Hacking Italy: Update #1

A quick update on our quest to travel to Italy next year in style, but as inexpensively as possible…

I’ve written about the British Airways VISA Signature sign-on bonus that’s currently available:  sign up, get 50,000 miles; spend $2K in the first 90 days you have the card, get another 50,000 miles.  Spend $30,000 your first (calendar) year with the card, get a free companion round trip ticket. (Oh yeah, you get 1¼ pts. per dollar spent – so at that point you’d have 140,000 miles.)

I applied for the BA card at the time of the original post – Hacking Italy:  One week in Sorrento – how low can we go? and have since received the card and am off and running.

Checking out the related thread at FlyerTalk, I realized that there was nothing preventing my wife from also applying for a BA card.  That way, if we spend $2K on each card during the first 90 days, we’ll have 200,000 miles.  With those miles, we can fly roundtrip from Chicago to Naples in Premier Economy and have 20,000 miles left over.   So she filled out the application last night.

As for hotels, I’d mentioned that I’d had a difficult time finding something that sounded as though it’d be to our liking.  After a lot of searching, I found a property that sounds great. It’s a boutique-type hotel right in Sorrento.  Rates are semi-reasonable, but this is an independent hotel and I won’t be able to use points at all.   There is a Hilton in Sorrento, but it’s a couple of kilometers from the center of town, and I don’t have enough points to cover the week.  And frankly, the reviews for this property were not encouraging.

Speaking of Hilton (Honors), Avis has a presence in Italy, and I can redeem HHonors points for car rentals…  so we’ll see if we can do something there.  But I need to check out autoeurope, sixt, and europebycar as well.  Euro car rentals are VERY expensive, by the way.  Perhaps an alternative is to take the train from Naples to Sorrento, knock around town for a few days, rent a car in Sorrento in order to explore the countryside for a couple of days, and then after another day or so in Sorrento, return to the airport in Naples via the train…  more research!

An aside:  I don’t know if any of you have tried renting a car for the Christmas holiday, but rates have gone through the roof.  I paid $15 a day (plus taxes) to rent a car in Albany NY in July;   for the holidays, I was regularly seeing rates in the mid $40’s for compact cars.  I used a discount code I found at FlyerTalk to knock down the rate a bit at Avis, but with taxes and fees, it’s still pretty expensive.  At least I’ve got a car reserved; that gives me a bit of breathing room during which I can still work to score a better deal.

Bottom line on the Italy trip to this point:  if you’re willing to spend $4K on a couple of credit cards over a 3 month period, you and your companion can fly roundtrip to Europe for free.  The link for the BA deal is in the original post; click on the first link above if you’re interested.

I’ll continue to provide updates as we work through the process.