb was that it had to have a washing machine for our laundry, but that was relatively easy to find. While we waited for the Chase Marriott card, we did find that the Airbnb options were quickly going since our dates in Lisbon were right after Christmas. Nevertheless, we found a cozy place in the heart of Lisbon. The Airbnb was conveniently close to city landmarks and dining options, featuring a charming private rooftop area with sought-after city street views.

To finish up the planning process, since we had an overnight layover in Paris CDG on the way back, I transferred 6.5k Hyatt points and booked a suite at Hyatt House CDG.

As a bonus surprise, a week before departing in December I was given the opportunity to tick off another bucket list item: flying in Business Class. 

Our return flight released a last-minute business-class award seat. I quickly snatched the seat for 30k more points and another $150. I was ecstatic to experience my first business class with Air France! Most airlines tend to release last-minute award seats for cheap when there are vacant seats, so be sure to check out the website days before your departure.

Expense Breakdown

Expense Items	Estimated Cost (per person)	Actual Cost
Flight: SFO/LAX/ORD – LHR	$600 (booking multi-cities)	27k MR pts + $150
Flight: LIS – SFO	$600 (booking multi-cities)	17k MR pts + $161
Flight: ORY – LIS	$150	$117.5
Eurostar: London – Paris	$150	$168
Hotel: London (Residence Inn) x 1	$300 / 3 = $100	1 FNC
Hotel: London (Bankside) x 4	$2000 / 3 = $650	4 FNC
Hostel: Paris x 3	$600 / 3 = $200	$162.5
Airbnb: Lisbon x 4	$600 / 3 = $200	$215.7
Layover hotel: Paris CDG x 1	$150 / 3 = $50	6.5k / 3 = 2k UR pts
Total	~$2700	$974.7 + 46k pts

For the estimated cost of flights, we took the cheapest multi-cities flight itinerary we found on Google. Bankside Hotel is an outlier, as it consistently retails at $500 a night for the 3 people room that we got. But even if we swapped that out for a regular hotel or hostel, the cost per person would have still been around $2000.

Conclusion

Beating the estimated cost is one thing, but achieving a comfortable 2 weeks, 13 night, Europe trip that covers two of the most expensive European cities under $1000 is simply next level. Overall, this trip required the most planning, but the amount of savings we achieved allowed us to reallocate the budget towards food and experiences. The lodgings were in convenient locations. For flights, we did not have to go through some crazy layovers to reduce the cost. Some key takeaways from this trip:

• Multi-Players Mode – having travel partners who are also in the credit card points game can greatly reduce costs and further extend the value of credit card points.
• Open a new credit card(s) – in general this is not a bad idea, as your trip expenses can count towards the sign-on bonus (SUB). We benefited a lot from the Chase Marriott Bonvoy card on this trip. In general, hotel credit cards with ~$95 annual fees are considered keeper cards, because they often give you one free night per year. Be sure to look into them if you are planning for a trip.
• Know your airport sweet spots – we spent a good amount of time figuring out all the sweet spot redemptions out of SFO. When it came to flight searching, it became much easier to find an award flight. There are a lot of good online resources, and we plan to write a short wiki on how we find award flights.
• Don’t waste your points – we see a lot of people trying to spend all their points on one trip or chasing high cents-per-point redemption (cpp) at all costs. CPP is usually a good baseline that helps us decide whether to spend cash or points. We usually aim for a minimum of 1.5 cpp and prefer 2+ cpp when redeeming points. This may seem low to people chasing high ccp, but our philosophy of deep value traveling will always prefer spending 60k on round trip economy flights rather than spending 180k on round trip business flights. I currently have two more Europe trips planned in 2024, the flights for both trips are award tickets with points!
• Consider all options – similar to the point above, we could’ve used points for hotels in Paris and Lisbon. But the cash rate for the accommodations was low enough, so we figured it would be better to pay cash and also experience the different styles of lodging (hostel and Airbnb). We really enjoyed the hostel in Paris and loved the Airbnb in Lisbon.

Hope you enjoyed the read and felt inspired to plan out your own trips with the tips shared in this post.