A few weeks ago, we took an incredible vacation to Europe that should have cost a fortune, but instead we saved over $20,000 by dialing in the entire trip and booking most of it with points and I want to walk you through the entire process of planning, booking, and in our case, canceling and then booking again and do it in such detail that you can learn all the tactics I used because honestly, this was one of the best trips we've ever taken and I would love for you all to be able to have a similar experience.

After I walk through how we made it all possible, my wife Amy's going to join me and we'll do a little recap and review of the entire experience. For anyone new, I'm Chris Hutchins and if you enjoy this video, give us a thumbs up or if you have a question, leave it down in the comments and if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, consider subscribing and if you want to get the latest deals, news, and other great things I find every single week, head on over to chrishutchins.com/email or click this link and subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

We always seem to take an overseas trip each year, but this year it seemed like nothing was going to happen except in early May, we looked at our calendars and we actually saw that there was a four-week window that we had no commitments in August. Now, we haven't taken an international trip with the kids since we went to London two years ago and now that they're two and four, we decided we were ready to do it.

So I used award tool and seats.aero to set up a bunch of alerts from San Francisco and LA to major European airports and we looked over the dates of the first kind of two weeks of that four-week window. Now, if you have the premium versions of either of these tools or a few others, you can set these alerts up really easily across a bunch of different destinations with all kinds of criteria from cabins to stops to duration, maximum number of miles, maximum fees, and I actually went through all these tools in episode 166 and 167 with Greg from the frequent miler.

So if you want to learn a little bit more about those tools, definitely check that out. And really we didn't care where we ended up because we were only looking at direct flights from San Francisco and from pretty much every city in Europe you can get to direct. It's really easy to buy a short ticket from Paris or London or Frankfurt or Zurich to somewhere else in Europe.

So we were really flexible. And sure enough, on May 25th, I got an alert for four tickets from San Francisco to Paris direct in business class for just 50,000 Air France miles with about $200 in taxes, which is a ridiculously good deal. But to make it even better, Air France offers 25% off the number of miles for children under 12.

So their tickets were only 37.5 thousand miles. As a one way, these tickets probably would have cost us around $4,500. And in episode 175, I went a bit deeper into this whole process. So if you want to dig deeper, go there. But I don't think it's quite fair to use that 4,500 number because a lot of international one way flights are way more expensive than round trips.

And honestly, if we booked this trip out of pocket, we would have paid for a round trip. Most of the round trip flights were closer to the same price, about $4,500, but let's just use the value of $200 for this flight. So our total outlay was 175,000 points plus $800 in taxes.

Relative to what we would have had to pay for those, we were getting about 4.1 cents per point, which is absolutely awesome. If you look at a card like my Amex gold, which earns 4X points on dining and groceries, then being able to get 4.1 cents on 4X points per dollar is like getting an effective 16.4% cash back on dining and grocery spend, which is great.

Now Air France does have a 70 euro per person fee to cancel, but we were okay with that because we knew that there was a decent chance we'd take the trip and worst case we'd be out a few hundred dollars if we had to cancel. As for the flight home, we waited a few days, we set up some alerts and eventually we got an alert for a direct flight from Amsterdam back to San Francisco 12 days after we left, which was perfect.

Now it's important anytime you think about booking flights to not just book on the airline that has the availability because it might be way better to book through one of their partners. So I've set up this transfer partner spreadsheet. You can find it on the product section of our homepage.

And what you'll see is that there's a handful of Star Alliance partners that are partners of United that you can transfer points to from any of the major credit card points programs. Now I went through this in a lot of detail in episode 184 and all the different ways to do it, but the short version is I could have booked it through United for 80,000 points and $93 in taxes per person.

And this is all for a one way business class ticket per person. And United would have given me free cancellation, which is great, but it was 80,000 points. Now Aeroplan is another way I could have done it. And it was 70,000 points plus $144 in taxes and fees. So maybe you could argue that slightly better, but $110 to cancel.

On the bonus, Aeroplan is a transfer partner of a lot of different programs. So it's a lot easier to get those points than if you were trying to get United miles. They also have an option where you can spend a few more miles and get free cancellation. So that option was 85,000 points, but the same taxes and fees.

However, at the time there was a 20% transfer bonus from a popular bank. And that transfer bonus brought that price down significantly. However, I already had Aeroplan points from when built had a hundred percent transfer bonus. So this was already a pretty great option, but I'll just remind everyone of the third option, because I just want to make sure you realize how lucrative it can be to spend a little time on this process.

And that was looking at Life Miles, which is, uh, from Avianca and they're also a Star Alliance partner. And that same flight was 63,000 points and $115 in taxes. Now that was, if I was willing to accept a $200 per person cancellation fee, but they have this Life Miles plus program that you can pay for.

That was going to be an effective about $65 a person in extra cost, but it would give you free cancellation and a refund of some of your miles, which ended up being about 40,000 miles. So the total cost was going to come down even further from that 63,000 miles when you netted it all out.

However, there was also a 15% transfer bonus from Amex to Life Miles, which made it even better deal. We ended up doing the Aeroplan option and we did it with some extra flexibility for 85,000 points, because in our mind, we had used the built a hundred percent transfer bonus.

And so these points were effectively even less. So it was almost 42,500 points if you factor that in. And so these transfer bonuses can be really awesome. For example, on September 1st, just recently built had another great one where it was 50% transfer bonus to Avianca. So if you needed those 63,000 points, you actually only needed to transfer 42,000 and that's 42,000 to get international business flight with $115 in taxes, which is absolutely amazing.

Now, since I'd priced all of this out, Avianca has increased some of their flight award costs, you know, devalued, but that's 63,000, I think only went up to 70,000. So it's really not that big of a difference. So if you look at what I ended up doing, spending 85,000 points, if you don't factor in the transfer bonus, it was still two and a half cents per point.

You want to factor in the fact that those Aeroplan points were a hundred percent transfer bonus, then we're closer to five cents per point, but even at two and a half cents, it's a great value. Again, I went deep on this process in episode 184, but just to flag a few days later, another option opened up from Air France for only 50,000 Air France miles, plus a few hundred dollars in taxes.

So I just want to remind people of a few takeaways. And that is that even if you're going to Europe in the summer with four people looking to fly in business class, one, make sure that if you find availability, you're looking at all your options for transfer partners to get the best deal, which is why I think it's so valuable to have transferable points.

And if you need more transferable points, we have links to the best cards and all their bonuses at the top of the website, allthehacks.com. The other big, important reminder is that if you can be flexible on the destination, the date, how close to when you book it, it is possible to find awards.

I did it in the summer for Europe with four people. So I know it can work for you too, but it does require a little bit of flexibility to get the best deals. We had flights booked and it was now time to make a plan, but here's a little wrench.

As we started thinking about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, we really started to second guess our decision to take two toddlers overseas for two weeks. We were actually less concerned about the time changes, but our youngest is still napping and doesn't nap in a stroller.

And on top of that, we found it so hard to find hotels in Europe that allowed four people to a room. And then we started thinking about how next year it would be so much easier that girls wouldn't be napping. And just around that time, I was recording episode 187 with Lee Rowan about travel planning.

