How we stayed at a beachfront hotel over a holiday weekend for $0

Earlier this year, we decided to go to Santa Barbara over Labor Day weekend. While we’ve visited southern California several times, we’ve never been further up the coast to central California.

Santa Barbara is located at the base of the Santa Ynez mountains and has Mediterranean-style architecture owing to the city’s Spanish Colonial heritage. Owing to all the amenities and the idyllic location between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains, Santa Barbara has one of the highest cost of living amounts in all of California.

Because of this, we knew that finding a hotel in Santa Barbara over a holiday weekend would not be inexpensive. This is where points and miles come in. Most of our travels use some combination of points and miles, and our four-day, three-night vacation over Labor Day was no exception. We opted to pay for flights to LAX and for our car rental. Thankfully, we have an employer discount with Avis that saves us a good amount on rental cars. There is a local airport in Santa Barbara, but flying to LAX was more cost-effective for us.

Where we used points

For the hotel, we decided to look at Hyatt because of the strong redemption rates. Hyatt is a travel partner of Chase and offers 1:1 transfer of Chase Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt. After researching our options, we chose to stay at the Mar Monte Hotel, which is located right on the beach. The Mar Monte Hotel is a Category 5 out of 8. For three nights (Saturday through Tuesday), we transferred 66,000 points from Chase to Hyatt. The cash value of this stay would have been nearly $1,700.

We do not pay a lot of attention to cents per point, but if you’re interested, The Points Guy has a calculator you can use. While writing this article, I did use the calculator, and it looks like we did come out ahead based on the value of the stay versus the points we used. Even if our cents per point was “less” than the typical value of a Hyatt point, we would have been fine with it. Why, you ask? We are not comfortable paying almost $1,700 for three nights. However, we got to stay in a wonderful hotel in a great location due to points.

In Summary

How you use points is completely up to you. We like to share these anecdotes / points of comparison to understand how points can be used to travel more or stay in places that previously would have been out of reach.

Got any questions? Let us know below!