Wondering if it’s possible to cover your honeymoon with points and miles?
You’re not alone.
It (can be) a huge expense, and depending on how much you spent on the wedding, actually going on one at all can start to feel out of reach.
That’s where points and miles come in.
Most couples can cover a two-week international honeymoon with somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 points (accumulated across both partners), booked nine to eleven months out. The decision that matters most is not finding the cheapest award; it is deciding which single piece of the trip you will pay cash for, and letting points carry everything else.
Now let me show you what that looks like on an actual honeymoon, because we’ve got some newlyweds on the team.
Meg’s Honeymoon Plan
Meg Clemente is our product manager here at Daily Drop, which means she spends her working hours inside flight data. I thought she’d always been a points and miles genius, but it turns out that getting married was what started her journey.
She got into this because she got engaged, like several other Daily Drop folks. Seems like it’s a whole thing to use wedding expenses to make a dream honeymoon come true. Brendan and Erin did a whole video about their 3-month honeymoon. McKay wrote a detailed guide all about this as well.
Meg and her husband just got home from their dream honeymoon in South Africa. When I asked her how she pulled it off, she sent me a spreadsheet, because of course she did. 😊
Their initial plan was the sensible one. They budgeted $5,000-6,000 for flights and hotels, some reasonably priced places to stay outside Kruger National Park, and a rental car they would drive themselves. And because Meg is Meg, she stayed within that, spending $5,976.11 in cash, so the budget held almost to the dollar. The trip she took with it bore no resemblance to the one she originally thought she would take.
Photo courtesy of Meg Clemente
How Many Points Do You Need for a Honeymoon?
Meg and her husband used 356,000 points total across four flights and two hotel stays, plus $5,976.11 in cash and a $100 statement credit. That covered fourteen days, two international long-hauls, three regional flights, and twelve nights of lodging for two people.
I wondered how long it took them to accumulate all those points. For Meg, the timeline from opening her first card to taking her honeymoon was under three years. You could tighten that timeline if need be, although it’s important to remember that once you earn a welcome offer, it won’t show up until the next statement, so there’s a bit of a lag.
What’s most interesting is that most of Meg’s spending and earning took place within a single year. Three hundred fifty-six thousand of anything sounds like a figure you earn after a looong time. But it’s not!
It is roughly what a couple can earn in a single year of ordinary spending on a few well-chosen cards, and if you have a wedding in that year, you are already spending the money.
She only opened two new cards, using five cards total for the trip. The MVPs:
Chase Freedom Unlimited®: A slow-and-steady winner that earns 1.5% cash back on every purchase (which can be converted to points when you hold a Chase card that earns Ultimate Rewards points).
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card: She timed a big wedding purchase with opening this card, so she earned the welcome offer right away; it showed up in her next statement.
Marriott Bonvoy Boundless® Credit Card: She used this card for its free night award valued up to 35,000 points) every year after account anniversary.
Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card: Earns 2x miles on all purchases; Meg took advantage of the rental car benefits in South Africa.
Chase Sapphire Reserve®: An unexpected overnight turned into a night out in the Big Apple thanks to a statement credit offered by this card (more on that below).
When to Book Your Honeymoon Flights With Points
Nine to eleven months out, which is roughly when most airlines open their schedules. Meg booked hers at nine months.
Book award flights before you book anything else on the trip. Hotel award space is easier to find, and cash hotel rates can be shopped down; long-haul business class award seats are the genuinely scarce thing, and they get scarcer every week you wait.
There is a second reason to book early, but it has lots more to do with luck than a strategy that is guaranteed to work out for you. I will get to it in a minute.
Should You Use Points for Flights or Hotels?
Flights, if you can only do one. Award pricing on long-haul international routes tends to beat hotel award pricing by a wide margin, and a $1,600 airfare is much harder to negotiate down than a hotel room.
Meg's spreadsheet is a good illustration, because at first glance it looks like she did the opposite. Her single largest expense was a three-night all-inclusive safari lodge at $4,950.91, and she paid every penny of it in cash. Zero points. That one line is 83 percent of everything she spent on the honeymoon.
She did it on purpose.
The lodge included every meal and two guided game drives a day, and that second piece matters quite a bit. Guides at private reserves can take their vehicles off the roads; you cannot do that in a car you rented yourself, which means the animals you see from a lodge vehicle are simply not the animals you see from the tar road with your hazards blinking.
It also solved a problem she had not priced in, which is that her husband found driving on the left genuinely scary. Three days of not being the one behind the wheel was worth real money to both of them.
Find the one piece of your honeymoon that exists in exactly one place and cannot be swapped for something similar, and protect that piece with cash. Flights are interchangeable. City hotels are interchangeable. Rental cars are so interchangeable they are practically a commodity. A specific lodge in a specific reserve is not.
What to Do When Your Award Flight Gets Changed
Here is the second reason to book early.
The return Meg wanted was a single-stopover itinerary, and it priced at roughly 300,000 miles per person. 🫨 That was more than they had, so they booked a longer multi-leg routing instead and made their peace with it, the way you do.
Months later, one of those legs moved and broke her connection.
When an airline changes your schedule enough to break your itinerary, you can call in and explore your options. You have considerably more say in flight changes than most people realize. Meg did not accept the first rebooking she was offered. She asked for the 300K per person itinerary she had wanted all along, and she got it, for 88,000 points per person. She said it took a few phone calls, but it was worth it.
Again, this is pure luck (and some determination on Meg’s part). You cannot schedule a schedule change. But booking nine months out gives the airline three quarters of a year to move something, and if they do, you should know that "whatever they have available" is not your only option. Most people say yes to the first thing offered because they assume that’s their only choice.
