Guide to Booking Vacation Rental Homes with Points

Vacation rental homes are often one of the best options for family vacation, but can be hard to book with points. This guide covers the best options for booking them using points.

Vacasa Rentals via Wyndham Rewards

A new partnership in 2021 between Wyndham Rewards has opened up some great possibilities for using points for vacation homes in the large Vacasa network!

Wyndham charges per bedroom per night. This makes homes with lots of bedrooms very expensive but one bedrooms can be a great value. The pricing does not take into account if homes have lofts or basements with extra sleeping areas. Some one-bedroom homes actually sleep up to 8.

Not all properties are available to book with points, Even better — when you book a Vacasa rental with your Wyndham points — you don’t have have any out of pocket costs! Taxes and cleaning fees are all covered by your points. Read our detailed guide here.

How to earn Wyndham Rewards points

The easiest way to earn a lot of Wyndham Rewards for a family stay is by earning a sign up bonus on a Wyndham credit card (issued by Barclay) or transferring miles from a Capital One Venture, Capital One Venture X, or Citi Premier Card

Use hotel points to stay at a hotel’s timeshare property

Most hotel chains have timeshare programs that allow you use points to book nights at them. We stayed at the Marriott Vacation Club near Disneyland Paris and had a great experience! We had a 3 bedroom villa with a spacious living room and kitchen. The on-site Kids Club provided kids activities and there were even activities for adults like wine tasting with painting.

IHG – Holiday Inn Vacation Club

Check out my full post on booking Holiday Inn Vacation Club properties here.

Click on the top right corner [ ] to see the full view- Orange shows properties that sleep 8+, Green shows 6, Blue shows 4.

Choice Hotels – Bluegreen Vacation Homes

Check out my full post on booking 1+ bedroom properties with Choice! Bluegreen Vacation has a number of properties within the Choice program.

Click on the top right corner [ ] to see the full view- Purple shows properties that sleep 8+, Yellow shows 6, Green shows 5, Blue shows 4.

Marriott Vacation Club

My full post on Marriott properties for families highlights a number of Vacation Club properties!

Click on the top right corner [ ] to see the full view- Purple shows properties that sleep 6+, most of which are Vacation Club properties.

Hyatt Residence Club

Hyatt Residence Club properties can offer great options. Full post for families with a map coming soon!

Hilton Grand Vacations

I haven’t dug into the best properties for families yet, but will be updating soon with a map. Here is their website.

Find a vacation rental in the travel portal

All the flexible rewards programs offer a travel portal to make travel bookings and you may be able to find a vacation rental in your credit card’s travel portal.

Apply rewards for a statement credit/cash back

If you are determined to use points for your vacation rental you can redeem your flexible rewards for a statement credit or cash back to cover the purchase. This option won’t get you the best redemption rate (no more than 1 cent per point), but it can pay, or help pay, for that AirBnb!

American Express

American Express Membership Rewards® can be redeemed as a statement credit, allowing you to use rewards for the cost of vacation rentals. However, since American Express gives a redemption rate of 0.6 cents per reward for statement credits, this isn’t a good option.

Capital One

Capital One also offers the option to redeem miles for cash back (via check) or as a statement credit for 1 cent per point.

However, they also offer another option for travel purchases. The Capital One travel eraser allows you erase eligible travel purchases from your credit card bill for 1 cent per point. You can use it for travel purchases made within the past 90 days.

Because you can use this option for purchases in the past 90 days, one advantage of the Capital One purchase eraser is that you can cover travel with points you don’t have yet. For example, you get your Capital One Venture card and haven’t earned the sign up bonus yet. However, you want to use the bonus to cover an AirBnb. You can charge $600 for an AirBnb (which will go towards your minimum spend requirement), and then after your bonus hits, you can go back and erase the $600 spend with 60,000 rewards points.

Chase

Chase allows you to use Chase Ultimate Rewards® towards your next credit card payment. Therefore, you can use your Chase Ultimate Rewards® to cover the cost of a vacation rental. If you do this, you will get 1 cent per point. Since Chase Ultimate Rewards® can get 2-3x this value when redeemed through transfer partners, like Hyatt, this won’t be the best use of your rewards.

Citi

Citi ThankYou points can be cashed out a variety of ways, but the easiest way is probably going to be to apply a statement credit for the cost of your rental. You can choose exactly how many points you want to redeem (1 cent per point) and then wait for the statement credit to post.

AirBnb through Chase Pay Yourself Back

Through June 2024, Chase will allow you to use points earned on The Aeroplan^® Card to pay yourself back for any travel purchase.

That means you can book an AirBnb and pay for it with your The Aeroplan^® Card. You will then be able to log in to your account and “Pay Yourself Back” using your points.