Today, I want to walk through how I saved over $10,000 at two luxury hotels across a few recent trips, including how I booked a $2,000 a night ocean view suite at the brand new Waldorf Astoria in Costa Rica for effectively under $300 a night. But this isn't just a trip review.

I'm going to break down the exact strategies I used to make it all happen. And the best part, these tactics don't just work with points. They can unlock huge savings on cash bookings as well. So whether you're planning a big international trip or just a local getaway, I'm going to show you how to maximize your savings, cards, credits, elite status, points, and your booking strategy to get amazing stays for way less.

I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode and you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. So let's start with a trip we just took to Costa Rica. And the whole trip was inspired by six Hilton free night certificates we had. But when I walk through this whole process, I'm going to show you how you could get a very similar if not the same deal, which is effectively 65% off a five-star hotel with Hilton points, with Amex points, or even just paying all in cash.

So let's first talk about how we ended up with all of these Hilton free night certificates. So it all started when we opened our first Hilton Aspire card. It's a card from American Express. The card comes with diamond status, which is Hilton's top tier of status. It comes with $200 in statement credits every six months for Hilton resorts.

And then the big one is it comes with a free night reward. And I'll talk in a second about how those free night rewards work. But the card also comes with a clear credit each year, and it comes with a $50 every quarter credit for different flight purchases that you make on the card.

It does have a high annual fee of $550. But I'm going to walk through why I think that annual fee is probably one of the best deals given how much you get from this card. So first off, how do these Hilton free night certificates work? So every free night certificate works for a standard room award.

So when you're on Hilton's website searching for room, sometimes you'll see something that's 585,000 points. But a lot of times you'll see some standard room award prices like 120,000 points, 80,000 points, 150,000 points. When there is a standard room available, you can use your Hilton free night certificate. Now, one of the only downsides is if you have status with Hilton, you get your fifth night free.

When you're using free night certificates, there are no fifth night free benefits. So by having the Aspire card, we had one annual free night certificate. So recently, we also opened up a Hilton Surpass card, which is one tier below on the Hilton lineup. It's $150 per year annual fee card.

It comes with gold status. It comes with $50 in credits on Hilton every quarter. And it comes with a free night reward, but only after spending $15,000. I should have mentioned that the Aspire card also has an annual night that you get beyond the regular one after you spend $30,000 and then another $30,000 to a total of $60,000.

So what we did was we got the Hilton Surpass card. We spent the $15,000 on the card and then earned a free night. Then I upgraded that Surpass card to an Aspire. And I didn't even realize this would happen, but we got a free night certificate for the upgrade.

And then we spent another $15,000 to get to $30,000 and got a free night again on the Aspire. And then on the anniversary of that card, now that it's a Hilton Aspire, you get a free night certificate. And then there was a promotion when we opened the Surpass card to get a free night as part of the welcome bonus.

We ended up with six free night certificates. And I'll link to an article that the Frequent Miler wrote about how to maximize your Hilton cards with upgrades and downgrades if you want to play that game as well to end up with a lot of free night certificates. I really love these free night certificates because you can get a ton of value out of them as I'll walk you through.

But that is how our trip started. This was before we knew where we were going to Costa Rica. We didn't know what we wanted to do. We just knew that we had six free nights that we could use at a Hilton anywhere. And we decided we wanted to figure out what would be possible.

And my parents are amazing. And they made an offer to watch our girls for a week this year. And so we were really flexible with dates. But we thought it'd be even easier this summer when we could drop them off. And we didn't have to worry about them missing any school or my parents having to stay at our place.

And so the first thing I did was I went to Rooms.Aero. And it's one of the award search tools for hotels. And they have this explore feature. So I went to explore Hilton. And you can go in and choose brands. Now, I knew that because we didn't have our kids with us, we wanted to have a really nice luxury stay.

We wanted to get a ton of value. So I filtered down to just the Conrad, SLH, and Waldorf Astoria properties because I knew those were among Hilton's best properties out there. And you can go in on this tool and you can search for what countries you want, how many nights in a row, what the maximum number of points.

And you can start to search and look around. Now, they technically don't have a date search on the explore feature, but you can go to search and type in 2025-09 and filter down for September to try to find things. So that's how I started this. And there were tons of options.

The Conrad Bora Bora, which we've been to a few times, was there. It always sets the bar for an amazing vacation from the West Coast. However, there was this new Waldorf that I'd seen an article about opening in Costa Rica. And when I saw it on the list of availability, it seemed like something that I just had to try out.

It seemed like it worked for our dates. I'd been to Costa Rica 20 years ago. My wife hadn't been there. And the dates worked out. It was a new hotel. Why not go for it? And dates were wide open for standard awards. And I'm pulling up the list right now.

And I'm recording this on August 19th. And for most of the nights, pretty much 100% availability every single night. So if you're looking for this hotel, just keep in mind, there is a ton of availability next year, especially during the spring kind of prime season. So it could be a pretty great option.

And so those standard room awards were 120,000 points per night. And when I looked at the cash rate for this hotel, it was $9,041 all in for six nights in a garden view, which was about $1,507 per night after tax. Which, if we just used 120,000 Hilton points, would be 1.26 cents per point.

And a little bit of a spoiler, we ended up in an ocean view room, which ended up costing $1,960 per night after tax, which would have been a 1.63 cent per point redemption. But talking about this in terms of cents per point and Hilton points is only really helpful if you have Hilton points.

So if you have free night certificates, then I guess you could figure out the value of each free night certificate was $1,507 or $1,960 if you're factoring in suites, which obviously is why I think the value of those free night certificates compared to the annual fee on the card plus all the perks is a totally great deal.

But let's also look at someone who has no Hilton points, has no Hilton card, has no Hilton free night certificates. So if you go to the Hilton website, there's always an option to buy points. And I've read through the terms and conditions, and you can buy up to 240,000 points a year.

Now, normally points cost one cent, but they are pretty much always on sale. When I first wrote up the notes for this episode, they were on sale with a 90% bonus. Now they're on sale with 100% bonus. And I would say pretty consistently, getting points for around half a cent is pretty easy.

