Year in Review – 2020

2020 was a year like no other. The travel industry was upended in dramatic and unexpected ways. Everyone’s lives were reprioritized because of COVID-19 as we wait for the new normal to take hold.

The Trips That Weren’t

It’s no surprise that most of the trips we planned didn’t go as planned. We had some fantastic trips lined up with varying degrees of certainty. We were going to spend our April school break in Fort Myers at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Beach. We had booked a trip to Hawaii for two weeks spread across Kauai and Maui at the beginning of the summer. We were thinking of spending Thanksgiving somewhere in the Caribbean and Christmas in Dubai.

My wife and I were also thinking of taking a couples trip to Las Vegas and followed by a luxury Miraval Resort stay in Austin as a sort of honeymoon-we-never-really-had trip 21 years later.

The Trips That Were!

There are a lot of disappointments on the list of things we couldn’t do, but the list of things we were able to do was a lot less shabby than I expected all things considered.

We ended 2019 and started 2020 in Long Beach California at the tail end of our California road trip that also included San Francisco, San Diego, and Palm Springs. The Long Beach portion was mostly just tacked on to the end of the trip and we didn’t have high expectations. After coming off a horrendous stay at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort and Spa that still haunts me to this day, the Hyatt Regency Long Beach welcomed us and blew our socks off with the fantastic service and room. We were a short walk from dozens of restaurants and activities and had an amazing view of the Queen Mary, over which the New Years’ fireworks show was happening. We had perfect “seats” for all the action and it started the year on the right foot.

In February we were able to go to Spain as COVID was just starting to become a fixture in the news as “something happening in Asia”. In Spain, we had a wonderful 10-day trip that included Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid. We talk about this trip all the time and reminisce about all the great food and activities we experienced while we were there. We returned just a few weeks before Spain effectively shut down.

In early March, the virus was on its way to the US and the northeast in particular. Toilet paper and essentials were becoming hard to find in grocery stores and we decided to “get out of dodge” and move up our planned April vacation to Fort Myers. Knowing now what we do about the virus we probably wouldn’t have made the same decision this time, though we had another fantastic (and safe) trip to a destination resort and have no regrets about taking advantage of the opportunity.

The rest of the spring and early summer were spent mostly in lockdown. It’s amazing how much we were able to get done to the house. Walls got painted. Things got cleaned/fixed/organized. We made the best of things. I took a break from the blog as I just didn’t have the material to write about and my heart just wasn’t in it. I went weeks without visiting flights.google.com, though I did continue to follow my favorite travel and points blogs to make sure I was taking advantage of all the limited time offers from my credit cards.

In the summer, as the boys were miraculously able to attend their summer camp, my wife and I made some short staycations and we spent a lot of relaxing time up in Maine at the lake. The weather was fantastic and the sunsets amazing. After picking up the boys from camp our short trip to Bar Harbor was a hit and I’m sure it’ll be repeated!

We also had an enjoyable soccer tournament weekend in New Hampshire to mix things up.

Status

At the beginning of the year, I had planned to focus on Hyatt status rather than Marriott status. Our final stay of 2019 in a Marriott property left a horrible taste in our mouth that got worse and we tried to get our complaints heard by Marriott and the hotel.

The hotel finally called our hotel, but immediately accused us of faking the pictures we had taken of the condition of the room. Needless to say, that was not a response we were expecting! The pictures were of course authentic. We responded one final time after that debacle and never heard back from the hotel or Marriott.

That said, my wife did requalify for Titanium status for 2021. We had some stays booked for our Spain trip and Marriott offered members quite a few extra qualifying nights based on the previous status to help with qualifications. I believe we only had to stay 11 nights to reach the 75 nights to requalify and get the 5 suite night upgrade certificates that come along with it. Most of those nights were in lower-end hotels in Barcelona and Valencia or on points stays.

From our experience with Hyatt at the beginning of the year, we were looking forward to staying in more properties. Since I had applied for the World of Hyatt Visa card at the end of 2019, I had a plan to put spend on that card to help get to a level of status that would help us get suite upgrades and/or club access at properties for our summer trip to Hawaii. For every $5000 spend on the card, we get 2 qualifying nights towards status. Since my wife is a contractor we pay her taxes via credit card so we can generate a lot of spend rapidly that way!

We also had a plan to find free weekends where we could do a staycation in Boston where there are a few nice Hyatt properties to help boost the night’s total where the cash rates made sense. This whole plan worked better than expected. During much of the lockdown, the Hyatt card offered bonus nights on the spend (so effectively 4 nigths per $5000 in spend) so I had reached Globalist status by May. It was right in time for the heart of the lockdown with no place to be able to use the status!

I’ve since been able to use that status a couple of times and I’ve grown quite fond of the Hyatt program. It’ll be our preferred brand for the foreseeable future. Marriott will be the fallback if we don’t find an appropriate hotel for Hyatt first, but with confirmed suite upgrades, highly valuable points, the ability to transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt, and all the greate Globalist perks, there is a lot in the progame that we value highly.

At the beginning of the year, I had thoughts of trying to get JetBlue Mosaic status. I had plans I would be flying more for work which didn’t happen.

Points

For much of the year, we were amassing points. We got points back from the trips we had booked but canceled (Hawaii, *sigh*) and weren’t spending too many of them. Due to the lockdowns, many of the credit cards got creative and we took advantage of many of the perks. Several cards had increased bonus categories like groceries and which we took full advantage of.

As new converts to the Hyatt program, Chase Ultimate Rewards have become our preferred points currency. We already had a fair number of points between my wife and me, but we doubled down. At one point we had almost 700,000 points between us. We’ve transferred many of those to Hyatt for bookings in 2021.

We’ve also earned a fair amount of Citi ThankYou points. We mainly transfer those to Jet Blue so we don’t put a high value on them, but we use the Citi DoubleCash card to pay our mortgage through Plastiq and can get more value back than we pay in fees, especially when coupled with my wife’s JetBlue Plus MasterCard.

Card Updates

I only applied for one credit card this year and my wife didn’t apply for any. I got the JetBlue Plus MasterCard which my wife also has. I’m hoping to go on a golfing trip next summer and that card will help with baggage fees and the points should cover most if not all of the tickets, which isn’t bad for the $89 annual fee!

My wife was considering applying for a new business card for herself but we decided to hold off until 2021 for that.

While I only got one new card, I did downgrade my Citi Prestige card to the Citi Premier card. The Prestige card lost a LOT of value for me last year when the 4th-night free benefit changes to require booking through their travel portal. I found the prices in the portal to be higher than booking directly with the hotel, even if you factored in the 4th night free. By booking through their travel portal you don’t get any elite benefits and your nights don’t count towards status. Previously, using the concierge service you could get special rates like AAA rates and book directly through the hotel to get good rates, elite benefits, and your stays counted toward status. At $595/year I wasn’t getting much value out of the card so I downgraded to the Citi Premier which has the added benefit of getting 2x points of gas which was only 1x with the more expensive Citi Prestige card. With the Premier I still get the same transfer partners and rates for the Thank You points and I can transfer points from my Citi DoubleCash card to the Premier account and then to any of the other transfer partners.

Conclusions

Overall, 2020 sucked and there’s no getting around it. We are thankful our friends and family made it through the year healthy and safe despite far too many others not being able to say the same. We are hopeful for a return to a new normal in 2021 and thankful for the trips we were able to take. We made the best of what was available and that’s all we can reasonably hope for.

Have a happy and safe New Year!