Mrs. Meticulous and I just got back from a week in Southern Florida, visiting Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. Since COVID-19 has been affecting our travel plans, we’ve pivoted to focusing on the national parks around the US. The area around the Everglades and the Florida Keys was beautiful and a nice way to spend a week. Below you can read about our planning process and how we laid out activities for our time there.
PAYMENT
One of the best parts of this trip was that a big chunk of the core expenses were covered by credit card points. When I say “core expenses” I am referring to transportation. This includes both getting to the destination and getting around once there, and lodging. These two expenses are a majority of the expense of any given trip, concentrated into a small number of transactions. It’s always important to plan these out carefully.
For this trip, we flew to Miami from MSP, rented a car, and stayed at a pretty cheap hotel south of the city.
I’ve evangelized the Chase Sapphire Reserve card that we love to use to rack up points, and this was a trip we chose to put that stash to use. As a reminder, using Chase Ultimate Rewards points through the Chase portal enables you to redeem your points at a 1.5x clip.
We used our bounty of Chase booty that we had accumulated over a year and a half of non-travel due to COVID to cover the entire flight and a portion of the hotel.
FLIGHTS
We chose a flight itinerary that had us come back on a low-demand day (Thursday). Leaving Friday but coming back the following Thursday allowed us to save over $100 on the flight cost. I’ve written about the time-value of money while traveling, so I know $100 might be worth an extra day of vacation.
For this specific trip, Mrs. Meticulous and I decided to see a couple parks in Florida and still be able to come home and enjoy a weekend at home.
Cost-wise, the two flights totaled $294 which was entirely covered by Chase points.
LODGING
When thinking about where to stay, we usually try to minimize windshield time as our main strategy. Knowing we were visiting two parks on the southern tip of Florida, we looked at hotels south of Miami so that we wouldn’t have to drive through downtown and traffic.
We ended up choosing a place in Coconut Grove, a swanky neighborhood a few minutes south of downtown Miami.
ICOCONUTGROVE was sort of a hybrid between an AirBnb and a hotel. There was a front desk, card keys, and a pool. However, there was no housekeeping for the duration of the stay unless you paid extra. This was fine for us – we often put the “do not disturb” sign on our door for the duration of our stays anyway. Plus, with COVID Delta variant making its way through Florida we were ok with minimizing any potential human interactions in the hotel.
It was a cool place, pretty small and minimalist. But for what we paid (see below for breakdown of core costs) it was perfect for us.
Expense-wise, we would have paid $879 for six nights. We partially covered the cost with $621 of Chase points so paid the difference of $258 through the portal.
TRANSPORTATION
Something I’ve been kicking myself about since I discovered it so late is that the company I work for offers shopping discounts for employees. One of the categories with discounts is rental cars.
For any of you working in the corporate world, I’d highly recommend looking into travel discounts through an employee portal. I used this trip as an opportunity to test prices of Kayak and others against my company portal. The results spoke for themselves and we ended up saving about $20 per day.
I also thought of one additional way to save. Since we arrived in Miami late on Friday, we didn’t need to start our car rental until the following morning. Debatable if this really saved us any money since we had to catch a Lyft to our hotel from the airport and to the rental place the next morning.
However, it did save the headache and potential stress of getting to the rental car center at MIA airport before the office closed. Per The MIA airport’s rental car info site, companies have different hours of operation so travelers are responsible for planning accordingly. Missing office hours and wasting the first day’s worth of rental wasn’t something I was willing to stomach, so we elected to pick up our car the next day after our arrival.
All in all, for six days of an Economy car (Hyundai Elantra), we paid $337. Pretty good considering the run on rental cars that happened over the summer. That nets out to $56 a day which includes various Florida-specific daily fees (rude).
Speaking of Florida-specific fees, we were not prepared for the amount of tolls on Florida highways. Going from Miami to the parks and back, you run into several <$1 tolls that snap a picture of your license plate. We elected to purchase the cashless toll processing. This was $60 for our stay which was added after we had pre-paid for the car. Just an FYI to keep the tolls in mind when thinking about driving around southern Florida, these scanners are EVERYWHERE.
CORE EXPENSE TOTALS
For the folks at home without savant-level memories:
| Two round-trip flights MSP-MIA | $294 ($0 after Chase points redeemed) |
| 6 nights at iCoconutGrove | $879 ($258 after Chase points redeemed) |
| 6 days of Elantra drag racing | $397 |
| TOTAL | $1570 ($655 after Chase points redeemed) |
Not to toot my own horn, but $655 is pretty damn good for flights and a week of hotels and car rental!
ACTUAL FUN ACTIVITIES… LATER
I mean, I consider planning for trips and saving money doing it super fun. But, there is a real reason we travel and it isn’t (solely) to optimize the system.
In a future article I will detail how we approached both Biscayne and Everglades National Parks. We made great use of our time in Florida. I’ll dive into it next!