And so today, if I go in and say, I'd like to buy 160,000 points, I get those 160,000 points for $1,600, but I get 100% bonus, which brings the total to 320,000 points. Now, let me talk about a couple caveats here that I think are important for anyone thinking about buying points.

And then I'll talk about why buying points can be so lucrative. So first, a new Hilton Honors member can purchase points 30 days after enrollment, if the account has some activity, or 90 days after enrollment with no activity. So everyone should just go open a Hilton Honors account, because if you have to wait 90 days, you can start that timer now.

And by the time you need it, even if it's a new account, even if you've had no activity, you've passed that threshold. Now, like I said, you can buy up to 240,000 points per calendar year, but you can also share points. So you could have a friend, a partner, a spouse, they could buy points, and they could send them to you.

You can send up to half a million points a year, and you can receive up to 2 million points a year. So each Hilton Honors member is limited to six transfers to other accounts and six points-pooling transactions per year. The transfers are usually instant, but it can take a few days, especially with some new accounts.

So all the more reason to set this up in advance. So if you're looking at this trip, thinking six nights at the Waldorf Costa Rica, 120,000 points a night, you would need 720,000 points. However, because you get your fifth night free, you would actually only need 600,000 points for those six nights.

So you could only buy 320,000 with one purchase for $1,600. And then for the remaining 280,000, I think one, you could just go purchase more points. You can't purchase all the points you need because there is a limit of 240,000 points purchased. So you could do some combo of purchasing another 80,000 to get to your 240 total with your bonus would bring you up to another 160,000.

You could have a spouse, friend, a family member. They could just go buy the 280,000 points you need for $1,400. You could open up a Hilton card where the signup bonuses are almost always more than 100,000 points. Or you could transfer some points from Amex to Hilton at a one to two ratio.

So if you needed that 280,000 points, it would be 140,000 Amex points. I don't think that's the best use of Amex points compared to buying them for half a cent. But the end result is still fantastic because you're getting such a great deal. And so just to keep in mind, if you want that Hilton fifth night free, you do need to have some amount of Hilton status.

And you can get that from staying at Hilton for four stays would get you silver status. The Amex Platinum or Business Platinum comes with Hilton status. All the Hilton cards come with Hilton status. And there is a Hilton status match where you can status match to gold Hilton status from almost any other hotel status, some of which are even easier to get or may come with other credit cards.

So really, really easy for you to be able to get Hilton status. This episode is brought to you by Daffy. With school back in session, we are ready to do what we can to help support our kids' education. For example, at their school, parent giving helps cover things like additional teachers, supplies, and music art and language classes.

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And speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at allthehacks.com slash NetSuite. The guide is free to you at allthehacks.com slash NetSuite. That's allthehacks.com slash NetSuite. Now, if you're planning one of these stays, like I mentioned earlier, the Hilton Aspire card gets you diamond status, which also gets you free breakfast and an upgrade, or at least high on the upgrade list.

And so those also come in handy. So if you wanted to buy the 600,000 points you would need for this stay, and keep in mind, this is a stay that when I went to book it with cash, which I didn't do, was $9,041. You could buy those 600,000 points for $3,000.

So if you're just looking at the Hilton website, looking at a sticker price of $9,000, thinking, this is too expensive of a vacation for me, you could, on that same website, buy the points you need for that trip, and you could buy them for 66% off the cost of that trip.

So $3,000 for points to get you a $9,000 vacation. Now, obviously, if you already have those points, if you have free night certificates, it might be an even better deal for you because you don't have to buy them. But this is such an opportunity to get a great deal, whether you have points or not.

But I like to optimize even further, and because we had a bunch of other Hilton credits, we thought, how could we dial this trip in more? So we have an Amex Business Platinum card, which gives you a $50 a quarter Hilton credit. Then we also have a Hilton Aspire card, like I mentioned, which has that $200 every six-month Hilton resort credit.

And while Costa Rica's hotel was not on the list, there were a couple reports on Reddit of it posting, and it ultimately did for us. So we thought, gosh, we have all these Hilton credits. How do we make sure we get to use those? Because we're going to have to eat at this hotel, if we want drinks, if we wanted to go to the spa, all kinds of activities we could book through the hotel.

So these credits could actually make the cost of the trip even less. So one hack, if you're planning a trip far enough in advance, which we weren't doing, you can actually call or email the hotel and ask if you can make a deposit to your room in advance. And if your room is paid, it's even easier, but even with a points booking, you can often make that kind of a deposit in advance.

It's not guaranteed, though. However, I had this idea of booking our stay from the end of June to early July, which meant that we would overlap with Q2 and Q3, but we would also overlap with the first half of the year, January to June, and the second half of the year, July to December.

So that would mean we could use our $200 Hilton Aspire credits, and we had two of those cards. We could use each card's credit for the first half of the year and the second half of the year, totaling $800 of credit. And I didn't even need to call in advance to prepay because we would be there.

I would just need to make sure that in the first couple of days we were at the hotel, I could either make some charges to the room and pay them off, or ultimately what we did was we would just make payment to the room as soon as we checked in and store that in our balance for the room that we could start using.

So between our two Aspires and our three Amex Business Platinums, that's four $200 credits and six $50 credits, which was $1,100 of total credit that we would have for food, drinks, spa, whatever we wanted to build to the room. As we were dropping our kids off, my dad reminded me that he actually had a Hilton Aspire card.

He hadn't used his credit, which was expiring in four days. And so he offered to let me take it with me and use that for the Hilton credits there, which added another $400. Thank you, dad. And that meant we had $1,500 of credit for the trip. Now, one thing to keep in mind, you do have to call to use your free night certificates.

And for some reason, sometimes they can't seem to book them all at once. We ended up needing to make one three-night reservation and another three-night reservation back-to-back. There was absolutely no problem for the hotel to link those two together. So with hotels down, then it was time to look at flights.

We could have just paid for those flights for $750, a little more if we wanted to go down on the nonstop from San Francisco, a little less if we were willing to change planes a little bit more. However, my first search on Google Flights, I had the PointsPath browser extension installed, and you could see that the United flight down nonstop from San Francisco to Costa Rica, instead of being, I think it was almost $600, it was just 20,000 points plus $79.

