@StephPlum I am!! In fact, I just booked flights to Hawaii (for late July) this morning!
Thanks to all of you, who put the idea in my head that a trip to Maui was possible. So instead of rescheduling our cancelled
Disneyland trip, we racked up Hilton points (via 2 Aspires and 1 Hilton Biz).
We were flexible with our dates, and earlier this week I found 5 nights at the Grand Wailea with the 95K standard rooms available. I snapped those up, so I got the 5th night free thanks to the Aspire.
I had 140K URs transferred to KrisFlyer (requested on 12/1). They showed up last night, with a (surprise to me) 15% bonus, so 161K total points. I had checked Saver seat availability on the United site, so I knew that my flights were available. When I went to book online through Singapore Air, although it said flights were available for 17.5K each way, when I put the flights in my cart, it gave me a total of 240K points! So 60K per person where it should have been 35K, with no reason for the uptick. I panicked for a second but remembered that I read somewhere it's better to call. I called this morning, and the call center agent was able to get us booked on my preferred flights for the 35K/person/round trip, plus $11.20/person in taxes.
So my totals were:
Grand Wailea: 380,000 HH Points ($4,310 list price cash value for our dates/room)
United RT Flight: 140,000 URs/KrisFlyer Points ($2,720 list price cash value for our flights/seats)
If I've done my math right, I'm pretty happy with those redemption values.
I was hoping to find a creative way to use our airline credits on the Aspire(s) this year, but short of prepaying for bags, I think I'm out of luck. I'd love to do seat upgrades, but I don't think the DPs are favorable for triggering the credits that way.
Anyway - THANK YOU all for being so awesome with sharing information. If we get to go (fingers crossed), this will be a dream come true!