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In the previous article, we discussed how we booked our $21K business class flights to and from the Maldives. In today’s article I want to show you how we booked our “free” hotel stay in the Maldives. Hotel stays in the Maldives can be crazy expensive so some have asked how we booked our Maldives stay. Considering that many of the resorts are the only property on the island they’re on, you’re only dining options are at the resort so dining costs can be outrageous. Luckily there are ways to hack the hotel stay and part of the dining costs to dramatically reduce your overall expenses to the Maldives. Here’s how!
HOW WE BOOKED OUR MALDIVES STAY
Adriana and I booked our stay at the Conrad Rangali Island. Many top travel bloggers rave about this property and for good reason. Spacious overwater bungalows with amazing views of the crystal blue water provide a super relaxing place to stay. All of this luxurious pampering comes at a price though. Nightly rates here come out to over $1000 per night plus resort fees for the dates we’re staying.
We’re not paying anywhere close to that though since we booked our stay with points. We had accumulated a healthy balance of Hilton points and decided that this property was a good place to burn them. Each award night at this property comes out to 95,000 Hilton points per night.
Time only allowed us to stay 4 nights in paradise. Ideally we would’ve loved to have stayed one more night because Hilton offers the 5th night free on award stays. Had we stayed 5 nights, our nightly rate would’ve come out to 76,000 points! This would’ve taken the value of our Hilton points to the next level!
HOW TO SEARCH FOR AWARD NIGHTS
First go to the Hilton homepage. From there, enter in your search criteria, check the “Use Points” box, then click “FIND IT”
Next your search results will appear. There are currently three properties showing for the dates chosen in this example. When you find the property you like, click “Select”. In this case, we chose the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island.
At this point, you’ll be prompted to sign into your Hilton account to proceed with booking with points.
For 95,000 points per night, you can book either a Beach Villa or a Water Villa. We chose the Water Villa. We stayed in the overwater bungalows in Bora Bora and they were amazing, so we wanted to compare them to the ones in the Maldives.
Here is the price for our stay if we would’ve paid with cash. Our 380,000 Hilton points yielded us 1.3 cents in value. Again, had we booked a 5th free night, it still would’ve cost just 380,000 Hilton points and our value would’ve jumped up considerably!
WHY WE LIKE HILTON SO MUCH
We are huge Hilton fans for two reasons. One is their large global footprint. It’s not hard to find a Hilton property at your destination. They’re practically everywhere! Second, it’s easy to earn elite status with Hilton. All you have to do is carry the right credit card. With the right credit card, you can save money with free breakfast for you and your guests. This is probably the most valuable perk one can get with elite status. With elite status, you can also score free room upgrades. At some of the high end resorts, they offer happy hour where drinks and snacks are free for those with elite status. Other properties offer lounge areas accessible to those with elite status. The card that we carry is the Hilton Aspire from American Express.
This card does come with a $450 annual fee which may initially scare you, but the value that you get from this card far outweighs the annual fee. Aside from the perks that I just mentioned, you also get an annual $250 Hilton resort credit and a $250 airline incidental credit. With these 2 perks alone, you actually make $50 in profit!
By having this card, it gives us Diamond status with Hilton, which allows us to get free breakfast and room upgrades. This saves us a considerable amount of money since breakfast could easily run at least $30 per person daily. By having drinks during their Happy Hour, we could save some additional money there since this would be free with Diamond status. Also the $250 resort credit could be used here to cover charges from dining or the spa.
CONCLUSION
We haven’t taken this trip yet, but we’re super excited about it. The cost of this trip in cash would’ve been close to $25K, but we’re paying pennies on the dollar, just by leveraging our miles and points earned from regular spending. Once we take this trip, we can show you the exact costs and provide further guidance on prices. Thanks for reading and supporting the blog!
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