I had made preliminary plans for a trip to San Francisco, but I had made extra care to make sure they were all ones that I could cancel without penalty. Once I had booked the flights to Los Cabos we knew we weren’t going to San Francisco.

Fisherman’s Wharf Hotel

First up to cancel was the one night I had booked at the Holiday Inn Fisherman’s Wharf. I had booked this using a free night certificate that was about to expire. It was going to expire in late November of 2018, but I could book the room for any time up to a year from that date. The catch was that I couldn’t reschedule it after the expiration date. Since it was March, the expiration date had long passed and since I couldn’t reschedule it I effective lost that free night.

If I had kept the reservation and been a no-show, I could have been charged the full rate for that night, so it was VERY important that I canceled the award night rather than just not showing up. I’ve read about people who were burned by this so it’s something to be aware of.

Since I wasn’t going to use the certificate anyways it wasn’t a big loss. It was worth booking that night preemtively even though we didn’t end up using it.

Napa Hotel

The hotel I had booked in Napa was a simple refundable cash rate so all I had to do was cancel it more than 48 hours before the date. No problem there.

Palace Hotel San Francisco

The Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco is where we were booked to stay 5 nights on points. The hotel nightly rate was over $400/night so points made a lot of sense even though it was a lot of points. Luckily, booking on points allows for cancellation and return of the points if canceled more than 48 hours before arrival. No problem there either and we now had 200,000 more points to use for future trips.

Car Rental

I had also booked a cancelable rate for the rental car so it was as simple as canceling online.

Final Tally

We only lost the free night certificate we weren’t going to use otherwise. Everything else we were able to cancel without penalty. There was sadness over not being able to bring the kids to San Francisco yet, but on the other hand, when we do find a more affordable time to go, we already have the framework of a pretty interesting itinerary lined up. I’m sure that will happen some time in the near future. It just seems like it’s an “easy” destination we can fit in with less trouble than some of these other ones we need to jump on more opportunistically.

In many ways, coming up with the general itinerary is one of the harder parts. With this in the future we can just plug in different dates or slight variations quite easily. Being able to visualize what a vacation looks like is very helpful for making sure we’ll have a good time. I’ve made itineraries for hundreds of vacations we didn’t go on. By iterating over the itinerary we can more easily determine what’s going to work best for us. It also helps develop strategies and find patters for getting the best deals!

San Francisco would have been fun, but Los Cabos was also going to be a great trip!