On the return, it wasn't quite as easy because that nonstop flight only flies on the weekends. We were coming back on a weekday, but similar on PointsPath, I was able to see just from Google Flights that I could get back from the Liberia Airport, which is very close to the Waldorf, probably about a 30-minute drive.

We could change planes in LA and get back in business class for $57,500 points. Now, was that worth it compared to the $25,000 points in Coach? I think because we have a lot of miles, because we're going to take one trip a year with kids, it was for us, but it wasn't that tough of a flight, so that might have been a better deal if you were short on points.

However, I set a bunch of alerts, hoping that some better availability would open up, because I thought the price could come down. And sure enough, three days before leaving, I got an alert that American dropped the price of that flight from $57,500 to $27,500, and because changes are free, we were easily able to do that, with one caveat.

For whatever reason, the flight from Liberia to LAX was available in business at that discounted price, But the final flight from LAX to San Jose or San Francisco was not available. If we wanted to get all the way home, it was going to still be $57,500. But if we wanted to just get to LA, then we could do it for less than half the cost.

So I quickly looked, is there a flight we could buy from LA to San Francisco that was cheap enough, that it was worth saving 60,000 points on the trip? Sure enough, Southwest, 10,500 Southwest points for the flight, plus $560 in taxes and fees. And we, as I'd mentioned in a past episode, had earned a companion pass on Southwest this year.

That meant we got two flights for 10,500 Southwest points, plus $11.20. And so obviously, that was a totally great tradeoff for 60,000 point savings. So these flights that would have cost us about $1,000 to go down direct and back one stop, not even in business, probably would have been about $2,500 if we did it in business, were only a total of 52,750 points per person, plus about $145 in taxes and fees.

So when I try to calculate whether we got a great deal, it's not fair to use the coach price because we actually got a flight in business. But it's also probably not fair to say, what value did we get? Let's use the $2,500 business class price because we never would have paid that.

So I'm going to use the $1,500 price, which is just me picking a number kind of arbitrarily in the middle, thinking I probably would have paid $500 for that upgrade. And even at that $1,500 price, we were getting 2.6 cents per point. Awesome redemption on flights. Really, really stoked about that, especially because it lined up with all the dates that we found for the rooms and being able to overlap the quarters and kind of semi-annual credit periods.

We didn't do a lot more planning. We thought we should get a rental car because it was about a 30-minute drive and we wanted to see things. I searched on Reddit. Everyone seemed to recommend this company called Adobe Rent-A-Car. There was Hertz and National, which I normally would go for.

But there were just such strong endorsements for this local car rental company. So the price was good. They had a four-wheel drive for a reasonable amount. We ended up booking it. I do highly recommend getting a four-wheel drive if you want to go off the resort and be able to go anywhere.

When we were off in the rainforest, it was very far from a well-paved road. And about 20 years ago, when I was in Costa Rica, a friend of mine ended up flipping the SUV he had on a dirt road in the rain. So we booked a four-wheel drive and that was kind of it.

We thought about whether we wanted to schedule any activities in advance. And big shout out to Javier from Journey Costa Rica. He joined me in episode 157 of the podcast, which was all about planning a trip to Costa Rica. I followed up with him and he gave me a few suggestions of driving into the rainforest, doing a sunset cruise, something adventurous on the water, maybe renting jet skis to go to a private beach, ziplining, canopy tours, maybe trying to find a cultural experience nearby.

We weren't sure whether to book with the hotel because we had all that Hilton credit or book direct. We weren't sure how we were going to feel. So we actually booked nothing until we got to Costa Rica. So let's talk about the trip being there and my takeaways. So first off, the United flight there and economy doesn't need a review.

It's exactly like anyone who's ever flown on a domestic airline in coach. It was six and a half hours. I forgot how long that felt, right? It's longer than coast to coast to New York and further than even going to Hawaii from the West coast. But without kids, no complaints.

I'll touch quickly on the flight home here so I don't have to come back to it. But also it is exactly what you would expect from a domestic business class. Bigger seats, better meal, older plane, nothing like you get in long haul international business. I was happy to get the extra space given that the price dropped.

I might have had some regret if we had paid that full price to get it. But I will say that the Alaska lounge at LAX, despite being a little small, was really great. Good food. Awesome way to kill some time. And I believe the requirements were you needed to be flying internationally on a flight over 2,500 miles to be able to go into the lounge.

And the flight from Costa Rica was like 200 miles over the limit. I could be off on those numbers, but we just met the cutoff to be able to use the lounge for free. And it's a quick walk to cross over to Terminal 1 to take that Southwest flight home, though it is definitely not connected airside.

So you needed to leave the airport and walk across the street. So upon landing in Liberia, not a huge airport, we'd already rented a car. We just found the person with a sign for Adobe rental car, hopped on the shuttle, went five or 10 minutes to their office. It was awesome.

The reviews were correct. I would highly recommend using them. Everything was seamless, easy, straightforward. And on returning the car, we didn't pass a gas station that we saw when we were dropping the car off and we were running tight on time. And we decided we would just eat whatever penalty we got for having to return the tank not full.

So we returned it with half a tank and we asked, you know, what is the penalty for this? And they said, oh, well, we don't really mark up the fuel. And so best guess I have is that we ended up paying somewhere between 50 cents and $1.50 to have them fill up the tank and not having filled the car up.

So that was an awesome surprise to wrap up the review for Adobe Rent-A-Car. So let's focus on the hotel. Just to be clear, the hotel doesn't know that I have a podcast, that I'm doing this review. I didn't get anything comped because of it. So these are all just my opinions.

Location-wise, it is on the Pacific coast of the Guanacaste province, about 30 minutes west of the Liberia airport. It's just south of the Papagayo Peninsula, where you'd find the Four Seasons, the Andas, a new Ritz-Carlton Reserve property. And it's about 90 minutes north of Tamarindo. You could drive about 10, 15 minutes if you want to Coco and Playa Hermosa for some other restaurants, beaches, groceries, and more.

