The Easter Island Award Trip – A little over a year ago, I started following a few points bloggers to learn more ways to earn and redeem travel points.  What I found is a community of engaged travelers  (yes, there is a community where I can go to the relief of my friends/families who hear me talk points/travel all the time) sharing stories and tips about all things travel.   At the time, many bloggers (specifically The Points Guy and One Mile At A Time) were speculating and posting daily about the proposed changes to the British Airways program.  Each day, I received numerous posts, tweets, etc. with the routes that they thought were going to be most affected by the change to distance based.  The universe was shouting at me to listen!  What this meant was that an award in business class that cost 80,000 points would almost double to 155,000+ points depending on your departure airport.  Since I fly BA to London for work once a year, I had some points to use for my vacation without knowing where I wanted to go so I was keen to learn more about their thoughts.

British Airways Avios Redemption – Where To Go?

The consensus was everyone should redeem for Bangkok/Bali or Easter Island.  Neither locations were on my short list so I had to do some quick research on the options.  I then had to figure out if  I could pull it off with points, stay within a reasonable budget and get approved for time off from work. Did I mention I had less than two weeks to put this together?  If the options had been Fiji or Hawaii, it would have been an easy call but I was looking at areas I hadn’t yet traveled to -Asia and South America.  Which was best for a solo traveler?  What type of budget would I need?  Did I really want to redeem for a place that wasn’t on my short list? Who are these bloggers and do I trust them?  So many questions, thankfully the Internet is a great place to do research.

Easter Island Award Trip

I chose to visit Easter Island via Santiago, Chile with a return via Lima, Peru flying business class on LAN airlines from JFK.  The best use of my 80,000 points redemption for a ten day holiday. Now, the points pros were able to turn their redemption into a round the continent tour of South America while I was happy with my two countries and three cities.  When people asked me why I was going (after the initial question of where is/what is Easter Island), I replied “A travel blogger told me to” which if you didn’t know gets many weird looks and then even more questions.  This then of course led me to talk about my points hobby (I should have earned a referral fee from the bloggers because I sent them many new subscribers).

My Easter Island award trip was an adventure of a lifetime.  Starting this blog, for me, is my way of adding to the community of travelers, would be travelers and armchair travelers.