We just got back from an incredible eight days in Costa Rica and I am so excited to share all about it! We split our stay between four more adventurous nights in La Fortuna and three resort nights at the Andaz Papagayo in Guanacaste. This was an amazing trip and we were able to save SO much on this family trip to Costa Rica using points!
Here’s a breakdown of how we used points to save on our hotels, lodging, and transport for our family trip to Costa Rica!
How We Saved On Flights To Costa Rica
We have two Companion Passes so we flew from KC to San Jose, CR and then back to Kansas City from Liberia on Southwest Airlines. We paid points for our tickets and then each of the kids flew as our Companions for just the cost of taxes and fees! Total cost: 147,000 Rapid Rewards points and $240 cash.
There’s no nice way to say it – the flight times for Southwest to and from Kansas City are pretty terrible. We flew out at 6 AM on our way there and arrived at 11 PM on our way back and our flight back had not one but TWO stops in Texas. For us, the savings we got by using our Companion Pass were worth it but if direct and easy flights are important to you, Southwest might not be the answer. There are a few other options for using points to Costa Rica based on where you’re flying from so definitely do your research and see what makes the most sense based on your home airport!
If you aren’t familiar with the Companion Passes, you can check out our free guide all about them HERE!
How We Saved On Lodging In Costa Rica
We booked four nights at an Airbnb in downtown La Fortuna for $1,061 total. It had three bedrooms, a full kitchen/living room, and a beautiful outdoor space with a pool, grill, bar, etc. It was great and worth every penny! We just budgeted cash for this part but you could have used around 100,000 Venture miles to erase this whole purchase if you were trying to zero out your expenses on the trip!
For the last three nights, we booked the Andaz Papagayo using points from our favorite bank transferred to Hyatt. At the time this resort cost 35,000 points/night and I booked it when the schedule opened 13 months out for a total of 105,000 points. Cash prices at this hotel are $1,000+/night so this means our 105,000 points got us over $3,000 worth of value!
You can check out our favorite cards for earning points for stays like this HERE!
How We Saved On Rental Cars and Transport In Costa Rica
We compared the prices of a rental car vs private transport for our whole trip and it was going to be a little bit more for private transport. Since we had two long travel days, we felt like this was worth every penny!
We paid $693 total to Fayla Tours for private transport from San Jose to La Fortuna (three hours), La Fortuna to Papagayo with a stop at Rio Celeste to hike, then from the resort to Liberia airport. This was SO worth it, y’all. We loved just getting to enjoy the beautiful drives through the countryside and our driver had so many fun stories to share, gave us ideas for stops to try unique local foods/drinks on the way, etc.
In La Fortuna we used Ubers to get around (usually $2-4/ride) or the excursions we did provided transport so that part wasn’t terribly expensive either.
Other Expenses: We did some grocery shopping on our way to La Fortuna to get breakfast food and we packed a bunch of snacks in our suitcase to save on food! I’ll share what we spent on our excursions in my itinerary post here soon since this post is already really long.
When all was said and done, we spent an additional $1,800-$2,000 ish on our food and excursions but I haven’t sat down to do the math yet. Obviously that amount is going to vary a ton for you based on how you eat and what excursions you choose to do!
So all in all, for our main big expenses of the trip we spent 252,000 points and $1,993 in cash!
People in the points and miles world will talk about how their trips are “totally free” using points and as we all know, that’s just not the case! Other expenses do add up and hopefully this gives you a sense of what you might spend if you did a similar trip! All in all, we paid around $4,000 cash for eight days in Costa Rica worth closer to $13,000+ and I feel pretty good about that savings!