But you really don't need to if you're okay with hotel and resort food and beverage options. There's a beach there, and it was beautiful. The hotel is actually on its own little peninsula, which is fantastic because you get pretty much 270 degrees of ocean views. We got to the hotel at night, so we actually had no idea what we were going to expect until the morning, but just walking in the lobby is amazing.

It's beautiful. Check-in was easy. It's common at resorts like this. You get a little welcome drink and a warm towel or a scented towel. Thanks to diamond status from the Aspire card, we did get upgraded from the garden view to an ocean view room. And I should have looked in the app to notice there was actually an ocean view suite available, but I didn't mention anything at check-in.

It was a little late, but I will come back to it. Also, we were ready to get to our room and have dinner. So I figured, let's just figure out this Amex credit stuff the next morning. And I'm so glad we did. Rooms were beautiful, right? This is a brand new hotel.

I wasn't surprised. Everything was kind of new and modern and warm. Lots of natural materials, neutral tones, nice finishes, floor-to-ceiling windows with huge patios that let in a ton of natural light. The patios all have bathtubs on them. Honestly, I'm not sure why hotels have bathtubs on patios. I'm sure someone will tell me what I'm missing in the comments or as an email, but I never really felt inclined to take a bath on the patio.

We used the shower and the showers were awesome. Two different rain heads with great bath products, huge bathroom, two sinks. And one of my favorite things was there were five to six glass bottles around the room with drinking water. So you never had to worry about finding more water.

After dropping our bags, we headed to dinner. Funny enough, we realized we never got an overview of where everything in the hotel was. So we kind of just walked around till we figured out where the restaurant was. And I'll get back to a food review at the end. So I thought just to share a little bit of the experience we had and how to handle it.

After dinner, we were going to bed and we noticed the AC had this issue where it was making a really loud kind of buzzing beeping sound all night. We probably could have called the front desk that night, but we used a white noise app on our phone to drown it out.

And we figured we'd resolve it the next morning, probably when I could go deal with all the credits. So we went to the front desk. This woman, Tirso, was there and she's incredible. If you're going to stay at this hotel, say hi to her, go meet her. She has great food recommendations and she really helped out.

So first off, she offered to swap the room because of the noise. And at that time was like, hey, there happens to be all these really nice rooms. Is it possible to upgrade? I saw one of the nicest suites with a plunge pool on the balcony. And she kind of said, look, that room is available to book.

The owner's staying there now. If you wanted to pay for it with cash, I'm sure he'd be glad to move. But I can't offer it as an upgrade, which I felt like was a really honest response. But there is no one staying in the Ocean View suite. So happy to move you there.

She also helped run all the cards that had credits. So we ran all the Aspires for the first half of the year, all the Amex Business Platinums for Q2. And that left us with a $750 balance that we started thinking about how we were going to use on the property.

We also had some old Hilton gift cards, which she mentioned didn't work with their payment processor. So I let that one go. And I thought I'd come back once we crossed into July and get the rest of the credits loaded to the account. So that afternoon, we moved to this new Ocean View suite and it was absolutely amazing.

It was basically the same as an Ocean View regular room, except there is a giant living dining room that we didn't really need. But because it was a suite, it was positioned at such an ideal part of the hotel that it had absolutely the best view from the bed, from the balcony, from the living room and everywhere.

And it was awesome. And most importantly, it did not have a loud buzzing AC noise. It was just amazing. So thank you, Tirsa, for making that happen. I'll put a link to some of the pictures in the show notes, or if you're watching this on YouTube, or maybe by the time this comes out on Spotify, we will have added video and you'll be able to see some of the highlights there.

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And aside from one restaurant and bar near the lobby, almost everything else you do is kind of at the bottom of the hill near the pool and the beach. So you don't have to do that much walking unless you wanted to. So we spent a ton of time there.

Let's talk about it. There are eight different swimming pools and four different hot tubs. Tons of different seating styles. There are cabanas, lounge chairs, actual chairs, couches. We never had any issue finding a place to sit, even if we came later in the morning, later in the afternoon. That said, the resort was not at full capacity.

So that could be a little bit different if the resort was full. And of those eight different swimming pools, two were for kids. One was kind of a few inches deep with some jets shooting up water, kind of like a splash pool. And another had this beautiful water slide that I kept wanting to use, but I couldn't bring myself to be the only adult in the kids pool without a kid.

And speaking of kids, I think we both had a little bit of regret not bringing ours. I think they would have had an amazing time. There was a complimentary kids club and a teen club. There was even an outdoor playground at the kids club. It really made us feel like our girls would have had a blast.

So next time we go, they will absolutely be coming with us. Also, there's free sunscreen and aloe at the pool. And in the evenings at all the restaurants, if you ask, there is bug spray in case you didn't bring some. I think if you're going to leave the hotel, you definitely should bring bug spray.

But I really just love when hotels make it easy and they put sunscreen, aloe, bug spray, available places so that you don't have to worry about it and you don't have to stress out. Right in front of the pool area is the beach. Similar to Hawaii, the beaches are public.

So there are people that are trying to rent you jet skis or offer you massages on the beach, but they weren't that pushy like I've seen other parts of the world. The ocean temperature was amazing. There were some reefs right there. Lots of snorkeling. You could do more sea urchins than I've ever seen in one place in my life.

And the snorkel gear kayaks were all free to use, which I love. I think one of my least favorite things about some resorts is feeling like every single little thing you have to pay for anytime you want to do it. So I loved being able to borrow snorkel gear anytime we wanted without any extra cost.

Down the hill from the pool was a gym and a spa. The gym was huge. It had pretty much everything you could want. This wasn't a Hyatt, so there were no Pelotons to earn some extra points. But there was also an adult pool and two more hot tubs at the gym.

If you wanted a little bit of quiet time at the pool, the spa was beautiful as well. We considered using some of our credits there. But we're just not really that into spas when we travel. But I did ask for a tour. It was beautiful. They let me use the sauna in the steam room, which is really nice.

And there's also another hot tub in the spa. So that brings the total for the resort up to nine swimming pools and seven hot tubs. As for other activities, the concierge met us at our first breakfast, added us to a WhatsApp group in case we needed help during the whole stay, and gave us a sense of what we could book through the hotel, other suggestions based on what we wanted to do.

