What if I told you that you could fly you and your wife to the tropical, secluded island nation of the Maldives while enjoying the ridiculous treatment of the business class flying experience, and pay less than the cost of your new TV? Grab your champagne glass, recline your fully lay-flat seat as much as you’d like, and get ready as we share how we were able to fly business class roundtrip to Maldives on points and only pay $800.
A quick summary – how to fly business to Maldives on points
Here’s the bullet points of how my wife and I flew roundtrip business class to Maldives for $800 in January 2022:
Outbound Flights: We spent 235,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards to book (2) one-way business class flights on Emirates from New York JFK to Male Maldives MLE, with an 8-day “stop-over” in Dubai DXB. In addition to the points, this booking cost $516.60 in fuel surcharges, total.
Cost per traveler: 117,500 Chase Ultimate Rewards plus $258.30 in fuel surcharges.
Inbound Flights: We spent 140,000 American Airlines AAdvantage miles to book (2) one-way business class flights on Qatar Airways (Winner of World’s Best Business Class) from Male Maldives MLE to Colombo Sri Lanka CMB to Doha Qatar DOH to Boston BOS to return. In addition to the points, this booking cost $174.34 in fuel surcharges, total.
Cost per traveler: 70,000 AAdvantage miles plus $87.17 in fuel surcharges.
But can we see the spreadsheet?
Happy to oblige. Including flights 1 and 5 which were “positioning flights” to get us from Florida to the northeast, we spent 434,000 points and $803.34 out of pocket.
Perhaps you’re like: You booked flights on Emirates with Chase points…? And you booked Qatar Airlines with American miles?? Plus you flew business, and only $800 total??? Help me understand. Keep reading for the rest of the details!
The credit cards we used
These are the credit cards we used to fly business class to Maldives on points. Each has an introductory offer for new members that awards a huge stash of points if you hit their minimum spend (i.e. spend $4,000 in the first 3 months). Some of these are my personal referral links which would shoot a few points my way should you happen to sign up for one through it! And if you find a better signup bonus elsewhere, definitely take the higher offer.
- Chase Sapphire Preferred – $95 annual fee. I have had mine since 2018, earning a 50,000 Ultimate Rewards bonus for signup. The current signup bonus is 60,000 and is known to go to 80,000 and even 100,000 occasionally! I may not renew the card this year as I will be eligible for their signup bonus again, as its been 48 months since I first earned it. Update – I product changed this card down to a no-annual-fee Chase Freedom Flex. Product changing preserves the credit history, but avoids the annual fee. I plan to re-apply for a new Sapphire Preferred in a few months, to collect a new signup bonus.
- Chase Freedom – no annual fee, now replaced by Chase Freedom Unlimited, and Freedom Flex. I have had mine since 2004 (YIKES!). Free card that gets you to start earning Ultimate Rewards. Earns a $200 signup bonus.
- Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select World Elite – $99 annual fee (not charged until year 2!) 50,000 AAdvantage signup bonus. (Sometimes increased to 75,000!) We opened this card before the trip. I am undecided on closing it when the fee comes close to renewing. Update – I product changed this card down to a no-annual-fee Citi Double Cash card.
- Barclays World Elite Aviator – $99 annual fee, 60,000 AAdvantage signup bonus. We opened this card before the trip. I will close it when the card renews. Update – I product changed this card down to a no-annual-fee Barclays AAdvantage Aviator card.
As a married couple working through this, we BOTH put our normal spending on one card at a time in order to reach the signup bonuses faster. This means all online purchases were on that same card. Since only one of us could physically carry the card, the other added it to Apple Pay to try and use it whenever possible. We prioritized hitting the signup bonuses over “maximizing” the varying rewards categories of each card.
Credit card responsibility
At this point I will acknowledge that a strategy to earn travel points on a credit card only makes sense if you’re someone who: A) pays off their credit card in full every month and B) won’t be tempted to spend more than your normal spend just because there’s a ‘reward’. If you don’t clear those checkpoints yet, thats fine! Being debt-free advocates, we’d say let the goal of travel motivate you to knock out that debt, maybe trying the steps we used in this article. For the rest of you, please read on for specifics on how we earned the points and did the transfers. But first, a brief foundation on travel partners.
Travel Partners
All the major credit cards have “transferrable currencies” where you earn points by spending on the credit card, and those points can later transfer to Travel Partners: airlines and hotels. Points become miles, they’re interchangeable here. A few of the major credit cards and their currencies are Chase “Ultimate Rewards” American Express “Membership Rewards” Citi “Thank You Rewards”, and Capital One just calls theirs ‘miles’. Since we used Chase to get to Dubai and the Maldives, here are Chase’s travel partners.
