A \$50,000 luxury trip… for just \$2K out of pocket.

Name: A \$50,000 luxury trip… for just \$2K out of pocket.
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T22:39:37Z
Duration: 53 s
Channel: Chris Larsen
Description: Chris Larsen (speaker) describes how he used reward points to convert what would have been a $50,000 luxury trip into paying about $2,000 out of pocket…

18 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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0:53

Chris Larsen (speaker) describes how he used reward points to convert what would have been a $50,000 luxury trip into paying about $2,000 out of pocket by avoiding bank/Amex travel portal redemptions (claiming a redemption that would have cost ~5,000,000 points via the bank site vs ~600,000 points he used). He then briefly recounts recent travel: three weeks in Japan (March), about a month in Florida, ~1.5 months in Europe (Berlin, the Dolomites, Florence, Cinque Terre, Porto), a week kiteboarding in Egypt with a stop in Dubai, and currently in Portugal. The tone is conversational and travel-hacker/boastful.

Questions this video answers

$50,000

$2,000

~5,000,000 points

~600,000 points

Three weeks in March

$50,000 trip. I paid two grand out of pocket. If I use those points, by the way, through Amex Traveler, the bank sites, which is. Talk about using points. That's what we want to avoid. That's the trap the banks want you to fall into. Yeah. They want you to redeem them through their site. And they're going to have you thank them for it when. Through you. So it's like this whole game. Right. So that would have been 5 million points through their site. I did it for about 600,000 points. Okay. So I saved about 50 grand. That was the first trip of the year. We then put everything in storage. We went to Japan for three weeks in March, came back for a month in Florida. That's where we met. And then we've been in Europe the last basically month and a half. Berlin, the Dolomites. We were in Florence for a few weeks. We went to Cinque Terre Porto. I was actually in Egypt for a week on a kiteboarding trip stop in Dubai. And now I'm in Portugal. And so it's a. It's a crazy life, man. It's. It's pretty fun. It's pretty funny.