Playing the whole credit card points, airline miles, travel hacking game has never been appealing to me. I didn’t want to play any games to get the best price!

But snagging my first deal was EXHILARATING.

So as to not bury the lead: We spent $75 to get from Peru to Australia. 

And yes, I understand that the big part of how we got this deal was by using our miles/points, which also have a lot of value. But even using that metric, we still got a great deal. Here’s the somewhat-convoluted-but-really-not-that-difficult process of how, using the miles from our Chase Sapphire Preferred credit cards.

• Using Google Flights, we got a baseline price for flights from Lima to Brisbane without using any points. A one-way flight for one person was around $1400.

• Next, we used the Chase rewards center to see how much it would cost—using points—to get from Lima to Brisbane. The cost was 112,000 points, a 1.25 cent per mile value.

• But we had also heard that there may be better conversion rates by booking directly with an airline. With Chase, you can transfer points 1:1 to any of their travel partners, including United. So we checked how many points it would cost using United’s booking center. (And it’s free to transfer points.)

• We tried a few different variations of flight itineraries, and eventually found an itinerary from Lima to Sydney* for only 45K points and $75. This is about a 3 cent per mile value—a much better value for our miles!

This may be very travel-nerdy of me, but I can’t wait to try this again.

*We were originally looking for flights into Brisbane, since that’s where we expect to start the Australia portion of our trip. But it was much more cost-effective to book to Sydney, and then we’ll spend around $75-100 for another one-way flight from there to Brisbane.