And so we ended up booking a trip to a place called Sensoria. We really wanted to get out into the wildlife and be able to go see Costa Rica and see some animals and kind of just relax. And this seemed like a really great way to do it. It was only about a two and a half hour drive versus some of the other rainforest places that you could go to.

And this was a little bit of a higher end experience with a private guide. It was a private property, but it had trails and thermal pools. And the price was about $165 a person if you drove yourself. Now, I'm really glad we had four wheel drive because the drive there definitely needed it.

That price included lunch and so it was about a three, four hour excursion. And I have some really mixed feelings about our time there. So it was beautiful. Their property was amazing. It was incredibly private. We didn't see a single other group while we were there. The hike was awesome.

The thermal pools were great, but it just wasn't our day for wildlife. We saw some bullet ants and we saw some tarantula hawk wasps, which it would be really cool if we were trying to get the most painful insect stings. But that was honestly about it. I can't really blame our guide for that.

Wildlife is not in the control of any of us. I can probably blame him for spending the entire hike sharing his conspiracy theories about government and large corporations trying to control everything we do. That's probably the last thing on any list of ours when we're going to relax in nature to have a politically charged conversation.

And so it kind of felt a little bit like he was more interested in that conversation than trying to spot wildlife. We definitely gave that feedback to the concierge who booked the tour. They gave it to Sensoria. I have no doubt that you probably won't have that experience, which is why I would really recommend this place, even though we didn't have the best experience in terms of wildlife and guide.

However, if you are interested in finding wildlife and getting into the rainforest, what I'd instead suggest doing is splitting your trip, spending some time down in near La Fortuna or on the Osa Peninsula, and really take the time to get into the rainforest. I think for us, if we had to spend, you know, more than five hours in one day in a car, it would have been too much.

So we didn't want to go much further. So if you are on the Pacific coast and you want a really beautiful nature hike, Sensoria was fantastic. Based on all the other reviews we read, I think we just got really unlucky in terms of the conversation we had and the wildlife we didn't see.

So I would still say check that out if you're in the area and you want something like that to experience. On the other end of the spectrum, we decided to go to Diamante Adventure Park, which was absolutely a tourist destination, but they had a mile long zip line that overlooked the ocean.

It looked really fun. So we did the canopy tour there. It was five to six different zip lines and it ended at a wildlife sanctuary, which felt a bit like a zoo. But I was told that they don't use that word in Costa Rica, but it was really fun.

The super long zip line was awesome. It's side by side. So you get to go together with your partner or your friend. And it was really cool to see a bunch of animals, especially because we didn't see them on our hike. Tons of birds, wildlife. We saw sloths and the staff there was so well informed that we actually learned a ton.

And while our kids wouldn't have been old enough to ride on a lot of the zip lines, they definitely would have appreciated the wild animals. They had a cool little kids adventure course and older kids were having a blast on the zip line. So I would definitely recommend this if you know what you're getting into.

It's definitely filled with lots of other people. It's not a quiet, secluded experience, but it was a lot of fun. And so those are really the only two excursions we did outside of food. For us, we wanted a trip to relax. We didn't have our kids with us. We spent almost all our time in or near the pool, at the beach, on the patio.

And we actually spent a lot of time eating. So let me quickly talk about that. The hotel had three main restaurants and two bars that had enough food to make a dinner out of. They also had room service. Though I will say that the level of effort they put into all the dishes at their restaurants, feeling unique and filled with tons of great ingredients and flavors and sauces, made the room service menu feel a bit bland.

So we actually never ordered it. Every breakfast we had was at the main restaurant. With diamond status, the buffet was free and you could add on eggs or coffee drinks to that total and it was still free. It was amazing. I will say, ask for the hot sauce they keep in the back.

It is so good and unlike any hot sauce I've ever tried. I honestly wish that I brought some home. We never really needed to order from the breakfast menu because there were so many options at the buffet. However, as you know, we had lots of credits to spend. So one day we tried the chilaquiles, one day we tried the French toast.

They were also delicious. And now it's probably a time to mention that what really sets a resort like this apart is not just the great food, the great property, but it's the staff. And the staff at the restaurants were so, so amazing. They had tons of local knowledge. I would encourage you to ask questions of people anytime you're at a property like this.

What should you do? Where should you see? Where should you go eat? They had stories of Costa Rica. They knew about the foods and their local cuisine. And every single day they seem to remember us by name. And it really makes us stay feel so incredible. So thank you.

Big shout out to the staff there. Also, just because breakfast was fantastic and free doesn't mean you should necessarily get your coffee there because they have an incredible coffee lab with like a dozen different varieties of Costa Rican beans. You can prepare them in tons of different ways from pour over to cold brew to espresso.

And I don't really drink coffee that much. But Amy loved going there almost every single day. And they had this turmeric ginger tea espresso drink called Spice Bliss, which like I said, I don't drink coffee a lot, but it was so good that I really wish they had a place nearby here that I could just get that regularly.

Highly recommend. For lunch, you can go to the main restaurant. You go to the poolside restaurant. We always had a huge breakfast. We usually skipped lunch or just had a snack, but we did have our fair share of drinks at the pool. My special shout out goes to a drink called the Lusco Fusco and the Vita.

They were fantastic. Each of them ordered many times. And speaking of drinks, it was really cool that every restaurant and bar had a different set of cocktails, including some mocktails. So I love that you felt like you were getting a little bit of variety everywhere you went. In the afternoon, they had a gelato shop, which was another way for us to burn those Hilton credits.

And then at dinner, you can go back to the main restaurant. You can also get small bites at the cocktail bar they have or at the lobby bar, which had the most beautiful sunsets you've ever seen. I'll try to make sure I put a photo in the show notes of the sunsets.

Amazing. Obviously, YouTube and Spotify will have some video. But the best dinner restaurant we went to it twice was called La Finca. It was their nice formal restaurant and it was absolutely amazing. Highly, highly recommend. I also said we didn't do room service earlier, but I'm wrong. We definitely ordered churros to our room one night and they were fantastic.