And it popped into my head, his question and his comment, are we choosing this trip or is this trip choosing us? And after a good heart to heart with Amy, we realized that this trip was definitely choosing us. And we just felt like we would be much happier punting the entire trip, the big international family vacation, one year when we were out of naps and it would be a little bit more enjoyable.

So we decided we were going to cancel the trip. However, one really interesting thing happened. I had realized a few days earlier that somehow we booked our flights to Paris right in the middle of the Olympics. And you probably don't know this, but Amy is an absolutely massive fan of the Olympics.

The entire time it's happening, if she's not watching it live, she's watching replays of so many different sports. Now that's not to say I don't love the Olympics. I do love the Olympics, but for Amy, it's at a whole different level. And on top of that, and we were about to turn 40 and we didn't really have any big plans to celebrate.

So when my parents naturally asked me if there was anything I wanted for my birthday, of which, you know, from episode 188, there was not. I threw out the idea that what if we drove the kids to their house with our au pair and they all could watch the kids for a week and we could take a 40th birthday trip.

They said yes to my surprise. And it was time to plan an entirely different trip and give Amy and myself, of course, one of the best 40th birthdays ever. So first step, I canceled the kids' tickets to Paris. We ate the 140 euro fee and we canceled our return flights, which thankfully, because I booked with a few more aeroplane miles had no fee.

And now we needed to figure out a plan. And so we started with return flights. And the reason we did this was because we had a lot less flexibility. My parents agreed to some certain dates. And so we really had two dates that we could find flights back home, but we only needed two seats.

And because the kids weren't with us, we had a lot more flexibility on our ability to take a layover if necessary. Fortunately, it wasn't hard to find two seats from Zurich back to San Francisco direct. I think we were using a combination of point dot me and award tool, but points.

Yeah. Seats dot arrow. There are so many options. Go back and listen to that episode with Greg, the frequent miler, if you want to run through of all of them. But we found these flights and we were actually able to use some of those refunded air Canada miles to book them.

Though this time we were less than a month out. So we actually opted to take a little risk and do the 70,000 point option where we would have to pay a hundred dollars per person to cancel and get our points back. But we felt pretty optimistic that we were going on this trip.

And so now we had flights to and from Europe and it was time to plan the best six day 40th birthday in Europe ever. And here is exactly what we did. Now we were landing in Paris three days before the Olympics ended, and we've been to Paris a handful of times.

So we knew we didn't want to be there for the entire trip. So it was time to find an Epic place to relax for three or four days. And honestly, we knew that there were so many options that would be amazing. So whether it was in France or Spain or Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, or plenty of other places, we knew it would be great.

So we actually decided to let the points guide us. And the only requirement aside from a beautiful, relaxing resort is that it needed to be a direct flight away from Paris and a direct flight away from Zurich, which really wasn't too bad. So I started doing some research to pull together a shortlist of hotels, and I do wish this step was a little easier, but I went to the Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG sites.

I found their hotel maps and I started looking around. I'm actually looking at the Hyatt one right now, and it's really great, right? You can search by award category, brand, you can even search by some features, like I only want a hotel with a pool or a spa, and you can find all of the options.

For some of the sites on the Marriott side, it's a little easier to search by country because they don't all have maps and then narrow down by filtering for their luxury brands. And I then looked at Flight Connections, which is a great site to look at all the nonstop flights from a certain city.

And so if you go in and type, "Zurich" from Flight Connections, what you'll see is here are all the places in Europe you can go direct from Zurich. And there are a lot of options, but if you start to look at where the warm summer destinations, it was really just following the coast from Portugal all the way to Italy, and then some of the islands in between.

So now armed with a few ideas and a few places, I started thinking that the award search tools for hotels that we covered in episode 167 would actually serve me a little better. There was a Waze, PointsYeah, Rooms.arrow, AwardTool, and honestly, all of them probably would have worked. Some of them are better than others if you don't have a specific region in mind.

For example, on a Waze, it's really nice that once you find a place, so let's say you wanted to search for Nice in France, you'd be able to search for Nice and see all the hotels nearby in a 30-mile radius. But then if you want to move the map down the coast and go to Cannes or Monaco, you can do that and redo the search.

So since I kind of knew where the airports were, I just started kind of moving around and looking at these different regions and finding a ton of great options. At the time, either it didn't exist or I wasn't sure, but PointsYeah has this Daydream Explorer tool for flights that just kind of says, "I don't know where I'm going.

Show me amazing options." They now have the same thing for hotels, so that probably would have been another decent option. The good news is there were so many good options for Points. A few highlights were the Seven Pines in Sardinia and Ibiza, the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, but as soon as I found one particular hotel, I kind of knew it was the one.

And it was this property called Cap Rocat in Mallorca, Spain, and it was so familiar because a listener named Camden had emailed me almost two years ago about going there for his honeymoon. And I remember at the time looking up the hotel, and I was like, "This is incredible.

The entire property is built inside of an ancient fortress carved from sandstone. It's part of the SLH, or Small Luxury Hotel Program, which at the time I think was partnered with Hyatt and is now partnered with Hilton. And it's an all-suites hotel with only 30 rooms. And fortunately, because it's now partnered with Hilton, you can use your Points and free night certificates to stay there." And I was surprised that the four nights we wanted to go were wildly available.

And I say that I was fortunate because this is not a cheap hotel. The room rate, the four nights we went, was about $2,900 a night after taxes. And we were looking to stay for four nights. So that's a total of almost $12,000, which was something that I just never would be able to pull the trigger on myself.

However, we were able to use two free night certificates and 260,000 Hilton Points to bring the total down to $0. I'm not kidding. When we checked out, there was no taxes or fees or anything. We just paid for the food we consumed and the taxes and fees on those food.

And the whole bill we had after four days was about $500. And that was mostly food activities and whatnot. How did we get those points? So we got them from two welcome offers, one from the Hilton Aspire Card and one from the Hilton Surpass Card. The Hilton Aspire Card every year comes with a free annual night certificate.

The Surpass Card did have a promotional period where it came with a free night as a welcome bonus, but it doesn't anymore. However, after spending $15,000 on the card, you get a free night every year also. The welcome bonus on both those cards also was 130,000 points or more.

So just from opening those two cards, we were able to get together enough points and free night certificates to book the entire four-night stay. So when you think about the value of a welcome bonus, very unoften do you find a welcome bonus worth almost $6,000, which in this case was what it was worth.

Now, if we had just done this on Hilton points and we didn't have any free night certificates, it would have been 520,000 Hilton points, which is still a great value. Most sites value Hilton points at about half a cent, which is fair because you can buy them at half a cent also, but this booking valued them at 2.2 cents per point.

Now, that's pretty interesting because not everyone has that many points, but if you can buy points at half a cent and redeem them at 2.2 cents, that means that even without Hilton cards, even without Hilton points in your balance, you could have just spent $2,600, bought the points you needed for this trip, and saved yourself $9,000 on the cost of the hotel.

Now, the only catch here is Hilton does have a cap of how many points you can buy a year, but they do let you combine and transfer points with your family and friends. So the easy workaround is to buy them separately and combine them together. Even better, if you booked this all with points, you get a fifth night free.

So the value would have gone up by another 25%. Now, I was really struggling with this because the idea that we were going to stay four nights and not get our fifth night free kind of made the optimizer side of me frustrated, but we were only going to be there four nights.

