A $15,000 stay for $1,500 in Boca Raton

The Hotel

We recently stayed at Waldorf Astoria Boca Beach Club for a wonderful five night stay. The hotel located in Boca Raton, Florida has been on my dream list of beach vacations for quite some time. Whenever I login into the Hilton website the hotel shows as a background image that shows up and looked incredible. The cost during most of the year is well beyond what we can pay per night for a hotel room, but with a 14 year old and 11 year old we would need an extra room. We now need two rooms or at least 2 beds and a sofa bed when we stay on the road. Add in that they also had remote school during the day and we would need extra space.

I needed two rooms for 5 nights at the resort, but the price during spring break in Florida was outside of my budget. $15,000 for the stay is more than we spend on vacations in multiple years let alone one stay with everything we still wanted to do this year. We often use the Hilton Honors program to find stays at more expensive hotels without having to pay for them. The Hilton program gives you the fifth night free on rewards stays allowing us to only need 4 nights of points. At this hotel each standard reward night is 89,000 points, we would need 712,000 points for this stay.

Earning my stay

To earn the points I used normal grocery purchases and gift card purchases to earn 450,000 points. I received a gift of 100,000 points and had to purchase another 160,000 points. Hilton is is running a special for 100% points purchase bonus. The gift and the purchase had a value of around $1,300 and it cost another $200 in grocery spending fees to earn the remaining points. For $1,500 we were now set on our 5 night – 2 room trip to Boca Raton with the kids.

In 2020 with Covid-19 closing down most businesses we started working from home and were only going to the grocery store. Although finding toilet paper was nearly impossible earning points on those trips became more valuable. The American Express Hilton Honors card was earning 12x points for all grocery spending. I highly recommend signing up for the American Express Hilton Honors that is currently offering 130,000 Hilton Honors points with $2,000 in spending. This bonus is worth $650 in Hilton money along with free sit down breakfasts and Hilton honors gold status. Click here to sign up.

My overconfidence

We drove down from Roanoke which is about 12.5 hour drive so we stopped off to see some family in Hilton Head, SC to break up our trip along the way. After a few hours in Hilton Head we got back on the road to finish our drive. I figured we could just find a hotel room for the night when we got down to Florida, maybe stop in Jacksonville. I checked rooms earlier in the week and there were plenty available, I didn’t want to book one because I didn’t know how far we would it make that night. Around 1am I thought let’s stop for the night.

This was a HUUUUGEE problem as we started looking for a room. While I was driving I asked my wife to start calling the hotels in Jacksonville, FL. One after another they are were booked up for the evening. Palm Coast, Daytona, Port St. Lucie, city after city they were all booked up, we found one for $900 for the night and another for $500. I told my wife don’t worry when we get to Boca Raton there will definitely be something. Around 4 AM we make it to Boca Raton and there is nothing available. The hotel we were going to check in did everything they could to find us any available room but they had nothing available. Luckily we were able to check in to our cabana at 9AM until our room was ready. The cabana had a full shower, bathroom, closed in sitting area with mini fridge and private covered chairs outside.

The stay at the resort was incredible, we had multiple Real Housewives of New York celebrity sightings include Bethany Frankel and Jules Wainstein during our stay. The kids loved doing virtual school in the cabana with their laptops each day and jumping in the pool and ocean between classes.