It also reminds me that every afternoon they would bring snacks and drinks to the room, which was a really nice touch. And honestly, we only left the resort for dinner once. We checked out a local place called Ginger. It was good if you're in the area, but it didn't really feel necessary, especially because we dialed in all the credits, such that so much of what we were doing ended up being basically...

Free is not the right word, but we didn't have a big bill when we checked out at all. So I think that's kind of it. Overall, it was an amazing stay. I could certainly list a bunch of the little things they might need to work out because we stayed just a few months after they opened.

The AC noise. The phone message system didn't work. There was a really awkward hided couch at one of the restaurants. There were a couple staff people that weren't quite on the same level as everyone else. But honestly, we had such a great stay. I sent that feedback to the hotel after we left.

The GM was super receptive. I would be surprised if a lot of those things didn't improve. And really, they were so minor that I just didn't want to feel like I wasn't calling them out. But I would absolutely return no questions asked and probably bring the kids. If you're curious, we did end up using all of our credit.

But one thing I didn't realize because we had a little extra at the end, at least this hotel, this might be true everywhere, would let you put tips for specific people or departments on your bill. And so ultimately charging your card. We didn't actually bring any cash on this trip, which was a mistake.

We forgot to bring our debit card. So it was actually really, really helpful for us to be able to do that. And I really know that it worked because we did send a tip to the concierge we were in a WhatsApp with. And sure enough, within a few hours of doing that, we got a message from them that they'd received it.

It was from a very specific individual who we called out by name. So it's really awesome that they make it easy to do that. Honestly, that might be true everywhere. I just have never tried, but it makes things really easy. And you don't have to worry about bringing cash and leaving in the room.

So that was a really awesome learning. So just to recap some of the takeaways here. I use the Amex Hilton cards to get free night certificates, primarily starting with a surpass card, earning the free night certificate at $15,000 spend, upgrading to an Aspire, getting another free night certificate at $30,000 spend, which, by the way, includes the spend you get for the surpass.

And then I got the annual free night certificate with the Aspire. We had two of those, so we were able to do it twice to get six nights. I'll include a link to an article all about that. We use rooms.arrow to find that standard room availability at Hilton Properties.

I know that you can also use PointsYet, Award Tool, Aways, Gondola, Max My Points, Stay With Points. They all have some version of searching for hotels, and Hilton has their own award calendar. So if you want to search for hotel stays, go back to episode 167, where we dove through all those tools.

But I imagine any of them can achieve what you want. But I would say if you're staying at a Hilton property, make sure to have an Aspire at the time you stay so that you have that diamond status, you get the upgrade priority, and you get the free breakfast.

For flights, I love the PointsPath extension, but make sure you set some alerts. I did it at Award Tool, which let us save over 60,000 points by rebooking our return when those prices dropped. So in summary, we spent 110,000 points plus $145 in taxes for our flights. We spent six Hilton free night certificates.

And then we spent about $1,500 in Hilton credit and another $1,000 out of pocket. So total out of pocket costs for this trip was about $1,100 for, it's hard to say exactly, but I would say somewhere on the order of $14,000 to $15,000 trip. I think that's incredible. There's no perfect way to put a cents per point on the entire thing, but nothing beats going on a trip, only spending $1,000 plus a little and being able to have a $10,000 to $20,000 vacation.

That's why I love this game. It's one of my favorite things out there. This episode is brought to you by Element. If you've listened to this show, you know I'm always searching for ways to optimize my life, and Element is genuinely one of the simplest, most impactful upgrades I've made.

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It's zero sugar, zero artificial junk, just a perfectly balanced mix of electrolytes and sodium that's backed by science and tastes great. Since I started drinking Element, I've noticed clearer focus throughout the day, better sleep at night, and I am more energized for workouts and recovery. Honestly, it is hard to imagine going back.

Whether you're an athlete or just someone like me trying to get the most out of every day, you've got to try Element, especially the new lemonade flavor. And they're so confident you'll love it that they offer no questions asked refunds, so you can try it risk free. For All The Hacks listeners, you can get a free eight-count sample pack of Element's most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase at allthehacks.com/elementlmnt.

Find your favorite Element flavor or share with a friend, that's allthehacks.com/elementlmnt. You can get the links, promo codes, and discounts from all our partners at allthehacks.com/deals. They're all brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us. Now, if you're looking at doing something like this and you're not looking to play the game as hard, but you want to take away some of the tricks, aside from having hotel status, there are a couple other ways to get these kinds of perks and upgrades at a hotel.

And that's either booking through a travel partner or booking through a hotel program. And so when you do that, you get perks without status, without anything like free breakfast, like a free upgrade on availability, like property credit, usually $100 per stay, early check-in, late check-out, a welcome amenity, all while still earning points and status with hotel chains.

So this is usually at luxury hotels. And one of the most common ways people run into this is that a lot of premium credit cards include access to book hotels through these programs. So Amex has fine hotels and resorts, Chase has the edit, Capital One has luxury collection, and so on and so on.

So doing that is one way to get a lot of the benefits of status and perks without having to have them. I will say the other way to do this is to book through a travel agent. Now you can do that the old-fashioned way by finding a human that you call, you can use some websites to outsource it.

The reason why I like this is because you usually get a higher priority on upgrades and the way you're treated going through a travel agent because they have a human connection with those resorts and hotels. There are tons of travel agents out there, many of whom partner with a program called Virtuoso, which is a network that has some of those benefits.

But keep in mind that there are some hotel chains that have their own programs that sometimes offer better benefits than Virtuoso would. Hyatt has Hyatt Privé, Four Seasons has Four Seasons Preferred Partners. So you want to try to find a travel agent that's a partner of all of those programs.

And if you do, you can probably increase that list of luxury properties where you get those kind of perks to around 4,000 hotels around the world. Now, if you look at Amex and Chase and Capital One, they usually have about 500 to 1500 in their programs. So you'll definitely get a wider array if you work with a travel advisor and you might get a little higher priority.

I'm a little bit biased here because we found one of those travel advisors that had 4,000 plus relationships and we work with them to try to build a website for anyone listening to this show to be able to book all of those rates with all of those perks themselves instead of having to get on the phone and go back and forth with email.