We didn't have any use. We weren't even staying late enough that it would make sense to try to get the fifth night free. And when you mix a reservation with free night certificates and points, it actually doesn't qualify. So I actually felt a little bit better. But for a moment, I was like, "How do I optimize this a little bit more?" And then I said, "You know what?

It doesn't matter." So I'm excited to share more about the property. And like I said, Amy's going to join me and we're going to run through that. But I want to wrap up the rest of this booking process because it's not just one hotel and two flights. There's a lot of things that go into this, finding a place to stay in Paris.

We wanted to buy tickets to the Olympics, make some reservations, get a rental car, get those flights within Europe. And I think walking you through all of those processes and decisions would be super valuable because the tactics I use are ones that you can use as well. Maybe not the Olympics tickets.

Who knows? If you do want to go to Italy in '26 or LA in '28, maybe they're relevant. So now that we got all that out of the way, we needed to book the hotel in Paris. That was kind of my process was let's put up all this scaffolding and we've got the flights, we've got the hotel in Mallorca, let's get the hotel in Paris.

And despite my worry about prices during the Olympics, there were actually a ton of options. And when I was doing research, I read that similar thing happened in London as well for the Olympics there. And I think there's a window where it's far enough out that no one knows how crowded it's going to be and prices are really expensive.

But actually, as you get closer, they seem to come down a bit. So first off, if you're ever booking some big event, I'd encourage everyone to make a refundable reservation early so you have it just in case things are expensive. I was actually able to find a couple options on Marriott where you could book something refundable with points just to have it while I was searching for what I really wanted.

So that's one piece of advice. And so we looked at a lot of things. This is where the hotel search tools also really, really shine because we knew exactly where we wanted to go. So I could hop on any of those tools. I could dial in Paris, put in the exact two nights we needed and see all of the options.

And it was really, really helpful to be able to do that. And you could do that on any of these tools and get a great experience. And while we found over a dozen decent options, there was one that actually stood out to me. And that was the Hyatt Madeline.

It was super central. And despite being pretty expensive at 35,000 Hyatt points a night, which might sound like not that many if you're used to other hotel programs, but Hyatt points are just so much more valuable. But the cash rate was actually $1,200. So that was still a value over 3 cents per point.

So great redemption value. But what stood out the most was that I had seen this Reddit post a day or two before, and I can put a link to it in the show notes, but a traveler who'd stayed at a hundred plus Hyatts made this tier list of every single one.

And in the A+ category at the very top in bright green was the Hyatt Madeline. So I was like, wow, someone who stayed at a lot of Hyatt said this one is at the top. It was really central. It looked great. And the redemption value was awesome. And we had a bunch of Hyatt points from opening a Hyatt card recently.

So despite that it was a non-refundable rate. We decided to go for it. Now, unfortunately I only have Hyatt discover a status, which means you don't get free breakfast. You need to be a globalist for that. Globalist takes 60 nights. I think I'm at four nights for the year.

So that wasn't an option, but Hyatt actually has this thing called a guest of honor certificate where other globalists can transfer those certificates to you and you get globalist status for your reservation up to, I think seven days. And even if you have no Hyatt status at all. Now, someone who reaches globalist has probably picked up a handful of these through different milestone awards that you get as you earn more and more nights and being a globalist, they don't need it for themselves.

So if you just ask around and have a friend that's got globalist status with Hyatt, I found that people are pretty generally willing to offer these to friends and family for free. However, there are a handful of communities online where people trade them and the going rate is about $50, which is a good example of a topic I can't really go deep on on the podcast publicly.

But if you search around online, I'm confident you'll find something, or if you want, I'm probably going to share more details about stuff like that in the All The Hacks membership, which we've linked to on the website. So I managed to find a guest of honor certificate. I got that added.

So now we got free breakfast lined up, which by the way, breakfast for two is a meaningful value, right? Well more than $50 across two days and two people. And so also that globalist status that would be applied through that guest of honor certificate made us eligible for a free room upgrade.

And if we needed free parking, it would be included, though we definitely didn't. So we've got our two hotel stays booked. Now I needed to book our European flights. And fun fact, they are called intra-European flights, not inter-European flights, which would be between Europe and another continent and which I have gotten mistaken in the past.

And when we looked at our options, there were really two options for both legs. And this is something that I often find when booking flights domestically and in Europe. And you can usually save a bit when you book the discount airline, but, or pay a premium to book kind of the national airline.

So in the US it would be a United, Delta, Southwest, a bigger non-budget airline versus a Spirit, a Frontier. In this case, the Air France option was like $500 and the discount options were all about $150 to $200. Normally, I would love to book on Air France or Swiss Air because one, when things go wrong, they typically are better at taking care of people.

And two, they just run more frequent flights. So if the morning flight on Air France was canceled, they'd probably be able to put us on the midday flight. But a lot of times, budget and discount airlines, they only have one flight a day from certain airlines. And so you're probably going to be stuck to the next day.

I'm also familiar with the fact that when you book a flight for $150 on a really discounted airline, by the time you add in the fees for your bags, even a carry-on, by the time you order some food or pick your seats or anything like that, the price is actually potentially going up quite a bit.

So all things being equal, I would always prefer to book on the Air France or the Swiss Air. But in this case, it was just significantly more expensive even after adding all those things up. And if you actually looked, there were a handful of flights on different discount carriers from the Paris airport.

We were looking at Paris Orly airport, which was a breeze to get to. I'd never actually flown out of that airport. And both on the airline we looked at, which was Transavia, and on a few others. So I felt pretty optimistic that if there was an issue, if someone canceled, I'd probably get a notification very quickly on TripIt or Flighty, and I'd be able to jump on and book something and be able to get out the same day.

Now, I was really frustrated though, going through the booking process, because when you go through a booking on Transavia, you have to decide, do I want the basic flight, the plus flight, the max flight, which are really just like bundles of other things, or you can choose the basic flight and then go add on things.

And depending on what you pick, the amount of changes you're allowed to make, the cost of those changes, the seat selection, the cabin luggage, the checked luggage, the number of points you earn on flying blue, because it turns out Transavia is a subsidiary of Air France. All those things change.

And they don't make it easy to find out, okay, well, what would this thing be if I wait? So you end up having to go pick basic, add on a few things, go back, check it out. And honestly, it was a little bit of a stressful process. And the thing that really pushed me over the edge of how we ended up deciding what to do and ultimately creating a new money rule was the fact that I looked at the measurements for our carry-on, which is an away carry-on.

And it was a one centimeter over the European dimensions. Now, one centimeter is not that much. So I wasn't sure how much that really mattered, but also all of the limits for these discount airline carry-ons was 10 kilograms, which is about, I think, 22 pounds. And I weighed my carry-on and it was probably about 26 pounds.

And so I had no idea how strict they'd be enforcing these rules. And the last thing I want to do is pay for my carry-on, get to the gate, find out I have to check my bag. Now I have to pay a check bag fee, but that check bag fee is now twice as expensive because I didn't do it in advance.

And so I did something that you all might find pretty surprising because I really would rather carry on a bag. I don't want to lose a bag on such a short trip. So what I did was I actually just booked the fancy version of the flight. So on Transavia's case, I booked the max flight, which includes fast track security, priority boarding, extra miles for your flight, and all of those different things.

