On some trips, hotels are an afterthought, and just a place to sleep near your destination. On others, the hotel itself IS the destination.
As I discussed in Part 1, the brand-new Ritz-Carlton Maldives was our main destination for our entire Dubai-Maldives-Singapore trip. There wasn’t much that went into picking it other than seeing it was new, in the Maldives, and its “standard” rooms were overwater villas. Staying in an overwater villa was important to us (edit: it was important to me), and when that room type isn’t the standard room, it might cost 5 times as many points to book, even if it’s only 20% more expensive than the standard room type!
Note: Hotels usually call their cheapest room type the “standard” room for award redemptions, and others are "premium" rooms. For example, at Hilton’s Hotel Del Coronado, only King or 2x Queen rooms in the Victorian building are “standard” rooms, and are usually 95,000 HH points or about $750, but a King room in The Views is well over 200,000 points, even though it only costs $8 more. That’s not a typo - it’s eight dollars more or barely 1% on the room rate, but that’s enough to make it not “standard.”
The cost of this room would be 400,000 Bonvoy points for five nights, taking advantage of Bonvoy program’s fifth night free on award bookings. All you need to do to take advantage of this is search for five night stays when redeeming points; I highly recommend saving Bonvoy points until you have enough for four nights somewhere, because this immediate 25% increase in point value is fantastic. This applies to Hilton bookings as well, and IHG bookings, but for the fourth night instead of the fifth. Don’t get caught in the moment thinking 100,000 points is enough for a weekend getaway to a nice hotel in Miami! Trust me when I say that using those points later for a trip to the Maldives, or another aspirational destination, is well worth it.
They did not charge a resort fee, but we did have to pay for transportation from the airport to the hotel via speed boat for $1,365 for two people. Nothing is cheap in the Maldives. Seaplane or luxury yacht were also transportation options. The seaplane was about 50% more expensive and would cut the travel time from the airport to the resort from 45 minutes to about 25 minutes. The yacht was slower than the speedboat, taking over an hour, and cost about twice as much, but probably had a smoother ride and had drinks and snacks on board. We decided that the 20 minute time savings wasn’t worth the cost, and that some nuts and champaign definitely weren’t worth an extra $1,000+, so we went with the speedboat. Maybe we’ll try the yacht next time to see what that’s really all about ;)
While the fifth night free also applied to our Hilton bookings, a unique feature of the Bonvoy program is Points advance. This allows you to book a hotel on points before you actually have the points in your account. We only had about 250,000 points at the time of booking this room! However, I signed up for the Bonvoy Business card during that time, and between that signup bonus and our other spending prioritized on our Marriott cards (Kristyn and I each have a Bonvoy Brilliant from Amex), we reached the 400,000 points needed! This feature is mostly useful in reserving a room while one is available at a property that might be fully booked by the time you actually travel. Kristyn and I also pooled our Bonvoy points for this redemption, since we each had over 100,000 points. Kristyn transferred points to me; since there is a calendar year limit, she transferred 100,000 points in 2021, and planned to transfer another 20,000 points in 2022, but I actually got all the necessary points before then and didn’t need another transfer. The transfer option is helpful, but just remember if you need to transfer larger amounts, you might have to spread it over multiple years!
The cash rate on this room would have been over $3,500 per night, which is an almost unbelievable amount to pay for the most basic room at any resort. The largest multi-bedroom villas at this resort easily cost over $10,000 per night. All in all, the points value worked out to about 4.4 cents per point, which is utterly astounding for Bonvoy points. Usually, getting 1 cent per point would be excellent value, with typically value being around 0.75 cents!
Next, we needed to find hotels for Dubai and Singapore. I had a total of about 600,000 hilton points, and 210,000 IHG points. We have been trying to take a trip to an amazing-looking resort in Grand Cayman that’s part of the IHG portfolio for what feels like a decade (it’s actually been about three years), so I still wanted to save those IHG points to use there. Stay tuned in 2023… That leaves Hilton points for the Dubai hotel and the Singapore hotel. There were several nice-looking Hilton properties in Dubai. We considered the Conrad, Waldorf Astoria, an LXR hotel, and a couple of hotels near the Palm Jumeirah. The Conrad and Waldorf were both booked for our dates, surprisingly. The LXR looked nice, but a lot of the finishes weren’t as modern as we prefer. We ended up picking the DoubleTree at Jumeirah beach because it was the best redemption value of hotels near the palm.
They were all located pretty close to one another, so sometimes point value is the deciding factor… This hotel was 70,000 points per night, and with the fifth night free for Hilton award bookings, came to 280,000 total. The cash value would have been about $1,700 for these dates, so we got a value of 0.6 cents per point, which is par for the course for Hiltons.
Last, we needed to book a hotel in Singapore for our final five nights. There actually aren’t many Hilton options in Singapore. The two options closest to the city center were the Conrad and a very nice-looking Hampton Inn. We went with the Conrad because we wanted to experience one of the luxury brands in Hilton’s portfolio on this trip. The points rate was 60,000 points per night, for 240,000 total with the fifth night free. Cash value would have been about $1,500, resulting in just over 0.6 cents per point. But there would be problems with this booking, so stay tuned…
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