Planning 1 | Planning 2 | Planning 3 | Travel | Disneyland  (Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3 – Day 4) | Arrival | Surfing | Aulani | Excursion | Hyatt

This is Part Three of Three on planning a future trip.  Please check out Parts One and Two.

Ground Transportation

Figuring out the rental cars for both portions of the trip might be the easiest part of the planning.  Using our favorite car rental site, costcotravel.com, we were able to get rental cars for both the Los Angeles and the Oahu portions of the trip.  We will check back continually to drive that price down as much as possible.  Right now, the rental car in Los Angeles is $175 for 5 days.  The car in Oahu was interesting.  It was actually cheaper to get a premium car than an economy car.  Note, we always get a full size car when we travel.  We have too many suitcases to try to jam into an economy car.  The car for the 11 days in Oahu will cost $377.  We will keep checking back to see if the price will drop further.  So, the total cost for rental vehicles should be about $550 plus the cost for fuel.

We may not have mentioned it before, but we never get car insurance through the rental agencies.  We use a combination of our credit cards and our personal car insurance to cover any liability.  The Chase MileagePlus Explorer card is a favorite of ours for this, since the insurance coverage is primary.

Food

We haven’t determined where we will be eating when at Disneyland or in Hawaii.  I’m sure Disneyland’s many restaurants will get our money while we are there.  We will acquire a large pile of Disney gift cards to take care of any expenses while at Disneyland and Aulani.  We will probably make a quick stop at a Costco in Hawaii for breakfast food and snacks to keep our costs down as well.

Excursions

We know there will be extra expenses incurred while at Disneyland and in Hawaii.  Disneyland park tickets as well as shopping always adds up whenever we visit.  We will most likely use the Disney Vacation Account (loaded with Disney Gift Cards) to purchase our Disneyland tickets.  Four days’ worth without park hopping should work, since we will just spend two days in each park (Disneyland Park and California Adventure).  Shopping will probably go onto the same gift cards we use for food.

We haven’t spent a great deal of time looking into other activities in Hawaii.  Some of our bucket list items include visiting Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial and a hike up Diamond Head.  We have some activities in mind for the girls as well, but don’t want to spill all secrets.  If you have any ideas on what to do and see, please give us some ideas.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you can get a feel for how to book a trip for points and miles.  The trip wasn’t an attempt to get as much bang for our buck(or miles/points), so we didn’t really skimp on the accommodations or travel level.  We could have built up more hotel points and/or free night certificates to stay completely free on Oahu instead of a stay at Aulani.  We could have flown in economy for fewer miles instead of flying business class.  We could have dropped the Disneyland portion of the trip and gone directly to Hawaii.  Having points and miles allowed us to stretch our vacation dollars to maximize our experience.

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