It ended up being more expensive. I want to say it was like 30, 40, $50 more than if I had optimally booked what I wanted. But had I booked a carry-on and needed to then pay for a checked bag, it was actually going to be a lot more expensive than that.

I can't tell you how great it was to just be like, "I booked this one thing. Now I don't have to think about it." And that felt really good. On Condor, I'm actually going to go as far as to say, I'm not even sure it is a discount airline having now flown on it, but in my mind, it was because it was much, much cheaper than the Swissair flight.

And they really only have economy or business, but that's what it looks like on the surface. Once you click economy, they have economy light, economy class, economy class flex, economy class flex plus, business, business flex, and business flex plus. And I'm just looking at one flight here. And the range is economy light at 113 all the way to business flex plus at 367.

So first off, super annoying that it's just so difficult to see this. Kudos to them for at least showing on economy light, if you want to check in at the airport, it costs $30. If you want to do something, some of those fees are there. Some of them aren't.

It says 8kg of hand baggage for a fee. So after a little bit of back and forth on their website, I realized same about $30, $40, $50 more if I wanted to book the business class version of the ticket, which included expedited security, lounge access, and all this stuff.

Condor, I had never actually heard of Condor, even though I learned later that they fly direct from San Francisco to either Frankfurt or Munich. It turns out it used to be a subsidiary of Lufthansa. It is then later a subsidiary of Thomas Cook, the travel company, but now is independent.

And so we ended up booking that. That meant that our total flights round trip from Paris to Mallorca, Mallorca to Zurich were about $500. But it also meant that we got to pick our seats. We got to sit in the front of the plane. We got priority boarding. We actually got a meal on the Condor flight.

And we knew that no matter what we wanted to do with our bags, we wouldn't have to pay anything extra. Could I have saved $100 a person if we didn't do all that? Absolutely. Was it all worth it? 100,000% over and over. In fact, in the spirit of having these money rules in our lives, Amy and I added one to our list, which was that if we're ever taking a discounted carrier to save money, we are always going to spend whatever it costs to just make that experience better.

That means being able to not wait in the long line. That means not having to decide whether you're going to carry your bag on and check it or anything else. And it was totally worth it to us. I'll talk about the experience flying both airlines, but that is a new rule for us.

Finally, last thing to book was our rental car in Mallorca. And wow, it was very cheap. So it didn't matter where I looked. For four days, it was going to be somewhere between $100 and $200. So as I always do, I looked on AutoSlash first because it's just a great comparison site.

And then I went to the individual rental car company websites because sometimes AutoSlash won't search any special kind of discounts you have. And so with Hertz and National, there's a discount associated with having an Amex Platinum card. With Sixth, I had a discount from Founder's Card. Surprisingly, those discounts were all much better than the AutoSlash rates.

And I'd heard some horror stories when I was looking online for renting cars in Mallorca that during the summer, it can be crazy and you show up and your car's not there. You have to wait a few hours. And all these reservations were pay at the counter. You didn't have to prepay anything.

So I booked a car at Hertz, and then I booked a backup car at Sixth half an hour later. They're both around $150 for four days. And for both of them, I booked an automatic Mini Cooper, which we thought would be kind of fun. I really wanted to book a convertible for the summer, but I really didn't want to spend an extra $300 to do that, given that we didn't really have a lot of plans to be in the car.

Now, despite using the Platinum card discount, you can actually put in whatever travel card gives you the best rental car protection. And then you could decline the collision insurance, which is exactly what we did. Last thing to book was our tickets to the Olympics. And I was wildly surprised at how easy it was to get tickets.

Thanks probably in part to the fact that France has very strict regulations that pretty much prevent all reselling of tickets above face value, which actually meant that you could buy tickets for all the events we wanted to go to, which in our case were beach volleyball and track and field at face value.

They had two options for how you book it. And hopefully this is similar to the future because obviously none of you are going to be going to France, so I'll keep it quick. But you could basically book tickets purchased directly from the Olympics, which were at face value. And you could pick a section.

There was like an A, B, C, D level, but you didn't know what seats you got. Or you could buy them on the resale platform, but also at face value, plus a 10% fee. But there you could actually pick which seats you got. And so naturally I was like, "Well, let's go look at the seat maps.

Let's try to get seats at track and field that are on the side of the finish line. Let's get beach volleyball seats that have a great view of the Eiffel Tower." And so that's what we did. And all in all, we ended up getting amazing seats. It ended up being about $300 a ticket, which I thought was a great deal.

But given that we were booking this a few weeks before and I had just mentally prepared myself to pay astronomical prices, which we didn't, I'm not sure how this will work when we're in LA in four years trying to book Olympics tickets and there aren't these rules on resales.

Maybe the Olympics committee will force some rules like that. Either way, I would highly recommend entering the ticket lottery in advance where you can pick some events and hopefully get drawn. That's what we're going to do. Unfortunately, there was no good way to buy these tickets on points. So we just paid.

Of course, we paid with a card to earn the most points. Absolutely, we did that. But there was no secret there. But with those tickets purchased, we knew we were going to have two great days in Paris to do the Olympics, four days in Mallorca to kind of relax.

And it was going to be an amazing trip. So that's all the booking we did. Amy made one dinner reservation at an awesome restaurant that we'll talk about. So I'm going to actually have her join me and we'll share a little bit more about the entire experience. Amy, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Cheers. We're having a little glass of wine here. Kids are almost asleep, in bed. So overall, what did you think of the trip? I would say 10 out of 10 amazing. It was really incredible. I think the combination of going to the Olympics in Paris, it was very fast paced, very energized, combined with then going to Mallorca, which was felt a lot more relaxing and just a bit a better opportunity to decompress was a really nice combination.

I would recommend it. Not that people can repeat the Olympics in Paris, but I would highly recommend the combo. Okay, so let's start with where we started. We went to SFO, we got there a little bit early, and we stopped at a brand new lounge, the Club Lounge at SFO, Terminal 1.

We've been to lots of lounges. What did you think of that one? I think this lounge was particularly great because it felt very spacious. And it was just beautiful, especially because so many lounges nowadays are overly crowded, in my opinion. I think that the food from the lounge, it was fine.

Interesting. So I thought the food was great. They had pretzels with cheese. They had those shrimp were really good. They had a couple made to order, like where they were serving small plates. That red pepper soup, you didn't even want to try it. I didn't try that. I guess it sounds like if you go for the made to order stuff, it's pretty good.

Yeah, it was great. We didn't really spend a ton of time. We didn't have drinks because we were like, as soon as we get on this plane, we want to go to sleep. And so we didn't want to have too much dehydration, too much alcohol and sleep poorly. I will say one shout out to Rebecca, who listener of the podcast was in the lounge also noticed me came over and said, Hi, awesome experience.

Good to meet a listener in real life. It's been a while since we did that event in San Francisco. I think we're overdue for one, though. We've got about 14 people coming to Iceland, so we're going to get our share of hanging out with listeners soon. Okay, so after the lounge, walked over international, got on Air France.

We took a really nice Air France flight to Paris. It was not outfitted with first class. So La Primaire, Air France is like marquee first class. This didn't have it. It just had business. But it was a really nice business class. What did you think? Yeah, the plane felt really nice and new.