The true value in the credit card reward space is finding the sweet spots in their transfer partners. The transaction ultimately is accomplished by transferring your Chase UR outside of Chase to your loyalty/frequent flier account with one of those airlines. In our case we sent 235,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards out to my loyalty account with Emirates. Since the transfer ratio is 1:1:
235,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards = 235,000 Emirates Skywards
The points transfer almost instantly, with the click of a button.
Some “pointers” on booking travel with points
- The traveler name on the loyalty account has to match the name on the credit card. So unless you’ve added someone else as an Authorized User on the card, you (with most airlines) can’t “pool” your points as family, and that is a factor in deciding which spouse should open which credit card.
- Once you transfer out of Chase, there’s no transferring back in. So DO NOT transfer out until you’re poised to actually book flights.
- You must have a “premium” card to transfer to travel partners.
On that last item, not all Chase credit cards allow you to transfer to travel partners. The Chase Freedom, for example, has no annual fee and a nice rotating schedules of increased reward categories. However it doesn’t allow you to transfer to travel partners. You need a “premium” card like the Chase Sapphire Preferred ($95 annual fee) or Chase Sapphire Reserve ($550 annual fee) to do that. If you have a Chase Freedom only, you won’t even see the “Transfer to Travel Partners” icon in the Chase portal at the below screenshot. When paired together though, like we have done, the Chase Freedom and Chase Sapphire Preferred form a nice combination.
Do I book within the portal?
To maximize your points, it is generally not as great a value to book travel within the Chase travel portal. (The “Travel” button above). The Chase travel portal search engine recently moved from Expedia to cxLoyalty. It simply converts a cash price you could find online in dollars to Ultimate Rewards. If you have a Chase Freedom, your points are worth 1 cent each. Get a Sapphire Preferred, that rate increases to 1.25 cents per point, and a Sapphire Reserve nets you 1.5 cents per point. Please don’t glaze over – while it’s good to be generally aware of the redemption value of a transferrable currency in terms of cents per point, it can get tedious. Just know that it’s often a better redemption to transfer to a travel partner. (For those mathematically-oriented out there though, I will revisit that redemption rate later in this post!)
Emirates business outbound flights to Maldives
Once my wife and I agreed our destination was the Maldives, we (correction – “I”) started by Googling “how to get to the Maldives on points.” I landed this article from The Points Guy, the leader in the travel reward space: The best ways to get to the Maldives on Points and Miles. Here I learned the main airlines that service east coast of US to Male, the capital city of Maldives. The occasion of our trip was our wedding anniversary, so since that falls in January, we were tied to that month of travel. We were flexible on which exact days that month, though. As far as making a stopover in Dubai, we knew Maldives would be one small island, so we liked the idea of seeing another place along the way too. Bottom line: you need some flexibility to fly business class to Maldives on points.
One of the key pieces of information in the TPG article is which airlines are transfer partners of which credit cards. Knowing I had Chase points in the bank (a bunch from a COVID-cancelled Ireland trip), I initially focused on the partners of Chase – Air France, British Airways, Singapore Air, Emirates, and United. I then spent an inordinate amount of time trying different city and date combinations for each of those airlines directly on their websites. This meant creating free traveler/loyalty accounts with each, which can be time-consuming, but is free of charge. Some of them even mail you a loyalty card in the mail! I threw them out, but appreciated the gesture from JAL and Qatar!
Why Emirates?
In addition to the on-board bar in the picture above, we decided on Emirates because:
1. we had a stash of Chase Ultimate Rewards which we could easily transfer
2. we flew them once before and loved it!
3. you could book a stopover in Dubai (Advanced – Multi city)
4. our friends had done a similar itinerary before, Dubai and Maldives, and recommended it!
So once I found the exact flights and class of service we wanted, I transferred the Chase points over and booked it. I did have to pay the fuel surcharges out of pocket, points don’t cover those, so I charged those to my Chase Sapphire Preferred. Those fuel charges vary widely from airline to airline.
Massive savings using points
It’s pretty unreal the power of these rewards points. The cash price of a one-way, multi-city ticket ranges from $5,000-$7,000. That could mean almost $14,000 for a couple, ONE WAY. Even Economy is over $1,000 per person. Take a look at this screenshot to pay cash and book the same itinerary we did:
So let’s revisit our redemption to convince ourselves that the effort involved in opening credit cards to fly business class to Maldives on points is worth it. We spent 235,000 points plus $516 to book. If we use the flight retail price above, two tickets would cost $13,840 ($6,920 x 2). First, we’ll subtract the fuel surcharges we paid from that:
$13,840 – $516 = $13,324 worth of flights were booked for 235,000 points.
$13,324 divided by 235,000 points = 5.6 cents per point. How’s that compare to the 1.25-1.5 cents per point that the Chase portal offers you?
To take it further, any of you still fearful of getting a credit card with an annual fee….if that $95 card, or even two or three of them, enabled you to score over $13,000 business class tickets, did you come out ahead? IS THE SKY BLUE?
