With our second baby coming in December, we decided to
take one more small family vacation before our family of 3 becomes a family of
4. We both scheduled a Friday off work next
month and will head out to Carlsbad on Thursday afternoon. Carlsbad is a city near San Diego, and is
about an hour drive away from our home.
The city is located right next to the Pacific Ocean and beautiful
beaches.
Carlsbad is also home to
Legoland theme park, where we will be visiting. Since our son loves
running around and exploring, we think he’ll have a great time at Legoland.
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Legoland has a water park |
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Legoland Sea Life Aquarium |
Opening in 1999, LEGOLAND theme park has more than 60
rides, shows and attractions based on the Lego toy brand. There are several rides without any age or
height restrictions that our 2.5 year old son should enjoy. I’ve read that LEGOLAND offers a lot for kids
of any age, without going on every ride. Legoland has a water park and an aquarium as well.
When looking for hotel stays near the theme park, we had
only a few options to choose from. We
have a ton of Chase Ultimate Rewards points, which transfer to IHG, Marriott,
Ritz-Carlton and Hyatt hotels - however none of their hotel offerings are near
LEGOLAND. There is a LEGOLAND Hotel, but
the rates are quite expensive. The next
best option was for a hotel stay at the Grand Pacific Palisades Resort.
The Grand Pacific Palisades Resort is a 5-minute walk from Legoland,
and offers a free shuttle to the theme park as well. They also have a fun family pool and kid’s
splash pad. Reviews
on Tripadvisor for this hotel are great.
First, I went to the hotel website and found that the
cost of booking a 3-night stay would be $497.86.
Since we have a ton of Ultimate Rewards
points, I decided to check out what the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel portal
had to offer.
The Ultimate Rewards travel portal can be used just like
any other travel booking site. You can
search for flights, hotels, rental cars, and activities. Chase makes it extremely easy to redeem your
points. You can choose to use as many or
as little points as you’d like to discount the cost of your travel. The price of our hotel stay through the Chase
travel portal came out to be $460.31,
and we booked it with 30,687 Ultimate
Rewards points.
Thanks to my Chase
Sapphire Reserve credit card, each Ultimate Rewards point redeemed on the
travel portal is worth 1.5 cents
when using the travel portal. With other
Chase cards such as the Chase
Sapphire Preferred or Ink
Preferred, each point is worth 1.25 cents.
This is a much better value than redeeming our points for cashback at a
rate of 1 cent each point.
Thanks to the Chase Ultimate Rewards program, our hotel
stay will be paid for with points. We
can’t wait for our upcoming family vacation next month! Travel hacking with credit card points allows
us to live a rich life as we strive towards financial freedom.
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