In my junior year of college, I spent my fall semester studying abroad at the University of Barcelona. I had no intentions to do this. One of my friends was interested in studying abroad, so I accompanied him to the International Programs office on campus one day. He never went. I did.

I fell immediately and irreversibly in love with the city. I spent four months there and still didn’t see all there was to see. It’s my favorite city outside the US in the world. I have been back twice since that semester in college, most recently in 2011. When I started accumulating points and miles in 2024, I knew I had to go back. Here’s how I booked it.

	Cash Price	Points Paid	Out of Pocket Cost
RDU-JFK	$493	30,400	$22.40
JFK-BOS	$478	18,000	$47
BOS-LIS	$11,225	81,500	$352.60
Hotel: Lisbon	$703	36,000	$0
LIS-BCN	$165.66	0	$165.66
Hotel: Barcelona	$2,373.30	102,000	$0
BCN-FRA	$241.58	0	$241.58
Hotel: Frankfurt	$145.65	5,000	0
FRA-JFK	$3,846	120,000	$401
JFK-RDU	$1,994	36,000	$94
Grand totals	$21,665.19	303,900	$1,324.24

Flights

RDU-JFK

We have two children, but it’s just my partner and me going on this trip, so step one was to get our kids up to New York where they will hang with Grandma and Grandpa for the duration of our trip (shoutout to Grandma and Grandpa, you’re the best!). For this, we used 30,400 JetBlue points and the usual $22.40 in taxes to fly our family of four from our home airport of RDU to JFK. 

JetBlue doesn’t get a lot of love in the points and miles space because the points have a (low) fixed redemption value, but I like them for this route because 1) Southwest doesn’t fly it and 2) I can track the cash price in Google flights and often recoup points when the price drops. 

JFK-BOS

I built this trip around one of the best deals in award travel: Iberia business class from the east coast to Madrid for only 34,000 points per person on off-peak dates. I was hoping to fly this out of JFK, but alas, Iberia didn’t release any business class space on the JFK-MAD route for our date (which was one of the last off-peak dates before the peak dates begin for summer). Award space was released on the Boston to Madrid route, so that’s what I booked. But that necessitated a positioning flight from JFK to Boston. 

Plan A to get to Boston from JFK is an early morning American Airlines flight booked via Alaska. We paid 18,000 Alaska miles to book this flight in domestic first, plus $47 in taxes and fees (including Alaska’s $12 partner award booking fee and the American Express excise tax to transfer Membership Rewards to Hawaiian, which we then transferred to Alaska). I would not normally splurge on first class for a 71 minute flight, but, YOLO. At 9,000 points per person, how could I say no? We will kick off our trip in style!

Since it’s absolutely imperative that we get to Boston to catch our business class transatlantic flight, I also booked a backup flight on Delta, scheduled to depart about an hour after the AA flight. I plan to cancel this flight if all goes well with Plan A, so I won’t relay the details here, but you can read about my strategy for booking backup flights.

BOS-LIS

We’re actually beginning our trip in Lisbon, because I figured it made sense to see a city I haven’t seen as well as one I have. I booked us on Iberia from BOS straight through to LIS for 81,500 points, which I transferred to Iberia Avios from my Capital One Miles and American Express Membership Rewards. This included 34,000 points per person for the transatlantic flight in business and 6,750 points per person for the hop from Madrid to Lisbon in economy. 

As I mentioned, this flight is one of the best points and miles deals out there, but it’s not always an easy redemption to make. Here are a few things to know about booking with Iberia:

• Only two business class seats are released per flight at calendar open.
• Iberia uses an award chart with prices calculated based on two criteria: distance and whether the date is considered “peak” or “off peak.” You can view the full calendar of peak and off-peak dates for the year on the Iberia website (just Google it, it’s hard to find).
• Your Iberia frequent flyer account must have been open for at least 90 days before you can make a redemption. 
• Iberia uses Avios as its points currency, a currency shared by Qatar, Finnair, British Airways, and AerLingus. You can move Avios between Iberia and these other programs (after 90 days), which means that you can transfer points to Iberia from all four major transferable points currencies, even though only Chase and Amex are direct transfer partners. This is how I was able to use Capital One miles for this redemption.
• Although I have not seen this widely discussed, I encountered an additional requirement that my IberiaPlus account had to have “movement” of Avios before I could transfer Avios from BA to Iberia. Transferring 1,000 Ultimate Rewards points from Chase to Iberia seemed to satisfy this requirement and unlocked my ability to move Avios from BA to Iberia.
• You can also book Iberia flights with the same pricing through British Airways, which has a less glitchy website and better customer service; however, Iberia releases seats through their own program five days before those same seats are bookable with British Airways.

We wound up changing our departure date, so I paid an $80 change fee, in addition to the $272.60 in taxes and fees we paid for the tickets.

LIS-BCN

We paid cash for this flight on TAP Portugal, since it was available for a reasonable $82.83 per person.

BCN-FRA

We paid cash for this intra-European flight as well. Why on earth are we going to Frankfurt, you ask? I’ll get to that. 

Lufthansa has a direct flight from Barcelona to Frankfurt, but it was more expensive than I liked, so I started looking at flights with connections. I found a KLM flight with a long-ish connection in Amsterdam…and then got the bright idea to make it a really long connection and eke a bonus city out of our trip! We paid $241.28 for our two tickets, including a 9-hour layover in Amsterdam where we can get out and explore the city.

FRA-JFK

The logical way to get home on this trip would have been to book that same Iberia flight back across the ocean. However, our return trip fell into the peak date range, so it wouldn’t be as irresistibly cheap, and I thought it might be fun to experience a different business class product on the trip home. 

Singapore Airlines, which is known to have one of the best business class products in the industry, flies what’s called a fifth freedom flight between Frankfurt and JFK. This is a flight that does not begin or end in the airline’s home country. 

This flight from FRA to JFK normally costs 80,500 points when booked through Singapore Airlines’ own program, but because Singapore and Air Canada are both members of the Star Alliance, you can often book these same seats for less through Air Canada Aeroplan.

We booked two business class seats on this flight through Aeroplan right at calendar open for 120,000 points transferred from Capital One and $401 in taxes and fees–about 40,000 points less than we would have paid to book through Singapore directly.

JFK-RDU

Home stretch! Last but not least, upon our triumphant return to the US, we need to pick up our kids and get back to Raleigh. Alaska to the rescue once again! The only award seats available on our desired AA JFK-RDU flight home were in first, so darn it, we just had to book first class again!

Although domestic first isn’t really anything to write home about compared to international business, it still beats main cabin. We paid 36,000 points and $94 to book this flight for the four of us, using points transferred from Amex → Hawaiian → Alaska. YOLO.

Hotels

Regular readers of this blog will be unsurprised to learn that I booked our hotel stays for this trip entirely through Hyatt. 

Lisbon

We booked two nights at the Hyatt Regency Lisbon for 36,000 points. This category 4 hotel feels like one of the better remaining uses of a category 1-4 free night award in Europe, particularly after this year’s award chart changes.

Barcelona

We booked four nights at the Grand Hyatt Barcelona in a club access room for 102,000 points. I’m a big fan of club access rooms for the same reason I love airport lounges: I’m a sucker for free food. I love booking these rooms as a way to keep food costs down (as I have in Paris and San Diego). Fun fact: this hotel is just around the corner from the apartment I lived in during that study abroad semester all those years ago!

Frankfurt

Our Singapore Airline flight departs fairly early, so we booked the Hyatt Place Frankfurt Airport as a convenient place to spend the night before our flight back to the US. At just 5,000 points, this reservation actually yielded the highest cents per point of our three hotel stays for this trip (2.9 cpp)!

The Bottom Line

The cash value for this trip clocks in at almost $22,000, while our out-of-pocket costs for flights and hotels come to about $1,300. This translates to a discount of about 94%. If that’s not a testament to the power of points and miles, I don’t know what is!