I really... I particularly enjoyed the doors. The ability to close off my seat felt amazing, especially because when you get on a flight where you know you're going to be on the go right when you land, it just felt really nice knowing I could close my door, sleep for six, seven hours, and not be interrupted with food choices or any other kind of service.

So I thought that was wonderful. Yeah, the deal seeker in me couldn't do it. Well, two problems. One, my door was broken. So I couldn't close it just practically. The deal seeker in me, though, was like, "Gosh, this meal looks really good. I'm really excited." And Amy asked, "Could I get the meal if I wake up in a few hours?" And they were like, "Not all of it.

We're only going to serve fresh food when it's fresh." So I stayed up. I ate the meal. It was delicious. Honestly, I don't remember exactly what I ate. So maybe it wasn't as memorable as I think. But overall, a great experience, except that our goal was to sleep. So you went straight to sleep.

I ate, went straight to sleep. We slept most of the flight, I think. Yeah. Had a nice little breakfast before we got there. Didn't get to enjoy the in-flight entertainment as much as I wanted. The screen was big. It did have wireless charging, which was pretty cool. You could just set your phone on a little table, and it charged.

I like that. Overall, Air France, 50,000 miles, one-way business class, and a couple hundred dollars in taxes and fees. I thought it was great. Agree. The other thing I would call out that was really nice is sometimes in business class seats, in the middle, the divider is relatively small.

But in the seats we had, it was huge. And so it just opened up a lot more space for the two of us to hang out, talk. We ended up sleeping. So I guess it's irrelevant. But I thought that was nice. Yeah. I will say if you're flying with two people, take a look at photos when you're picking...

If you're in business class, because sometimes the middle two seats are always the same. And sometimes they switch, which actually happened on our flight home. And there's one version where they face inward. And it's a less optimal experience for two people traveling together. And there's one where they're a little bit more facing outwards.

And there's a lot more space between. Way better experience than sitting across the aisle from each other. So that was great. So landed in Paris, went straight to the hotel to check in the Hyatt Paris Madeline, which I mentioned that we booked because it just had stunning reviews from someone on Reddit.

My quick take was almost no complaints, but nothing that really stood out. We got an upgrade, which was amazing. We use the guest of honor certificate. Breakfast was fantastic, but nothing was wildly exceeding expectations, other than that it was just a very solid, good hotel. More spacious than a lot of European hotels often are.

Yeah, I would agree with that. It was solid. Yeah. The few things they did that stood out to me. One, it's called Hotel Madeline. And so they would put out little Madeline cookies in the afternoon. So I thought that was a cute little touch. The other thing they did is when the forecast called for rain, they set out umbrellas, which I thought was also kind of a nice thing.

It felt like the service was there. But you're right, there wasn't anything particularly special about it. It was just a nice quality hotel that was also very spacious for being Paris. Yep. Obviously, we weren't there to stay in the hotel. That was the next trip. So for us, it was about location.

Location was amazing. I think we walked pretty much everywhere we went in Paris. We might have taken one or two subways only to get up to the Stade de France, and to and from the airport, of course. Other than that, that's it. And for anyone going to Paris that's never been, getting on the RER B from Paris into the city couldn't be easier.

Riding the Paris subway couldn't be easier. Surprisingly less crowded than we were expecting. We thought Paris was going to be wild and crazy, and there were a lot of people there, but it never felt like there were a lot of people there. Yeah, it was relatively relaxed. I think Paris does tourism so well already that accommodating the influx of people there for the Olympics just felt very natural.

I think it's just a great city to just put on your shoes and get out there and explore by walking. There's so many cool neighborhoods and bars and restaurants and all of that. I wish I would have brought better walking shoes. We walked maybe 15 to 20 miles in one day, and my feet were killing me by the end of it.

That's my only complaint. That was on me, but it was amazing. Yeah. The first day that we didn't put in that many steps, I wore a pair of shoes that I hadn't worn in a while. And I also was like, "That was a mistake." I had to ask the waiter at the restaurant we went to if they had a Band-Aid because I was like, "I don't think I can make the walk home." Other than that, great.

That dinner was at a restaurant. You booked it, Arnaud Nicolas. Yes. What did you think? I thought it was fantastic. Amy was like, "I want to find a place that's near where we're going," which turns out was very necessary because we almost didn't make it in time. It was a one Michelin star, but it wasn't that expensive.

It was a reasonable, casual Michelin star restaurant with amazing meats, all kinds of different pâtés and all... Just amazing. I thought it was fantastic. We split a wine pairing between us, so we got to do the wine pairing, but we didn't have to drink four glasses of wine, which neither one of us wanted to do.

And I would definitely go back. It wasn't... It didn't feel... The staff was awesome. Highly recommend. Usually, when you're near a major tourist hub, there aren't a lot of great restaurants. But we had tickets to go to beach volleyball that night. And beach volleyball, as many of you know, was right at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

So we were like, "How do we find a restaurant that's not too touristy, with good food, within a five-minute walk of the Eiffel Tower?" And you nailed that one. Love it. Sometimes, chat GPT and Google help. Yeah, it was good. I think the restaurant itself, the service was amazing.

The wine... We're in France, so it's great. And the food was just excellent. So that was awesome. We barely made it. We walked over to the beach volleyball event and had great seats. I talked about how I bought secondhand seats so we could find the right things. You'd been talking and excited about the Olympics for months.

Now we're here. What did you think of the first event? It was electric. The energy was like nothing I've experienced before. There were people from all over the world, all these different countries coming together, faces painted, jerseys on... Sometimes jerseys off. As we experienced, sometimes jerseys off. It was incredible.

Again, didn't feel overly crowded, considering it was the Olympics. Yeah. I think if you had asked us whether there was any chance we would try to go to the Olympics in LA, given how close we are, I think going into Paris, we were like, "No, it's just going to be a mess.

Too many crowds. Not fun." Coming out of Paris, I'm like, "We should probably go." Yeah. I think the one difference is Paris has great public transportation. LA is a big question mark for me. Well, they've got 4 years to figure it out. We'll have a better sense then. Next morning, we just did a walkabout.

That was the 15-20 mile day, picked up some cute gifts for the girls, stopped at a coffee shop, got a great matcha. Don't even remember the name of it. I think it was Tokyo Coffee. It was great. It might have actually been called The Coffee Shop. Oh, yeah. It had a Japanese vibe and the logo was in Japanese.

It was great. We tried to find some Olympic souvenirs. We went to a couple places with massive, just insane lines. Finally, we were like, "Well, if we're going to wait in a line, let's at least go to the main HQ." We probably honestly should have just bought the souvenirs online.

But we wanted to bring back the girls a little stuffed frige, the little mascot of the Olympics. And I'm glad we did. They loved it. It's been in their beds. They each have one. They've been in their beds since we got home. So glad we did that. There was actually one other thing we did, which was really cool.

So I'd sent an email out about how a very popular bank that a lot of people listening now know that we can't call by name. But very popular bank, really popular travel rewards card with three points on dining, three points on travel. They set up a boat on the Seine where you could go as a private lounge.

And by going there, you got free food, free drinks, free ice cream, free cocktails. It was really awesome. And it felt kind of like an airport lounge in the city with the exception of one experience. What did you think of that little surprise that purely by luck, we randomed into?

