Points and miles from our Seattle trip

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In our quest to de-mystify travel hacking, we’re continuing our series of sharing how many points and miles we earned from our trips. As we pursue our goal of visiting every U.S. National Park, we made a visit to the Seattle area. We did not redeem any points or miles to cover this trip. Rather, we looked at this as an opportunity to earn for future travel.

So, without further ado, here are the points and miles we earned from our Seattle trip.

Table of Contents

Flights

We flew from ORD to SEA on United. Thanks to P2’s United Gold Status, we were automatically upgraded to Economy Plus seats while only paying Economy prices. As a Silver member, I earned 3,633 miles from the roundtrip. P2 earned 4,152 miles because he is Gold.

In total we earned 7,785 miles for our future travel pool. We each also earned 519 PQPs towards United status for 2025.

To purchase the flights, we used P2’s United Club Infinite Card, which earns 4x miles on every United purchase. That means we’ll earn another 2,076 miles for future travel.

Hotel

We’ve been to Seattle before, and this time we were traveling with our baby, so we decided to stay outside of the city. We settled on Bellevue, just 10 miles from downtown Seattle.

As Marriott loyalists, we ended up staying at the Courtyard by Marriott Seattle Bellevue/Downtown. It was in a walkable area of Bellevue, and we were able to easily park our rental car under the hotel.

Because of our Titanium status, we earned 14,150 points on our four-night stay. We will also earn 6x Bonvoy points per dollar thanks to P2’s Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card.

Rental Car

Because we were staying outside the city and were planning a national park visit, we rented a car from Avis. Unlike our loyalty to United and Marriott, we’re not as tied to using one rental car provider. While we frequently use Avis, we do compare the major providers and choose the one with the best price.

We used to get points with Avis, but now we take advantage of a program that Avis has with United where you can earn United miles instead. Although we have over 2,000 Avis points, we’ve never been able to cover a free day even though their website says those start at 700 points. This fact, combined with our loyalty to United, made it easy to switch to earning 1,000 United miles per Avis rental.

If you opt into United miles instead of Avis points, you can earn a minimum of 500 miles per Avis rental as a basic MileagePlus member. People who hold Chase MileagePlus cards earn a minimum of 750 miles per rental. United Gold and Silver earn 1,000 miles while Platinum members earn 1,250 miles. Our status earned us 1,000 United miles from this rental.

As Silver and Gold members on United, we automatically qualify for Avis Premier Plus. With our most recent rental, we’d chosen the least expensive car but were upgraded to an SUV thanks to this status.

Additional Spend

Beyond the big ticket items, our largest spend for this trip was on dining. Our restaurant card choice is the Chase Sapphire Preferred (3x), Chase Freedom Unlimited (3x), or American Express Gold (4x).

I’m working on a sign-up bonus on the Ink Cash, so we used that card for big charges like Space Needle tickets and tickets to a Seattle Storm game.

The Freedom Unlimited was also our “everything else” card because it earns a minimum of 1.5x Ultimate Rewards points per dollar.

Summary

From this trip, we earned over 10,000 United miles and almost 20,000 Marriott points for future travel. These points are in addition to the transferrable Chase Ultimate Rewards points and American Express Membership Rewards points we’ll earn from food and activity spend during the trip. While not huge amounts, these smaller domestic trips add up for those bigger redemptions we’re eyeing.