Seychelles: How the Heck Could We Afford to Go There?

Raise your hand if you have no clue where Seychelles is located. Keep your hand raised if you’ve never even heard of Seychelles. Hopefully you’re not in a crowded metro right now…or worse, reading this in a bathroom all alone and raising your hand.  As you probably have inferred from the title of this article, Seychelles is not a cheap place to visit.  It’s small, remote, and was chosen by Prince William and Kate as their honeymoon site, so as you can imagine, it has an air of exclusivity to it.  But with a combination of luck, quick action, and long-term planning, we were able to turn this once-in-a-lifetime destination into one of our cheapest trips yet.  Here’s how we did it.

First, if you’re still raising your hand, put it down.  Here is a map of Seychelles:

 

Ok, now to the business.

Flights

Typically, round trip flights from the US to Seychelles cost in the $1400+ range, but I had seen them as low as $1100 depending on the dates.  However, on Christmas morning 2014, several travel blogs and websites that I was following at the time were all posting about this mistake fare on Etihad Airways.  A mistake fare is often caused by a technical glitch in an airline’s fare system.  They don’t happen often, but when they do, tickets can be insanely cheap.  The airlines usually catch on pretty quickly, especially with people spreading the word on social media, so it’s important to act quickly in these situations.

The deal being advertised was $187 round trip from New York to Abu Dhabi, but I was curious to see where else Etihad Airways flew to in case the deal extended to these other destinations.  Low and behold, Etihad flies to Seychelles, which had been on our radar for quite some time, but always seemed out of reach.  Sampling some dates on the ITA Matrix, we found round trip tickets in September 2015 (still 9 months away!!) from New York to Seychelles for $588 each!  Once we found those prices, I went to Orbitz to book the tickets.  I was so anxious at this point because I did not want this deal to slip through my fingers.  We found the matching dates and prices on Orbitz and booked.  At last…confirmation!  But not so fast.

Even though we had confirmation of booking, there were still a couple obstacles to clear through.  First, we needed to receive an actual ticket number, usually a 16 digit number, so we checked the confirmation email and we had our ticket numbers.  Hurdle 1: complete.  The second, and equally important, obstacle was how would Etihad respond to the so-called mistake fare.  A day or two later, Etihad acknowledged the mistake fare, made an announcement that they would honor the mistake fare for anyone who purchased a ticket during that time, and even went so far as to congratulate people on social media who had posted about snagging one of these deals.

Holy crap.  We’re going to Seychelles!!

For $588 each, we’re flying round trip to Seychelles with an overnight layover in Abu Dhabi.  Merry Christmas, indeed.

Hotels

Now that we knew we were bound for Seychelles, we needed a place to stay.  As you can imagine, many of the hotels on Seychelles are high end, and since we were treating this as our 2nd honeymoon, we wanted to stay somewhere real nice.  After some research, we found that on the main island of Mahe, Hilton has two properties: Hilton Seychelles Northolme Resort & Spa and DoubleTree by Hilton Seychelles Allamanda Resort & Spa.  These hotels are a category 10 and 9, respectively, placing them in the highest tier of Hilton hotels.  And since we’d be in Seychelles a total of 5 nights, that could get pricey.

This is where the long-term planning came in to effect.  We had 9 months to potentially set aside the money needed to pay for 5 nights in Seychelles, but for $430/night at Northolme, that could take a while.  Instead, I decided to use a credit card strategy.

I had been following The Points Guy for months, and I was really starting to get a hang of all the different travel branded credit cards and how to use them to my advantage.  So I signed up for 2 different Hilton credit cards.

The first was the Citi Hilton HHonors Reserve Card.  After spending $2500 in the first 4 months of opening the account, you get 2 free weekend certificates at almost any Hilton property, including most of the high end properties.  So when used correctly, these certificates can be worth a huge amount.  It turns out that our first two nights in Seychelles fell on a Friday and a Saturday, so after spending the $2500 on things we pay for anyway (mortgage, utilities, etc), we received our 2 free weekend certificates and booked 2 nights at Hilton Seychelles Northolme.

The second card I got was the Hilton HHonors Card from American Express.  After spending $750 within the first 3 months of card membership, I would receive 40,000 Hilton HHonors points in my account.  In addition, when I used this card at gas stations, supermarkets, and restaurants, I got 5x the Hilton points, so the points were racking up fast. We decided we were going to do the final 3 nights at the DoubleTree Seychelles because it would cost fewer points to book.  For 3 nights we would need 180,000 points.

After receiving the initial 40,000 point bonus plus the bonuses from other categories, I had about 80,000 Hilton HHonors points.  I needed another source of points.  Thankfully, I already had in my possession the Citi Prestige credit card.  With the Prestige card, I could transfer the points from that account to Hilton since they are partnered.  However, Citi Prestige has a special relationship with Hilton properties, so instead of the normal 1:1 points transfer ratio, the ratio was 1:1.5 points, so instead of having to fork over 100,000 Citi points, I only needed to surrender 67,000, which turned in to just over 100,000 Hilton HHonors points!  That I can do. It took about a day for the points to transfer from Citi to Hilton, but once they did, we were able to book the final 3 nights using only points.

So in summary, we got 5 nights in the Seychelles for free with 2 weekend certificates and 180,000 points.  Again, it’s important to point out that we didn’t spend anything on our credit cards that we wouldn’t spend anyway…that is key.  It’s easy to get transfixed on meeting a minimum spend amount, so you’ll buy anything to meet that.  But using sites like Charge Smart to pay our mortgage with our credit card and using those cards to pay for our utilities, it was easy to meet the minimum spend.

Money Saved

With airfare and hotels taken care of, all that’s left on this trip to pay for are meals, activities, and incidentals.  Let’s take a look at the numbers to see how much extra “spending” money we’ll have in Seychelles.

• Normal airfare: $1100-1700.  We paid: $588.  Money saved: $512-$1112 per person, so multiplied by 2 is $1024-2224.
• Hotels (5 nights): $1900-2150. We paid: $0.  Money saved: $1900-2150.
• On airfare and hotels alone we saved anywhere between $2924-4374.

Even on the low end of that scale, for one trip that is a huge amount of savings.  This gives us the flexibility to go scuba diving, splurge a little at restaurants, maybe get Anthea an extra massage at the spa, and maybe go to Bed, Bath, & Beyond.  I don’t know.  I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.