It was so magical. I'm a huge Olympics nerd, for those who don't know. And we were having to leave. We were about to leave to go to the athletics event. And the athletics event was 30 minutes away. And so we were near running late. And we're about to leave.

And Chris somehow befriends this big bank woman responsible for all of the athletes to come and do meet and greets. And he ends up getting us into this meet and greet with Katie Ledecky, which to me was just insane. I don't really get starstruck outside of maybe a few athletes, but she is just a powerhouse.

And so it was really, really cool to be able to meet her. Yeah, it was totally by luck. I was at the right place in the right time. So it was really cool. We rushed up to the Stade de France. I think the highlight of going to the Olympics, and I say this as someone who's really only gone to two events ever in my whole life.

But I think the highlight for Summer Olympics has to be athletics, going and seeing the track. We showed up. It's really cool when you show up a couple minutes early. They do all of the medal ceremonies for the night before they play the anthems of the winning teams. Really cool kind of special moment.

But wow, when the races are on, and people are just running as fast as they can. It was incredible. I never actually ran track. You did. What was that like? It felt very personal for me, which maybe it's because I spent a lot of time and energy running track in my earlier years.

But it was really incredible to see these athletes run as fast as they run in person. You just can't even comprehend the athletic abilities in this one specific arena. So that was really incredible. Yeah, I totally agree. One of my favorite parts was that everyone was cheering. There was someone from every country there, even though I remember there was one Irish runner the entire night.

Just one across all the events. And there were like 100 people with Irish flags there for 3 hours just to cheer on this person. Obviously, to also watch all these other events, but it was really cool. The French were so excited. Every single time a French runner passed us, the crowd went crazy.

It was really fun watching the US take gold in the women's 4x100. Men's 4x100 didn't go so well. But that was really awesome. I want to go to LA just to go watch more track and field events. The one other thing I would call out that I noticed by going to the Olympics, especially the athletic events, was the world is still a very good united place.

And what I mean by this is there were athletes competing from all over the world. And people would cheer for all of the athletes regardless of which country they represented. And that to me, even if their athlete came in dead last, everyone else was cheering for the athlete that came in dead last.

And I think that's really... It was something that I will never forget because I think we hear a lot of news sometimes and it feels like a downer. But experiencing that was really... It just made me feel really positive about the world. People are good. People want to be united and cheer each other on and see people be successful.

So that was cool. Yeah, it's funny. Unlike some sports where there's 2 soccer teams and everyone's like, "I hope the other team loses. I want my team to win." Obviously, everyone had their person they want to win. But it was cool that no matter who won, everyone was still excited to be there.

Yeah. So after that, we headed back. We got some sleep. We had an early flight the next morning. We headed out to the Orly Airport, which I'm only sharing because we've never actually been there. Incredibly easy to get to. We were fortunate. I don't even think I planned this.

But we were on one metro line, got to the airport. Surprisingly large. I kind of thought it was going to be like this small airport in Paris. It had like four terminals. I think we were like, "Oh, there's a lounge there. We should check it out." Well, it turns out it wasn't even anywhere close to the lounge we were in.

The few tips that I will share from our experience at the Orly Airport. One, we were flying Transavia. And I've never seen this in America or Europe or anywhere in the world. But the airline divided their check-in counters by destination. So we went to a Transavia counter and we waited for like 10 minutes, got to the front and they're like, "Sorry, this set of counters are for these 10 flights.

And then that set of counters are for these other 10 flights." And we had to go wait in line again, which was a little bit of a frustrating experience. But other than that, pretty easy, pretty straightforward. The microphone I'm holding right now was something that we brought on the trip just in case.

I did not take it out of my bag and that led to some extra security screening, which I regret because I will say there are a lot of things that go just great in France. And every time we're at the airport, if your bag gets pulled for secondary screening, it's a very slow process.

If it doesn't, it's a great process. So take your microphones, take your laptops, take your liquids, take everything out. You don't want to be stuck in a long line of bags to be screened. But other than that, it was great. Yeah. I think Orly, to me, felt chaotic. And maybe it was our check-in experience.

Maybe it was also Transavia, where even the boarding experience felt delayed and long. And we were essentially routed onto the jet bridge and then just sitting there like cattle for some time. So the whole thing just felt pretty chaotic to me. I think my hypothesis... So I don't know why they did this.

They lined us all up. They checked everyone in and we went down the jet bridge. But then 100% of the passengers stood waiting on the jet bridge. My hypothesis is that given it's a budget airline, they wanted to use fewer crew. So they had a crew to check everyone in, then they could close the door to the jet bridge.

And then that same crew could help board the plane. That's my only hypothesis because we were all standing in this line. Instead of boarding the one person who needed a wheelchair first, they boarded them last. And they tried to wheel them down the jet bridge where there was like 175 people.

That part of the process, not great. I'm gonna blame Transavia, not the Orly Airport. But yeah, that was a bit of a mess. Yeah. Once we're on the plane... It was great. It was great. Transavia, good flight, easy flight, bright green seats like you've never seen. That's the one thing I'll remember.

But otherwise, very uneventful flight to Mallorca would totally fly. Transavia again, would check in in the right place. Correct. Landed at Mallorca. Only really noticeable thing is, gosh, there's so many stickers. You pointed this out. There are stickers everywhere in that airport as if like the theme of Mallorca is stickers.

And a majority of the stickers were German. Yes. Which was quite interesting also. Yeah. I'm not sure why. Either the Germans love stickers, Mallorca loves stickers, or it's like two concentric circles. Only Germans who go to Mallorca love stickers. I'm not sure. We rented a car. And I wasn't sure if we would need a car, whether we'd want to just relax the whole time.

But there were a couple cool places that it looked like it'd be fun to go to in Mallorca. And the rental car was super cheap. So we did. And great choice, by the way. We'll get to that. But picking up the car was so easy. We rented from Hertz.

It was very clear that Mallorca was a sixth rental car airport. There were six signs everywhere. They had priority in every possible way. But Hertz experience was great. One note for European cars. I know that there have been a lot of people that have problems with damage. So I would say we did this and I'd recommend everyone do it.

When you get there, do a very thorough walk around the car, take lots of pictures. If you have dents, if you have dings, even if they're pretty small. In the US, I find that unless there's something major, nobody cares. Abroad, if there's a little ding, someone cares. And when we were leaving, whenever you leave a rental car in the US, you usually go through a gate and someone looks at your paperwork.

Here, that wasn't the case. So if there was something wrong, make sure you go back to the desk and say, "Hey, we noticed this thing that was wrong. Can we just note it down?" We took the pictures. We didn't realize when we were leaving that there wouldn't be a person to tell.

And so we drove out and we thought, "Well, I guess we will have the pictures." And there was one scratch on the car that wasn't noted down in advance. And it wasn't a problem. But just note for everyone else, it was a little mini Cooper. It was great. Definitely recommend if you go to Mallorca, rent a car, because there are so many different places around the island to see.

And it's a little bit bigger than I expected. So renting a car was the right move. Easy to drive, easy to park, easy to figure things out. So we go straight to our hotel. And I had done a lot of research. I'd heard about this hotel for 2 years.

I showed you a couple pictures, but you didn't really have a lot of context before we got there. So what was your overall experience, not just of check-in, but Capricot? Okay. So I'm going to start by sharing my initial reaction when you shared where we were staying. So it's in this old, cool fortress kind of castle.

