We are really looking forward to our return next year to the Hilton Waikoloa Village Hotel. It’s a massive resort on the Big Island that we visited many years ago. As we explored the islands we found the Grand Hyatt on Kauai to be our personal chill-out favorite but, on this trip, we will be joined by our grandkids and their parents for a medical conference and hopefully, a lasting memory will be made for all of us.
The Hilton Waikoloa has a series of connecting natural pools where a couple of friendly dolphins reside. We hope to share the “Dolphin Experience” with our 6- and 8-year-old grandkids for a morning I’m sure we will never forget. It’s expensive, but just imagine those kids swimming and playing with the dolphins in a supervised setting with an instructor and family setting of just the six of us.
The hotel price in September is a reasonable $251 per night plus the resort fees, taxes and all the other goodies hotels like adding on these days. As Diamond members of the Hilton Honors program, we hope to avoid most of those, get a nice suite upgrade and use our available upcoming resort credits. Is it the best use of Hilton points at a little over .4 cents per point? NO, but it’s 8 nights and a cash savings of over $2000. The parents and grandkids own a timeshare week where they will be staying on property.
Our stay will be paid for with Hilton Honors points we accumulated with points we earned on our Hilton Aspire cards, Hilton Surpass cards, and Hilton Business card. Katy and I each got the Aspire card this year with a nice 150,000 point welcome bonus along with with a $250 resort credit and a $200 airline incidentals credit. That nicely covered our $450 annual fee. Katy also got the Hilton Honors American Express Surpass card with a $95 annual fee and 125,000 points welcome bonus. And I picked up the Hilton Honors American Express Business card to help keep track of my ever-increasing and constant blogging business expenses. That card added another 125,000 points to our Hilton stash so to speak, and easily covers the 480,000 Hilton points needed for the 8-night stay.
The continual 6X earnings on Katy’s Surpass card at grocery stores and gas stations well certainly come in handy if we make a return visit to a Hilton property in the near future. In fact, earlier in 2020 we are headed back to the Hilton in Palm Springs where the $250 resort credit on each of our Aspire cards will, I’m sure, be used for spa treatments and massages;) We booked the stay in Palm Springs as two separate reservations (one in her name and one in mine) so we could, in fact, use both the resort credits from our 2019 welcome bonus. And renewal of the Aspire cards will cover some of those ancillary expenses at the Hilton Waikoloa.
[Image: Shutterstock/dirkr]
Source: frugal travel guy