Two tickets to Buenos Aires for less than $800

I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I crawled out of bed and started searching for flights to Buenos Aires. Good thing, because I just purchased two tickets for a total of $762!! No lie!

Here’s how.

Occasionally, I check the cost of flights from various mid and eastern cities in the U.S. to Buenos Aires: Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami. Mostly they are all equally priced, with the cheapest round trip tickets fluctuating between $1,200 to $1600. When I got out of bed tonight I expected to see the same.

Instead, when I checked the flights from Miami, I saw “$815.” I did the requisite wiping of the eyes to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating from lack of sleep. It was still there: $815 web fare special rate for a round trip ticket.

I knew I needed to grab them immediately, but Maggie was asleep. I certainly was not going to buy the tickets without her knowledge. I’ve already learned that lesson! Should I wake her up or stay up all night and ask her when she wakes up hoping the special rate didn’t disappear? I decided to wait.

And then I remembered our credit card, which we use for everything! I logged into the rewards system and it said we had just over 77,000 miles. Using their internal flight search, I found the same flight I had found on Expedia.com.

One ticket cost 75,000 reward miles or $750! I re-wiped my eyes and verified I read it correctly. What I thought was a good deal originally just got cut in half!

This time I had to wake up Maggie. Three-quarters asleep still, she said, “Why wouldn’t you buy that? Get it!”

So it turns out, our decision to get the overly advertised Capital One “No Hassle” Venture Credit Card paid off. You know that card. Just think of a viking asking, “What’s in YOUR wallet?”

The fact that we used that one card for about 95% of our purchases since being married helped us save a lot of money. I still can’t believe it. We just purchased one ticket completely with reward miles we’ve been accumulating for close to a year and the other ticket for only $762 (after the service fee was added). Amazing!

I guess we’re really going now. No turning back! We depart from Miami on Wednesday, October 12, 2011, for the beautiful city of Buenos Aires with a layover in Mexico City.

I do wonder if Maggie will remember me asking her.