And to me, it just looked very cold. And I was like, "We're going to sleep in a stone room that just feels not very ideal, but it has great reviews. Okay, people rave." And when we arrived there, it couldn't have been more different than what I expected in my head.

It was very warm, very inviting. It just felt like this pristine, beautiful, high-touch kind of experience where the number of rooms are so limited at the property that you really don't see guests that often. They almost have more on-site staff to support you than they do other guests. Yeah, they do.

They said they had 100 people working there and 30 rooms. Which is just incredible. I think we experienced that with the amount of service we got and how few people we ended up meeting who are also staying there. But it was incredible. Yeah. I'll try to put a link in the show notes to a couple things just to give you an idea.

You can obviously go to the website, but I was surprised at how hard it was to get a good feel of the property on the website. A few highlights. Room, amazing. We booked the basic room that was free with Hilton Points. Still was like $3,000 for the night. And I would say I was kind of hoping that because you have Hilton Diamond status, they were going to give us a better room.

They did not. It was also the peak of summer and we paid with points. So I understand. So I think we got one of the least desirable rooms. I can't say that for certain, but it was awesome. Beautiful room, massive bathroom. I think the bathroom is the size of our room in Paris.

And then every room has a balcony or a deck or a roof or something with a daybed, a place to eat that overlook the ocean. And I don't know what we were doing wrong the first day because they bring you breakfast to your room every day. There might be a restaurant that has breakfast, but they made it clear that breakfast is included and everyone does in the room.

And once we caught on, we're like, "We should be eating all of our meals upstairs on the balcony, overlooking the ocean." It was beautiful. Yeah, it was a really amazing property. They had an ocean, a pool, outdoors, and then this really weird indoor pool that was... I actually saw a picture of it and thought it was just part of the lobby, but it turns out it was a swimming pool down near the spa.

All the other standard things you'd want. They have a gym, they have a restaurant, they have a bar, they have live music at night, an amazing restaurant. They have actually a Michelin star restaurant that we didn't go to because it was full, but we were actually really happy. They have a restaurant called C Club.

We went there twice. It was amazing. The food was so good. I don't even know what to say. The resort was pretty much perfect. I can't think of anything that they let us down on, anything that they messed up on, anything that I would critique them on. I would give them a solid, perfect score.

I would agree. I think the few things to note, one, it is about 20 minutes from Palma, which is the closest main downtown area. And so again, if you want to go out and explore and walk around, you have to drive or take a car if you stay at Capricot.

The other thing that I would note is, would we have paid full price? For us, it's difficult because we are points and miles junkies. So it's difficult to say that. But I will say it was such an incredible use. Maybe some of the best use we've gotten out of these free night certificates.

Would you agree? Absolutely the best use out of free night certificates because we've only been playing that game for two years on Hilton. But when I think of all the places we've booked with points and miles and been able to stay, I think Capricot and any hotel in Bora Bora probably are just right up there.

And the one thing that I think makes Mallorca maybe slightly more special than Bora Bora, and I know how special Bora Bora is to you. So I already see in your eyes what you're saying is, Palma is a really cool city with amazing restaurants and cafes. And so it felt like we could have that relaxing vibe.

We probably only left the hotel twice in 4 days or 5 days. But when we did, we were able to go and explore a little bit more. When you're on Bora Bora, you have this amazing, amazing experience. But outside of the resort, there's not really anything there. So when we were there, hung out at the pool, took out a kayak, relaxed on the beach, swam inside, relaxed in our room.

The breakfasts were unbelievable. I remember the guy told us the first day when we checked in, he said, "Okay, you can have 2 choices. You can say, 'Just give me everything,' or you can pick what you want. I suggest you say, 'Give me everything,' the first day. And we'll just bring you everything in the morning.

And then on subsequent days, you can decide what you want." I think we had more food there than at the Michelin star dinner in Paris. There was so much food. I almost felt bad. Actually, I did feel bad that we didn't eat at all. But amazing breakfast. I think about that breakfast regularly.

I wish someone woke me up with that breakfast every day. Boy, would that be nice. Quite the opposite right now. We instead wake up and make that breakfast for our kids, but nothing near it. It was great. Agree. So that was Capricot. Highly recommend. Absolutely amazing use of Hilton certificates, Hilton points.

Few other things on Majorca. We did do one day trip. We went up to Soler. We went to the old town and the port town. I enjoyed walking around. It felt like you got a little bit more of a vibe of Majorca. I don't know. Anything else to add from our little day trip?

The towns in Majorca are probably like this where the streets are very small and the buildings just look really magical. And you just kind of get lost in these alleyways of cute shops and homes. It's definitely worth just getting out and walking around. Yeah. I think the really cool thing when we walked around the port town, it was very clear because I think it was just a weekend.

Families were out. People were playing. They're all hanging out. It's really nice to see all these playgrounds. It actually made us a little bit sad. We're like, "I think the girls would love this. There's an ocean. There's a playground. The water's warm." They had these awesome little paddle boats, which everyone's seen a paddle boat.

But for some reason, every paddle boat at this marina had a water slide on it, which I'd never seen in my whole life. So that was really cool. Only other thing that I'll add in Palma... So we went down to Palma twice, once for dinner at a restaurant called Vandal.

We didn't go to other restaurants, so I can't speak to them. I thought it was incredible. What did you think? The food was so good. I loved that it almost had this punk rock vibe where they weren't there to cater to you. And they did. But in a way that felt very much like we're all friends just here to sit down, eat, and have a good time.

So it was a really cool, laid-back vibe. Yes. We sat at the bar. All their plates have somewhat offensive phrases on them. Provocative phrases. Yeah. And I loved it. I loved the vibe of that restaurant. There were a lot of other restaurants that seemingly had white table claws and looked nice.

I think our style is like, "Let's sit at the bar. Let's get a great cocktail. Let's have some really good food." But you get no extra points for fine dining for us. Good food and casual at the bar is better than fine dining. So that was exactly what I wanted to do.

We walked around a bit, got some ensimadas, which is like a classic Mallorcan pastry. We also walked around the palace, the cathedral. Pretty impressive. I can't remember. I looked it up. It took like 3 or 400 years. 400. 400 years to build this cathedral. It's massive. We'll put a link in the show notes.

It's just wild. A lot of Palma felt really modern and cool. And this was very old and really fun to walk around. I think that if we were maybe younger, we would have enjoyed some of the nightlife of Palma, which we've heard about. We've watched on our many nights binging Below Deck Mediterranean, which has got a little guilty pleasure.

But we instead went back early and got some sleep. Yep. I'm okay with that. Yes. This was not a trip to go out and party. At one point, I was like, "Should we do it? Should we do it?" No, no, no. We definitely should. That was Paris for us.

Yes. Paris, we were out late. Shout out to Whitney and Carl, friends from back home, who dragged us out one night till, I don't know, past midnight at least. And eventually, we're like, "We got to go." And they're like, "Well, we have a flight in eight hours. Why do you have to go?

You don't have anything to do tomorrow." But that was a fun night. I love Paris. I feel like we've had many nights in Paris where you just end up somewhere at one or two in the morning. And it's always a good time. Yep. By the way, the bikes in Paris, Lime bikes and things like that, you can pick up so easily.