So if you go to hotels.allthehacks.com, you can access that site. There is a password because we were asked to put one so that anyone couldn't find all these great deals. The password is just the word perks, so you're all able to access it and find all those benefits and book those rates and get that preferred treatment.

I can't count the number of people we've been able to hook up with everything from ocean view upgrades, free amenities, free breakfast, all kinds of stuff. If you want a little help figuring out how to navigate the site, I think for some people, it'll make sense. For some, it'll be confusing.

If you go to allthehacks.com/upgrade or find the link on the website for the hotel upgrade program, there is a link to a video walkthrough that might be helpful. Obviously, if you have an Amex credit for fine hotels and resorts, or if you have a chase credit for the edit, use those and get your discounts.

But I am pretty sure that all things being equal, we can get you a better experience booking directly through our relationships with those hotels. Okay. So our Costa Rica trip was the highlight of our trip without our children, relaxing on the beach. It was amazing, but we actually had another incredible stay that I think shows a way to get an amazing deal with hotels with points that's slightly different.

So we went with our children to a place called Carmel Valley Ranch. It's about two, three hours south of San Francisco, and it's part of the Hyatt Unbound collection. And so our au pair was taking some time off. We had a long weekend. We wanted to find something to do.

We have a ton of Hyatt points. I've achieved Hyatt globalist status this year, which is an amazing status I'll talk about in a bit. And so we decided to look at a few options that were a little bit local. Carmel Valley Ranch came up because we could book it with points, but not just points.

They had suites available and we were able to use Hyatt suite upgrades to get a suite at the property for the same number of points as a regular stay. So it was 45,000 points a night for a stay, but those suites, which would normally be 66,000 points, were with a suite upgrade award, 45,000 points as well.

So we ended up getting a ranch suite with two double beds, which online on their site was $1,337 a night for a four-night stay. And we did it for 45,000 Hyatt points a night, which made our Hyatt points using a suite upgrade worth about 2.97 cents per point. So I just want to back up, I've said cents per point earlier in this episode, but if you consider a chase card that might earn 3x points on dining and you compare that to a cashback card that's earning 3% back, if those 3x points transfer to Hyatt and get about 3 cents of value, it's effectively the same as a 9% cashback card.

Now, obviously that's only true if you would have spent those $1,300 on that stay, but if you have cashback and you wanted this stay, you would have had to spend that amount because you didn't have those Hyatt points. Unlike Hilton, Hyatt points do go on sale and they do go on sale for less than 2.97 cents per point, but they certainly don't go on sale for anywhere near as low as half a cent.

I'm looking right now at an article from One Mile at a Time about a Hyatt point sale that's good from August to October 2025. You do get a 20% discount. It makes those Hyatt points cost 2.08 cents per point. So technically that would still let you get about 30% off your stay.

So if you were looking to book this property and you were looking at the price, you could book it using Hyatt points you buy instead of the cash rate. Now, keep in mind, if you use that cash rate, you'd obviously earn points on that spend. And so it's not a perfect apples to apples comparison, but when you're talking about getting it for 2.97 cents per point and you can transfer your chase points there, or you already have Hyatt points, it's just absolutely a better deal.

As globalist with Hyatt, you get free breakfast, which is so good. Unlike the Waldorf Astoria here, you could order whatever you want on the buffet from the menu. Even the gratuity we left the staff was all covered through our globalist breakfast benefit easily saved us over a hundred dollars a day.

And the other cool thing is you don't actually need to have Hyatt globalist status to get treated like a globalist. In addition to free breakfast, globalists don't have resort fees, don't have any fees for parking when you're booking on points. And so you can get that status, one, by staying a lot with Hyatt or spending a lot on their cards, but also every globalist gets some number of guest of honor certificates each year, which basically allow you to gift someone your globalist status for their stay.

It's good for up to seven nights. So if someone wanted to go on a stay to one of these properties, I could go online, put in their Hyatt number, put in their last name and send them one of my guest of honor certificates. There are discussion forums online where people trade these.

People often in our membership have been able to find ways to get them from other members swapping around. So that's an option. And they do work with paid stays or points days. The only catch is you can't combine a guest of honor certificate with a sweet upgrade award. So similarly, as you achieve tiers of status with Hyatt, you earn sweet upgrade awards or you earn milestones where you can pick things like sweet upgrade awards or points or other perks, you can't use a sweet upgrade award and a guest of honor certificate.

So at one point, my parents were potentially coming with us on our stay to Carmel Valley Ranch. And I told them, I have some extra things I can send you. Do you want me to send you the guest of honor where you get my status and free breakfast? Or do you want to send me to send you the sweet upgrade award where you get a locked in guaranteed upgrade, but you're gonna have to pay for breakfast.

They didn't end up staying. So we didn't have to find that out. But that is the one true benefit of globalist status is that because you have that status, you can use your sweet upgrade award and get both of those perks. And keep in mind that sweet upgrade award also works with paid stays.

So I was just helping a friend where he was looking at a room that was $300 a night and the suite was $900 a night. So for five nights, he was able to spend $300 a night, use a sweet upgrade award that I gifted him. And he got that stay in the suite that would have otherwise cost $4,500.

So again, another way that you can optimize for some of these upgrades and things with points without having to actually have them. Like I said, globalist isn't easy to get. There's no card like in Hilton that will just give you the best status. Sometimes they have status challenges, which can make it faster to get there.

If you want to go deep on earning status, check out episode 182, which was all about the shortcuts to elite status. Also, one other really cool thing about Hyatt, they have this program called Brand Explorer, where every five new brands you try within the Hyatt program, you get a free night certificate, good for category one to four hotels, and they have 35 brands.

So if you try one property in all brands, you'd end up with seven free nights. And because this is part of the unbound collection, which I hadn't stayed at, we earned another brand in our brand explorer, which actually put us over to 10 brands. So we actually got a free night certificate just from this stay.

As for Carmel Valley Ranch, it was such a great stay. If you're in the Bay Area, whether you have kids or not, I'd highly recommend it. If you don't have kids, I do know that the Alila Ventana Big Sur is one of the most aspirational, best value properties to use your Hyatt points.

