As our travel plans for the year come into focus, I’m noticing a trend that’s different than the last couple of post-Covid revenge travel years – more cash bookings. As I mentioned in a prior post, our rescheduled SE Asia trip in April includes a business class cash booking for the flight home from Vietnam to New York on ANA via Tokyo. Our rescheduled hotels also include some cash bookings as that made more sense than using Hyatt points in Phnom Penh, Da Nang and Singapore. Our intra-Vietnam flights are also booked with cash.

We’re also using cash (and ecredits and Amex airline credits) for quite a few Delta flights over the next few months. While some flights are booked with SkyMiles where it made sense with the 15% discount for holding a Delta Amex, I was also able to burn some of my US Bank Altitude Reserve points on some bookings, so I could instantly redeem 1.5 cents per point toward the cash price, earn MQDs on the flights and not actually pay cash out of pocket.

My wife will also have several business trips coming up so we will spend the best kind of cash – other people’s money – on those trips. We’ve even had to incorporate one of her business trips into the front end of our SE Asia trip as it’s to the west coast where our flight to Singapore leaves from. It made more sense for me to just accompany her to San Diego and spend the weekend out there before driving to LAX for our Singapore flight. After all, her flight and our hotel will be reimbursed. I also burned an expiring Hyatt Category 1-7 certificate at the Mission Pacific hotel in Oceanside as we make our way up from San Diego to LAX.

It does seem that hotel rates are coming down in some places and flight prices have stabilized a bit. We also have quite a few credits to burn through on American and Delta so we need to make sure those don’t expire. It remains to be seen if we end up using cash more in the second half of the year, but so far 2024 definitely seems like the year of cash.

If you have questions about this post, let me know in the comments or send me an email at emptynestermiles@gmail.com. If you are thinking about opening a new credit card, please use one of my links.