I’ve got a wedding to attend in Europe next year and I want to fund the whole trip with points. Flights, hotel, everything. For those who’ve pulled off a zero cash international trip, what did you wish you’d planned better?

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Plan early. There's more award availability, and more time to get card signup bonuses.

You should further define what you mean by zero cash. Flights and hotel are easy points purchases, but not taxes on flights. Dining, nightlife, transportation, entertainment, sightseeing are harder to handle with points. If you need to fund all that with points too, you need to get a ton of cashback-eligible points.

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Keep in mind that early doesn't necessarily mean the moment the flights are available. I booked a flight to Northern Europe this June. In August last year, it was around 110k miles per person, and in April this year it was 120k miles, but in November, I snagged 4 for 49.5k apiece

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Be flexible with flight dates and consider both alternate airports and a connection. Several years ago, making a connection required about 40% fewer miles than nonstop and only added about 2 hours, most of which was during the night.

Assuming you just mean flight and hotel with the rest (food, transit, entertainment) in cash, you need to be very flexible.

My last trip was 10 days in Japan with nearly all nights covered via Chase (to Hyatt) points (huge fan of Andaz Tokyo btw!). Had to monitor award space for a few weeks until my exact dates opened up (late planning but I got lucky). Booking biz during peak season to a peak destination was basically impossible based on when I started planning, so a cheap economy flight partially covered by VX portal credit was the best option.

I would monitor biz seats first and build your hotel stays around that, since Hyatts are pretty easy to book unless they're very high demand ones (like Tokyo/Kyoto). You may need to re-position, and that will add time and an extra airport hotel stay... which may not be worth it imo. Basically plan as far ahead as possible, have refundable back up plans, and set up alerts. It can be tough to get everything to align (dates, biz seats, luxury hotels), but some combination of those is definitely doable.

Unless the wedding is in a large metro, using points for the hotel/lodging might not be a good ROI. Don't know that there's good value in transferring points to the larger European brands (e.g., Accor), but ime Hilton and Marriott redemptions are relatively expensive in Europe.

Do you all do the legwork yourselves or do you use any of the points services to see what's the best option to efficiently use your points?

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