At the end of our 17 day trip around Florida in 2021, we had high hopes that travel would get back to normal for us in 2021. While we managed two more trips in the spring (both to Florida), we weren’t able to go on a lot of our planned trips for various reasons.
I had also neglected this blog since we weren’t traveling as frequently and were distracted with other this (i.e. moving), but I finally got though the backlog of trips before the end of the year (barely!).
The Trips that Weren’t
We had plans to go to Vail for a ski vacation in February, but canceled because I forgot to buy the ski passes. Due to quarantine restrictions in our home state we wouldn’t have been able to go anyways.
We had booked a trip to Austin in April, but had to cancel due to airline schedule changes, so we ended up going to Florida (Tampa) for the fourth trip in a row.
My wife and I had planned a two-week trip to California over the summer to celebrate our anniversary while the boys were in summer camp (which luckily still happened), but in June we made the decision to move from the Boston area to Connecticut to be closer to family. It’s one of those decisions we had been thinking about for awhile but the actual decision and timing came together in a timeline that likely seemed pretty sudden from the outside. The boys went off to summer camp and we had sold/moved out of the house before they got back. We moved in the the new house just three days after they returned and less than 2 weeks before their new school started. That obviously kept us busy over the summer and we had no time for our California trip for the second year in a row.
We were planning to go to Bar Harbor again after the boys were done with summer camp, but since we were closing on our new house we couldn’t squeeze in the trip. Next year!
Over the holidays we were going to go to Dubai and Abu Dhabi with my brother in law, but due to concerns over COVID, we had to cancel and hope to rebook it for 2022. With the rise of the Omicron variant, we’re glad we made the decision to cancel. Plus, our tickets were out of Boston and we live closer to NYC now so that would have been a logistical challenge.
Making the Best of Things
What 2020 taught us and 2021 reinforced is that flexibility is key when booking travel. We started the year finishing up our tour of Florida. We managed to escape to South Beach in February and Tampa in April. As much as I bellyache about going to Florida so much, the weather was fantastic and we had a blast on all the trips. It was convenient to fly to (nonstop flights) and had the elements of sun and sand that we were looking for.
We did have a quick trips to NYC, Connecticut, and Philadelphia Tomatico’s for a squash tournaments which were a lot of fun (and a lot of driving). My wife and I did spent a week in a hotel in Connecticut this summer while we shopped for houses and applied for mortgages between work meetings.
We also stayed in NYC for a night just after Thanksgiving to use some free night certificates that would have otherwise gone to waste. It was fun being able to use the early checkin and late checkout to get large parts of 2 days in the city for the price of one. With free parking and breakfast it was a cheap way to enjoy the city without the stress.
Status
Our main focus for status in 2021 was to maintain my wife’s Titanium status with Marriott and my Globalist status with Hyatt. While both programs extended status, so we could have done nothing and kept them, we earned enough qualifying nights to officially re-qualify for both.
With Marriott, my wife received a bonus for 2021 that gave us 38 extra qualifying nights. Since she has a Marriott Consumer and Business credit cards she got 30 additional free nights, so we started with 68 total. That made it easy to get to 75. Since award nights count towards status, the 5 nights at the St Regis Bal Harbour in Miami Beach and several other one-off nights using free night certificates got us up to 77 qualifying nights total.
For Hyatt, we started work towards prequalifying at the end of 2020 by leveraging some promotions Hyatt was running. We could get a night for 2020 AND 2021 and got double 2021 qualifying nights for stays January of 2021. Since we checked out of our Orlando hotel on New Year’s Day, we started the year with 28 qualifying nights. Our February and April stays were in Hyatts adding to our totals and spend on the credit card helped push us over the 60 night threshold getting us access to a Concierge and suite upgrade and free night certificates. We also stayed several nights for Tomatio’s squash tournaments as well as the week we were house hunting. Finally, I traveled for work and stayed a few nights in Hyatts. In the end, I managed 83 qualifying nights, allowing me to snag 2 additional suite upgrades for 2022 (for a total of 6)
I did not fly enough to earn any airline status, and most of the flights were booked on points, anyways so they wouldn’t have counted towards elite status. My wife still maintains her United Silver status as a part of her Marriott Titanium status.
Credit Cards
I got two new cards in 2021, downgraded one, and canceled another.
The first new card were the American Express Platinum card. I got it for the 100K sign up bonus and the ability to get Rakuten Rewards cash back as Membership Rewards points, among other things. The card has a LOT of benefits, but it’s not the simplest card to maximize value for. I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to at least break even on the annual fee (even the recently increased fee) even if I don’t put much spend on the card. I’m still searching for how I can best use the Membership Rewards points.
The second card I got was the Amazon Prime card. I had this card years ago before getting deeply into the points and miles game but had canceled it. After having just bought a house and knowing how much we order from Amazon, the card is a no-brainer that I should have gotten/kept years ago. We only use it for Amazon purchases and things we buy at Whole Foods to get 5% back. We use the points we get as statement credits since using them to buy things would forego the 5% back.
Late in 2021 I got the new United Quest card. Since the card overlapped with the benefits of the United Explorer card I already had, I ended up downgrading the Explorer card to the United Gateway card which had no annual fee and sits neatly in my drawer. I’ll likely consider closing it in 2021 since I can’t product change it to anything that would be more useful.
Finally, with the AMEX Platinum Card, one of the benefits is complementary Marriott Gold status. This status isn’t terribly useful, but it’s better than nothing. I had the Bonvoy Brilliant Amex card which also gave me the same Gold status and some other benefits for a $450 annual fee. Even though the effective rate was $150 a year ($300 credit at Marriott properties) and it came with a 50,000 point free night certificate (easy to get more than $150 worth), since we are moving our focus away from Marriott the benefits were inconvenient and not worth the cost. Any free night we’d use would be under my name and not help my wife’s status or get her benefits.
Conclusions
While we didn’t have the year of travel we were hoping for, we still had some memorable trips. Using points and miles and leveraging the flexibility of paid travel during the early part of the year, we were able to make plans early and cancel at the last minute if necessary. This allowed us to have vacations that we wouldn’t have booked otherwise because of the cancellation restrictions that would normally have been in places. It’s better to book then cancel instead of book at the last minute and find there aren’t options.
We look forward to lots of travel next year and we hope for the new normal to arrive!
Tomatico Travels 
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