Reader Owen requested WenneTravel to find a trip to one of the less
traveled places on the African continent. We’re gonna do Owen one better. Here
is our itinerary for two less traveled places on the African continent:
New York to Harare, Zimbabwe
Harare to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Ouagadougou to New York
And the credit cards we’ll be signing up for:
Person 1
Chase United MileagePlus Explorer
30,000 miles after $1,000 spend in 3 months
$0 annual fee first year
Chase Ink Bold
50,000 Ultimate Rewards points after $5,000 spend in 3 months
$0 annual fee first year
Chase Priority Club Rewards
60,000 points after $1,000 spend in 3 months
$0 annual fee first year
Note: Priority Club hotels include Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn,
Intercontinental, and more
Person 2
Chase United MileagePlus Explorer
30,000 miles after $1,000 spend in 3 months
$0 annual fee first year
Chase Ink Bold
50,000 Ultimate Rewards points after $5,000 spend in 3 months
$0 annual fee first year
Barclaycard Arrival
40,000 points after $1,000 spend in 3 months
Earns 2 points per dollar spent
$0 annual fee first year
Total Miles: 62,000
Total Hotel Points: 61,000
Total General Points: 152,000
Total Cost: $0
Flights
The Star Alliance has Africa
well-covered thanks to Ethiopian Airlines, Egyptair, and South African Airways.
With United miles and Ultimate Rewards points from Chase that can transfer to
United miles we’ll have more than enough miles for the 80,000 required for a
roundtrip to the African continent. And thanks to United’s stopover rules, we’ll
also be able to add in another stop absolutely for free! So we’ll use our
31,000 United miles we now have, and also transfer over 49,000 Ultimate Rewards
points from the Ink Bold to United.
To spare you some of the pictographic
details, I did a separate search for each leg of the trip on united.com. I
found Saver award space in July for all three legs in the order I wanted, and
then I put them all together in this search, called “Advanced Search” on the
United homepage:
I did the search and put together my
itinerary. It ended up like this:
In case you hadn’t noticed, two of these
flights, one from Addis Ababa to Harare, and one from Addis Ababa to Toronto, are
on the 787 Dreamliner from Ethiopian Airlines. That is Boeing’s famous new
plane that’s got all kinds of bells and whistles. Basically a dream…liner. Get
a flight on one of these, I promise it will be worth it. The total price?
Less than $150 and 80,000 miles.
Total Miles Used: 160,000
(two tickets)
Total Cost so Far: $285.40
Hotels
Harare has a couple of Priority Club hotels to choose from:
The Holiday Inn Harare may not look like the nicest of hotels, but it
will most certainly do at 10,000 points per night for four nights.
You might expect there aren’t a ton of chain hotels in Ouagadougou.
Lucky for us, any hotel bookable via credit card can be reimbursed using
Barclay Arrival points. All we have to do is pay for the hotel with our Barclay
card, and then later we can log in and “erase” the purchase with our points at
1 cent apiece. I’m going to use Kayak to do our search:
$138 per night for a 3-star hotel doesn’t seem too bad. That comes out
to $414 for three nights, or 41,400 points. Just under our budget of 42,000 Barclay
Arrival points.
Total Hotel Points Used: 40,000
Total General Points Used: 41,400
Total Cost so Far: $285.40
Two people in spots in Africa for 7 nights total (plus some in-flight
nights). Less than $300 total.
Here’s a look at the actual price for flights and these hotels on the
same days:
Flights
$3,196 each
Hotel
Harare - $400 ($100 per night
including taxes)
Ouagadougou - $414 ($138 per
night including taxes)
Total Savings: $3,724 ($1,862 per person)
Need help thinking about the right credit cards for you, or how to book
this kind of trip? Head over to www.wennecorp.com
and we’d be happy to chat with you. Absolutely free.
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