They also flew home in business class on purpose, so they would have something to look forward to. Meg wanted the last day of the honeymoon to be something other than the sad part of going back to the real world.
Are Transfer Bonuses Worth Using on a Honeymoon?
Sometimes, and Meg's case is a good example of both halves of that answer.
For Cape Town she had been planning to use Hyatt points. Then Chase ran a 50% transfer bonus to Marriott Bonvoy, so she moved 23,000 Chase points over instead, paired them with a free night award, and paid nothing out of pocket for three nights in the city.
Usually, Chase to Marriott is usually a “meh” trade because Bonvoy points do not hold their value the way Hyatt points do. But a transfer bonus narrows that gap. (If you are running the math cold, Hyatt usually wins.)
But she is glad she switched, and the reason has nothing to do with points. The Marriott put her and her husband in a part of town where they could walk to dinner and walk back after dark. The other property would not have. A redemption that saves you points and costs you the ability to leave your hotel at night is not a better redemption.
Two notes. We keep an up-to-date list of all current transfer bonuses on the Transfer Partner Cheat Sheet here (so bookmark that page whenever you need to check). And know that Chase moved its World of Hyatt transfer ratio to 4:3 for new cardholders as of June 15, 2026, with existing cardholders holding 1:1 only through September 30. So the Hyatt-beats-everything shorthand is not what it was a year ago.
The Small Things That Saved Their Trip
Meg and her husband used a lounge on six of their seven flight segments, and her new favorite lounge on this earth is the United Polaris Lounge in New York. It’s worth knowing that access came from flying international business class, not from a credit card. The award ticket bought the lounge.
The Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card includes complimentary Hertz President's Circle status after enrollment along with rental perks through Visa Infinite. In South Africa, that turned into a free upgrade.
Schedule changes worked out not once but twice in their favor for the flight home.
Their original flight was supposed to leave Johannesburg in the afternoon, meaning they only planned to spend two nights on safari. Because of regional flight schedule changes, they were able to get on an evening flight and stay an extra day in Kruger, for three total nights. Meg says that change was priceless.
On their way home, a flight delay turned into another unexpectedly memorable night. Their flight home out of New York got pushed later, and later, and later again. Rather than sit in a terminal watching the board, they rebooked for the next morning, used a Chase Sapphire Reserve® StubHub credit to go see Wicked (the card comes with an annual $300 StubHub/viagogo credit, distributed as up to $150 in statement credits biannually), and spent 20,000 points on a Hyatt in Times Square. Her husband had never been to New York City in his life.
This is the kind of magic that knowing all the perks of the cards in your wallet manifests.
What a Real Honeymoon With Points Actually Costs
Cash paid | $5,976.11 |
Points used | 356,000 |
Statement credits used | $100 |
Daily Drop estimated value received | $19,898.27 |
How we calculated this: for each award booking, we took the cash price of that exact booking and subtracted the taxes and fees Meg actually paid, then added the difference to her cash spend. These are Daily Drop's own estimates, not fixed values, and yours will be different.
$19,898 is carried almost entirely by one line, which is the business class return home, priced at $10,774.54 in cash. Meg was never going to buy that ticket. Nobody in this story was ever going to buy that ticket. Take it out and you are looking at a trip worth roughly $9,100 for $5,976 in cash, which is still an excellent value.
I want you to take a very important lesson away from Meg’s story. She budgeted five to six thousand dollars before she knew a thing about points, she spent $5,976.11, and the lodge she originally could not afford took 83 percent of it. The points did not shrink her budget. They changed what her budget could buy.
Honeymoon Points and Miles FAQ
How far in advance should I book a honeymoon with points?
Nine to eleven months ahead for international flights, which is when most airline schedules open. Hotels can wait. Book the scarce thing first, and the scarce thing is almost always a long-haul premium cabin seat for two people traveling together.
Can two people book award seats on the same flight?
Usually, though availability for two seats in premium cabins is meaningfully harder than one. This is the single strongest argument for booking early. If you cannot find two together, the honeymoon might have to start once you’re back on the ground, or just accept that you’re okay with flying economy, together.
Is it better to pool points with my partner or keep them separate?
Both of you opening cards and earning separately generally produces more points than one person earning alone. Several programs allow transfers between household members, so check whether yours does before you assume the points are stranded.
Should I use points for the whole honeymoon?
Usually no. (I mean, you can try, but there’s usually taxes and fees you have to pay cash for anyway.) Identify the one experience that only exists in one place and pay cash for it, then use points on the pieces that are interchangeable. A trip where everything was free but nothing was special is not the goal.
What happens if my award flight changes after I book?
A significant schedule change generally entitles you to be rebooked, and you can request a specific alternative rather than accepting the first option offered. Ask for what you really want.
Do I need a premium credit card to do this?
No. Meg started as a complete beginner. Ordinary spending on two or three well-chosen cards over a year, especially a year that includes a wedding, gets most couples into range.
How much cash should I plan to bring?
Depends entirely on where you are going, and tipping culture is the variable people underestimate. Meg took out roughly $500 over two weeks in South Africa. Research the norms at your destination before you leave, not at the ATM in the arrivals hall.
Bottom Line
This is for couples with a real destination in mind and about a couple of years of runway. It works badly if you let the points pick the destination. In other words, the points should work FOR you… you shouldn’t be letting them dictate your options.
Start with the two things you would regret missing, fund those with cash, and let points carry everything that could just as easily have been something else. Then book early, watch your email, and when the airline moves your flight, ask for the itinerary you wanted in the first place.
And as Meg would tell you – a spreadsheet is a girl’s best friend.