I've been there one time for a wedding that we didn't actually stay on property. I would love to go stay there. It is adults only, so it wasn't an option for us. But I would say one of those two properties would be a great use of points and a really relaxing kind of local vacation in the Bay Area.

Or even if you're coming in from out of town, I think you'd really enjoy it as well. The hotel doesn't feel as brand new as the Waldorf did in Costa Rica, which makes sense. It is not brand new, but it was fantastic. And the grounds of the property are beautiful.

Everything we did was great. It didn't feel old or outdated. I would say the suite was fantastic. We had a living room, a sofa bed, plenty of places to put us and the kids, which is really nice. For anyone with children, it's always nice to have a separate place that you can go sit and relax with couches while your kids are falling asleep or if you want to stay up later than them.

Or one night, we just wanted to order some pizza and watch a movie. So we sat in the living room and we all just hung out and watched a movie and had a movie night. And shout out to ChadGPT for suggesting the movie Elemental. Everyone in the family, even the kids, really, really enjoyed it.

Now the property at Carmel Valley Ranch is huge. It's beautiful. We did a bunch of different hikes around there. We went up to the corral, which is really amazing because the kids get to meet baby goats, sheep, donkeys, alpacas. It was really fun. They also have these really great experiences that you can pay for.

One of them is called Little Ranchers, where the kids get to spend a couple hours up on the farm with the animals doing a lot more work with them, which would have been really cool when they're a little older. There are also a ton of other experiences. I think you could fill an entire week with different activities, whether it was fitness related or learning or to do with animals.

We loved walking through the vineyard and the garden. You could see where all the grapes were growing for the wines they create on the property, but we also got to see all these different vegetables they were growing that they ended up serving us at the restaurants. They had a really fun QR code scavenger hunt, which was meant for the kids, but we really enjoyed it.

It just kind of took us all around. If anyone from the property is listening, I think it should be a little bit longer. It was probably only five or six stops. Then there were just a bunch of tree swings, which was probably the highlight of every walk we took for our kids.

We actually found them all on the map and we're like, "Hey, we're going on this hike. I know you're not that excited right now, but at the top, there's a tree swing." And the kids were like, "Okay, let's go, let's go." And I was going to say it's not the highlight because every night at 6:00 PM, there were free s'mores at the fire pit in the lobby, and that was definitely the highlight, but the swings were probably a close second.

They do have a really beautiful pool right near the lobby, but it is adults only. But at the bottom of the hill, they have this entire area called River Ranch, where there's a huge family-friendly pool, super shallow baby pool, splash pad, restaurant, bar, gym, kids club, that was not free, and pickleball and tennis courts.

We spent a lot of time down there. It was awesome. I will say just because you're in California doesn't mean it's always the warmest place. So there were a couple of days where we were at the pool and our kids didn't seem to mind, but Amy and I were like, "This is a little colder than I would want for a pool day." We ate most of our dinners at the main restaurant in the lobby.

Food was fantastic. Every meal, they had these different sticker sets for the kids to help keep them entertained. I love when a restaurant or a property goes above and beyond to just make kids' lives easier because it is so appreciated by parents to be able to relax, to keep them distracted, and also to help them just sit still and relax for other people at the restaurant who don't have kids and maybe aren't as excited to hear kids running around.

So they did a great job of doing that. As for things off the property, we did leave a few times, so I'll share a few recommendations. We stopped by Earthbound Farms, which is right down the street. We picked strawberries, had lunch, highly recommend. Just a beautiful, relaxing place to hang out for a few hours.

We had heard from a friend of mine that the best dinner nearby is at a restaurant called Lucia, which is at Bernardus. The stars didn't align for us, but next time we might check it out. However, we did swing through Monterey and Pacific Grove twice, and I've got a few recommendations there.

One, playing in the tide pools. There are tons of them. We went to the Great Tide Pool, as it's called on Google Maps. It was awesome. Kids got to see crabs, starfish, all kinds of stuff. We had some great ice cream a few times. We went to Revival and Colette's.

We had a fun, awesome burger and fries at a place called Snack Shack, which is right above Lover's Point Beach. And we really wanted to grab a hot dog at a place called Lucy's on Lighthouse, which a friend of ours told us was fantastic, but they were closed when we were there, which was a huge bummer.

And then finally, we stopped at the Monterey Aquarium, which is really impressive. And it's even better because kids under five are free, which both of our kids, at least when we went, were, which is awesome. Finally, big shout out to Stephanie and Edward at the front desk at Carmel Valley Ranch.

If they are listening, you guys are awesome. Carlos, who runs housekeeping and helped sort out getting us a humidifier. And Bailey, the beekeeper, who we met feeding chickens, but who told my girls just about everything they could ever want to know about bees and who are very excited to come back and do the kids beekeeping experience.

Just like the experience at the Waldorf, the staff made the stay so amazing. Shout out to everyone there at the property. You guys were awesome. So just to recap some of the tactics, Hyatt points, they're already so valuable, but honestly, I don't think I'm going to be using my chase points for anything else.

I think I've been able to get such great value from Hyatt that that is my chase points purpose. I'm earmarking them as just Hyatt points, but these Hyatt suite upgrade awards really make your points go further. You can use them on the points day, but you can also use them on a cash booking and put yourself in a suite for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying that suite outright, which is awesome.

If you're not a globalist and you don't have those certificates, I'd suggest you try to make friends with someone who has Hyatt status or join some community in this space or try to find a discussion forum online where people are offering to trade them. It really can make your stay go further.

Or if suites aren't available or you really prefer just maybe an upgrade opportunity, but you want to lock in free breakfast or covered resort fees or free parking, find someone that can get you a guest of honor certificate. Those are also incredible and can really make your stay better.

So I hope that wherever you're going, whether it's Carmel, Costa Rica, or anywhere else in the world, that some of the tactics I shared today can help you have an incredible time optimizing those hotel bookings and paying as little as a third of the cost for a luxury stay.

If you have any feedback, questions or anything, podcast@allthehacks.com. That is it for this week. I will see you next week.