Singapore Under INR 100K

Till now we have spoken a lot about free travel and stay using credit card points, but never deep dived into it. So I thought why not explain it with my own example which I had previously mentioned here. 

Our journey began with acquiring a once amazing card called - Axis Magnus back in 2022. Though the card is only a shadow of its previous glorious self, I have linked the features and benefits page for your information. One of the market leading features of this was, that on a monthly spend of INR 100k, you would get 25k Edge Reward Points. Magnus being a Super Premium card, would also elevate the cardholder to HNI status with Axis bank. This meant that the transfer ratio of edge reward points jumped up to a crazy ratio of 5:4

In 2023, I also had a wedding of a cousin in Pula, Croatia. So there were quite a lot of expenses that I could foresee. This along with the rent payments and other monthly expenses for both mine and my wife’s home, including a gold scheme that was running, I managed to hit this INR 100k milestone quite easily and for a number of months.

Slowly racking up points, I was amazed at the tally that I was able to reach by the end of August 2023. With the organization that I work for, we get a week off in December for Christmas. My wife and I were planning to do a National Park trip, since we had been to Ranthambore in December 2022 and simply loved the experience. But as mentioned, we had been to an international trip just a few months ago in June, our budget for this trip was INR 100k at the most. We started looking at Kanha and Jim Corbett, but the prices just blew our minds. We also tried to check for a Kerala itinerary but even that was touching north of INR 130k!

One fine day while browsing Instagram, I saw a food blogger who I follow traveling to Singapore for his anniversary. That was a light bulb moment for me. I checked the rates for the flights, they seemed expensive, then I checked how I can book those using points, since I already had about 105k points in my United MileagePlus account, which is the loyalty account for United Airlines. I checked and voila, the tickets were coming under 1 lakh points for two plus about INR 10K in taxes! Mumbai to Singapore with a small layover in Bangkok via Bangkok Airways and return was direct flight from Singapore to Mumbai with Singapore Airlines. I was able to book these since United is the biggest partner in the Sky Alliance group. One can book any Star Alliance partner airline tickets through United. So, for the trip, flights, check! 

Next, for the stay, I moved the remaining 40k points that I still had in my Axis Edge balance to Accor ALL which is the loyalty programme of Accor Hotels. It has about 53 brands under it, such as Pullman, Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure, ibis, Fairmont and Raffles. It is also one of the best chains to stay in South East Asia. Apart from this, the biggest plus advantage of Accor points is that they are, at least for now, pegged at a direct conversion value of INR 1.8/point. This means, I had over INR 72,000 worth points with me! We checked a few hotels and zeroed in on Mercure Singapore Bugis. This hotel hit almost all the spots for us. Was super close to the MRT station, was also in one of the prime locations in Singapore with Malls and restaurants all around, and also was about only 2.5km from the most famous Singaporean attractions like Gardens by the Bay and Marina Bay Sands! Stay, check! 

We booked these as soon as we could. My wife checked the must visit attractions and we zeroed in on a few. After looking at a lot of applications, we figured that the best deals were on  Klook. We got a lot of discounts on every attraction booking, the combo ticket for Gardens by the Bay, Cloud Forest and the Flyer, and also for the River Wonders and the Zoo. Since our target was to spend as minimum as we could, this was a blessing! Even the Universal studios and SEA Aquarium combined tickets were at a better price than their own site! 

Lastly, for forex, both prepaid card and cash, we used BookMyForex, which is a MakeMyTrip group entity. They provided us with the best forex rates, and their prepaid forex card has 0 cross currency markup as well. The currency was delivered to us within a day and they were considerate enough to also give us smaller denominations. And for MRT and any other transactions, I had the RBL World Safari credit card with me, which has 0 forex markup, so you pay only the actual value.

With that we were all set for the trip. And boy was it amazing! We walked over 15 kms a day for 5 days straight! But managed to explore a whole lot! Experiencing high speed roller coasters at Universal, the amazing street food, and the quaint atmosphere at the River Wonders and the Singapore Zoo. It turned out to be one of the best vacations we had taken and all we spent, barring the shopping, was about INR 98K!