And aside from me cutting you off and almost knocking you off the road, which was not intentional, I just realized I was driving the wrong way in a particular road. Other than that, it was great. Okay, trip home. Pretty straightforward. I mentioned how we booked Condor Business Class to get to Zurich.

And that got us into the lounge at the Mallorca Airport. Mallorca Airport is fine. Lots of options to buy things to take home. Lounge was empty. It was a very strange lounge because they had a massive boardroom. It looked like I was walking through an office, but quite a lot of food, drinks, everything.

So if you have access to that lounge... I didn't check if it was priority pass or not because we had access from our boarding passes. But if it is worth... I wouldn't say worth spending time in, but if you have time, worth stopping by. Yeah, I would agree. It was definitely large and somewhat sterile from a feeling perspective, but it wasn't crowded.

And there was a really pretty wide assortment of food and drinks. So if you need to load up before your flight, it's a good place to do it. Yeah. So quick review of Condor Airlines. I think I thought it was a budget airline. I'm not convinced it's a budget airline.

It actually felt like a pretty legit airline. We got a meal on our short flight to Zurich. It was not a chaotic boarding process. Big fan. Would fly Condor again. And Condor flies from San Francisco to Europe. So maybe we'll fly Condor again using Alaska Points. I didn't realize they're a part of Alaska, but you can use Alaska Points to fly Condor.

Maybe we'll be back on Condor. Zurich Airport. It's funny. Our au pair is en route to New York right now and her parents are transiting through the Zurich Airport. And she was like, "They only have an hour. Are they going to make it?" I was like, "Well, everything in the Zurich Airport seemed really efficient." You couldn't possibly miss where you need to go.

It was very straightforward. Everything was clear. People say things run like a Swiss clock. Things in Switzerland just run really well. We had a couple hours in the airport. It was very easy. We stopped at the Swiss Air Business Lounge. We were flying United back, which got us into the Swiss Air Business Lounge.

Notably, it did not get us into the Senator Lounge. And so I told Amy, "This might be one of the few times that there was a better lounge that we didn't have access to." Now, were we Star Alliance Gold, we would have had access. Were we flying first class, we would have had access.

Maybe business on Swiss would have had access, but we didn't have access. Best I understood from reading online, the only thing we missed was a gigantic whiskey library, which I think would have been cooler for photos because I was about to get on a plane. I didn't really need a lot of whiskey.

I don't think you wanted a lot of whiskey. But that Swiss Lounge was fantastic. Yeah, it was amazing. All of Zurich, the airport is clean, highly efficient, and everything seemed to work. Typically, most airports you see certain bathrooms not working, water fountains not working, escalators not working. Zurich was dialed in.

So the airport itself was great. The lounge was phenomenal. I thought it offered an assortment of food and drinks. There was a really cool outdoor patio. You could sit and work or hang out, watch the planes take off. So that was pretty cool. With free binoculars, if you wanted a plane spot.

I did not know that. Cool. They had an ice cream station, which neither one of us ventured into, but... I would have hit that if it was later, but... But a 10am ice cream, maybe not on the cards. They did have prepared foods. They had a chef making pastas and chicken and that kind of stuff.

So many dessert selections. They had a basket of Swiss chocolate, little Swiss Air Swiss chocolate. We brought those home for the kids. It was great. I would not mind spending a couple hours in that lounge. They had a cool relaxation room where you could kind of maybe get a little nap if you wanted.

So definitely layover in Switzerland with access to that lounge. Awesome. To wrap it all up, United Polaris on the way home. Have flown United Polaris a lot. Was just like every other time. Solid experience, good food, good seat, good entertainment. Nothing special, but nothing wrong. And I say this from a place of privilege, being able to use points and miles to fly in business class.

It was a fully lie flat bed. I am six feet tall. I had room to stretch out on. I got some sleep. It makes flying so much better. That said, I think I pointed out on this flight, because it was a day flight, I didn't really need to sleep.

Maybe an hour. But I wasn't trying to get five, six hours of sleep like we were on the way to Paris. And if I'm trying to stretch my miles, I am okay thinking, "Let's prioritize the overnight flight. Use the points for business there." Flying back, what I really wanted was the space to be able to get work done.

I probably sent 250 emails. If you'd sent me an email in the last seven months, you probably got a response from me on that flight because I just cranked. And so I appreciated having a little bit of space, but we would have had that in premium economy. So I'm not sure if you're trying to figure out how to prioritize your miles, it's worth it to spend money on business class.

If you're flying something standard and it's not once in a lifetime, Emirates, Qatar Q Suites kind of thing. And if it's on a direction where you're not really expected to get some sleep. That said, we've been fortunate to earn a lot of miles. Happy to do it. Yeah. I would agree with that assessment though.

Any overall takeaways? I have a takeaway, which is Europe, particularly France, Italy, Spain, to an extent, does this really well, which is the afternoon break where they really just enjoy slowing down, sitting down for a spritz or a wine or something and just hanging out with friends or family.

Aperitivo is kind of like that hour in Italy. And I think that was really noticeable to me as something that I wish the US did a better job of. I think we can all slow down and really just stop and enjoy and really savor these moments of togetherness and the calmness of just connection.

We don't do that so well here. So that was one thing that I really enjoyed about our trip and just the way that a lot of these European countries operate. Yeah. I love that. I think it's probably not in our DNA, but I've been doing some thinking about why has the US economy done so well?

It's like, "Well, there's this trade-off. The US economy has done really well because we don't have it in us to just sit around and do nothing. We just grind." And I don't know. I need to find a good balance between the two though. Well, maybe it's just we go on vacation, we do as the locals do, and then we come back and grind.

Exactly. I think one takeaway was it was a little sad to not have the girls there part of the time. And it was really nice to just not have to deal with children for a few days, to just be able to wake up whenever we want, to not have to rush home for nap time.

And so shout out to my parents, shout out to Elsa Arroper for helping watch the girls and make this possible. Being able to spend our 40th birthday together going to the Olympics, relaxing with you was awesome. So thank you for always entertaining my two, three weeks before departure ideas.

I am striving to give more notice because there's some real value in being able to savor an upcoming vacation. And when I throw them on us with weeks to spare, it's not that they're not great. It's just, man, if we had planned that trip six months out, we would have been able to look forward to it.

When you plan it three weeks out, you only have three weeks to look forward to it. And then it's a frantic three weeks to get everything organized. So... It's a bit of a rush. I look forward to a nap-free time when we could take the girls on this kind of trip.

I look forward... People always say, "Don't look forward to the future. You don't want your kids to grow up that fast." I both really want to savor the time we have, but I'm also excited for the day when they're old enough that they're like, "We're going to run down to the pool.

Why don't you guys just hang out and relax?" So all that to say, I'm excited to travel with you and the girls and the family for the next, I don't know, many, many years to come. I agree. It was definitely a trip of a lifetime. And next trip, let's plan further out.

All right. This was awesome. I told Amy, I was like, "This is going to be interesting. We're going to experiment. We're going to do an episode together on the couch. Have a glass of wine at night." Curious what you think. I promise neither my nor Amy's feelings will be hurt if you'd rather us go back to a little bit more condensed, a little bit more tactical.

But if this is interesting, if it wasn't, go ahead and shoot us a note. You guys all have the email podcast@allthathacks.com. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next week. See you next week.