To take it further-further, we booked New York to Maldives with a stopover in Dubai. That “advanced” itinerary with stopover cost 117,500 points per person, but if we would have booked without a stopover, (just a traditional layover since there’s no direct to Male) it would have been only 85,000 points per person. An even cheaper way to fly business class to Maldives on points.
Qatar business return flights from Maldives
So our Emirates booking would get us to fly business class to Maldives on points – now how to get home? Reading the TPG article, you get the idea that of all the options, Qatar business would be a very cool experience. Since Qatar is a Oneworld alliance partner with American Airlines, you can book Qatar flights on American’s website, using American’s miles. At this point in our planning though, 6 months prior to our trip, targeting Qatar was a lofty goal for us. We only had a measly 11,000 AAdvantage miles between the two us. How many more would we need?
The cost for (1) one-way trip home (to east coast of US) via Qatar on business was 70,000 AAdvantage miles, meaning for two of us we needed 140,000 miles. To maximize flexibility, I searched for Qatar flights landing in JFK, Philadelphia, Boston, or Washington DC. We would book inexpensive domestic flights, as a separate itinerary, to get home to Florida from there. To reach the 140,000 points, I opened 2 new credit cards:
The cards we used to get the points
1. Citi AAdvantage Mastercard with $99 annual fee (waived first year) and a 50,000 mile signup bonus
2. Barclays Aviator Mastercard with $99 annual fee and 60,000 signup bonus
The 2 signup bonuses netted us 110,000 points of our 140,000 goal. Both cards are American Airlines-branded, so they earns points in AAdvantage miles. It is linked directly to your AA account, so there is no point transfer from a bank, like Chase.
American is not normally a transfer partner of ANY major credit card. They did briefly run a special with Citi during Summer-Fall 2021 where you could exchange Citi Thank You points for AA miles. Because of that, I originally applied for the Citi Premier, which had 80,000 signup bonus, but I was not approved. (Shout out to my brother, who I told about this and was able to snag the offer!) I pivoted to the Barclays but as you can see above, it left us short of our point goal. So what did we do?
Finishing it off – flying business class to Maldives on points
Some of the gap was made up for by points earned from the actual spending we put on the card. Ultimately though, we paid to transfer my wife’s existing balance of ~6,000 AA miles to my AA account for $90.00 on the AA website. (1.5 cents per point cost). This is the kind of sub-optimal event that should be avoided by planning which spouse opens which credit card. So it’s not a cheap way to acquire AA miles, but in our case it was getting urgent. We were less than 60 days out, and our lodging in Dubai and the Maldives was booked. We needed these flights home.
So instead of paying the ~$6k per person cash price to travel business class 8,572 miles around the world (screenshot below), we forked over some points and a measly $87.17 per person in fuel charges! It gets even better when you compare to our Emirates redemption, which was over $250/pp in fuel charges.
Retail cost of our flights without points
- (2) JetBlue one-way economy flights from PBI-JFK: $500 (approximate, since it varies)
- (2) Emirates business class flights from JFK-DXB-MLE: $13,840
- (2) Qatar Airways business class flights from MLE-DOH-BOS: $11,804
- (2) JetBlue one-way economy flights from BOS-PBI: $500 (approximate)
Total retail value of all flights: $26,644!
We were able to book all those flights for $803 out of pocket. I am just now doing this calculation for the first time and it is flooring me that we paid 3% of retail value. If your mind, like mine, instantly moves to focus on minor points of dispute, please note:
- Yes: for a more accurate retail price comparison it would have been cheaper to price round-trips versus the one-ways we booked. No argument there.
- Yes: the cost of the annual fees on the credit cards we used could be added to our cost, (even though they got us other benefits not mentioned here that have value). But if you add annual fees of $300 to the $803, we still only “jump up” to 4.3% of retail cost of what those cards bought us.
- Yes: accruing 400k credit card points seems daunting at first. But trust me, it is easier than you think!
- And finally, Yes: its worth going for business class on a trip like this. From the check-in, the lounges, the boarding, the on-flight food and beverage…it’s truly a spoiled but glorious way to fly.
Want to fly to the Maldives on points?
If you like the idea of a Maldives trip with a stopover, check out these 3 Middle East carriers.
- Emirates, Dubai (book with Chase, AMEX, Citi, Capital One)
- Etihad, Abu Dhabi (book with AAadvantage)
- Qatar Airways, Doha (book with AAdvantage or Avios)
I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look of how we were able to fly business class to Maldives on points with minimal out of pocket costs. (Trust me – you’ll spend the money once you’re there! #seaplane) If it’s hotels you’re after, check out this post for how we used points for lodging too.
Ultimately, there are lots of airlines and credit card combinations that can get you to the Maldives for an insane discount. If you have questions about a trip of your own, reach out on Instagram! I would be more than happy to help brainstorm solutions with you.