Hi Friends! Welcome to my first blog post on Travel Hacking Success Stories ! This is a continuation of my Travel Hacking Blog Series where I talk about how I use reward points to pay for my vacations. This will be a second section of the Travel Hacking Blog Series where I share my success stories and how I used points and credit cards on specific vacations.

As an avid Disney-goer (checkout my past Disney blogs here) I was both shocked and horrified when I learned boyfriend  has never been to a Disney park. Luckily for him, I found out about this during the Disneyland 60th Anniversary celebration and thought ‘it’s perfect, we have to go!’. Unfortunately, I was saving up for the down payment on my house at the time so I knew we couldn’t spend a ridiculous amount of money. So I was really hoping I could use my points for the big ticket items, like flights and hotels. And that’s exactly what I did. I wanted to have ample time to spend at the parks so we ended up going for 5 days (6 nights). Looking back on it, I would say we stayed for too long, you can do Disneyland in 3 days (4 nights) easily, but I wanted to give boyfriend the full experience 🙂  I was able to save $2,766 by using my American Airlines miles and Hyatt points. Keep reading below to find out how.   

Since the Disneyland Railroad is closed, due to the construction of Star Wars Land, they had the Lady Bell car on display and you could see the inside of it! This is really rare. For a quick history lesson, the Lady Bell car (named after Disney’s wife, who also designed the car) is the last railroad car from opening day, when it was used as a special VIP car. Typically it’s not available to the public and you rarely get to see it. 

Cars Land is probably one of my favorite places in Disneyland because of the amazing detail and creativity they put into it. Even the flowers are made out of car parts !

Can you tell I was a little obsessed with the 60th Anniversary decorations on the castle ?

Where we stayed:

At Disneyland most of the hotels are within walking distance to the park, if not right across the street. There’s even a link on the Disneyland website for Good Neighboring Hotels. We stayed at the Hyatt Place at Anaheim which was about .75 miles away from the parks. This is far for Disneyland standards but I thought ‘eh, we’re young, we can walk’. There is technically a shuttle to and from the park, but I thought it was easier to walk. The walk wasn’t bad, just a straight shot up S. Harbor Blvd. The normal cost is around $320 a night, so we would have ended up spending $1,920 for the 6 nights we were there. Keep in mind, we went the week after Spring Break so it was a little less expensive, but just as crowded. When using points, it was 15,000 points a night, it’s a tier 3 out of 7 so it’s pretty cheap for Hyatt. One pro-tip is that since it’s a Tier 3, if you have the Hyatt credit card, you can use your free nights here. With the Hyatt credit card you’ll receive a free night on your cardholder anniversary and 2 free nights when you open the card and spend $3,000 in the first 4 months ( they’ve now changed it to 40,000 points instead of 2 free nights). Overall, using our points was well worth it and we saved almost $2,000 on our Disney trip. Also,  since it’s a Hyatt Place they had complimentary breakfast in the morning, which was a huge plus for boyfriend who loves to make waffles in the morning.

How to get there:

For flights, I got lucky. Typically, I assume that I won’t be able to use my airline miles when we travel. Even though there are no blackout dates on American Airlines, they typically want a ridiculous number of miles or force you to make multiple connections, when you try to redeem your miles for flights. But I got lucky since we were going right after spring break and during the week, I was able to book our flights with 12,500 points each way (the cheapest you can get with American). So, I ended up spending 50,000 points and saved $846 ($423 a flight times 2 people). It’s a little hard accumulating 50,000 points, if you don’t travel a lot like I do, but if you sign up for the American Airlines credit card, you earn 60,000 miles after you spend $3,000 in the first 3 months, so this is well enough points to pay for the flights.

Good luck on your next trip Travel Hackers!