We Just Spent $5.22 in 14 Days at a 5-Star Resort
How one travel decision 20 years ago means a fortnight here costs us less than a budget AirBnB
Yesterday I wrote about the fact we were sleeping in a shipping container.
Right now I’m writing this from a perfectly respectable B&B in the misty mountains of Monteverde.
But prior to starting my public daily writing strategy, I was resting and recovering from an unexpected gallbladder op, in a five-star Marriott resort called Los Suenos in Playa Herradura.
A slightly broader range of accommodation than the average week, I'll admit. 😁
But I wanted to write about this, because in the fortnight at Los Suenos, we spent a grand total of $5.22 at the hotel itself. On one Pepsi.
I think that’s a record.
We did buy groceries and we went out for lunch in the local town once. But the hotel bar, the restaurant, the spa, the beach club, pretty much everything in the hotel itself was ignored.
Which, given the resort was stunning, is a slightly tragic comedy.
Unfortunately it wasn’t that we were being virtuous, I’d just had my gallbladder out, couldn’t drink, couldn’t eat fancy food, and really couldn’t do much except lie under a tree on a sunbed and slowly let myself heal.
Rhett, ever the supportive husband, was eating supermarket toast in solidarity. We were, in retrospect, the worst possible guests for a luxury resort. The hotel must have looked at our bill at checkout and wondered if we’d actually been there at all.
But to add insult to injury the entire two weeks cost us less than $500.
‘How’s that?’ I hear you cry.
Almost 20 years ago, we bought into the Marriott Vacation Club. We were on a cheap weekend in Andalucia, Spain (with my Mum god rest her soul), and were subject to one of those 3 hour sales talks that I very grumpily agreed to go to (it was a condition of the cheap weekend).
Thankfully for us, our sales girl was on her way out of the Marriott door and happy to do a fire sale. I still remember Rhett and her working together for hours to find the cheapest week on the planet, so we could take advantage of their ‘getaways’ program, that we could see would be super valuable for us.
Eventually we invested $5,000 for a week in a resort in Branson, Missouri (we’ve never been) and that one single decision has given us cheap access to a network of resorts around the world for the last 2 decades!
The model has changed since. They no longer sell weeks, only points, which is a different and largely worse system, but we never gave up our week. So through a slightly arcane process involving annual maintenance fees, a sister company called Interval International, and the fact my husband is incredibly patient, we’ve been using that one original week to stay in beautiful resorts in Thailand, the Caribbean, Mexico, the US, Spain, and now Costa Rica, for the best part of 20 years.
(Plus we bought another week from a resale site, which has given us even more options)
And when we do the maths on it properly (the maintenance fees, divided by all the trips we take across a year, plus the cost of the original membership amortised over 20 years), staying at a five-star resort like Los Sueños cost us less than the shipping container and our current B&B!
I kid you not!
Our worst-spending fortnight at a luxury resort cost us somewhere around $500 ($300 in trade fees, plus maintenance fees, plus $5 on the Pepsi).
$500, for a fortnight, in a five-star resort, with ocean views, gorgeous pools and possibly the most peaceful recovery a recently de-gallbladdered woman could ask for.
I’m not writing this to suggest everyone should go buy into a vacation club.
Certainly not in the traditional way anyway. The sales-room versions, where people pay $30,000-$50,000 upfront, are mostly designed to enrich the company.
Buying a resale week for $1,000-$3,000 on the secondary market is the actual hack. Most owners don’t know this, and most sales reps actively don’t want you to.
I’m just observing that 20 years ago, slightly by accident, we did one of the smartest travel things we’ve ever done. We didn’t think of it as a ‘travel hack’, there wasn’t really a vocabulary for that yet.
We just wanted the cheap deals on the getaways website.
It turned out to be the foundation of two decades of living & staying in luxury resorts across the world.
Right now we’re halfway up the misty mountains of Monteverde, looking for sloths and avoiding the zip lines. The room will no doubt have reverted to its luxurious self the moment we left, and some other family has filled it with cocktails, seafood and lounge service.
In the meantime, we’ll continue our journey to La Fortuna tomorrow, planning our onward travels, quietly grateful that one decision we made when our daughter was still a toddler is still paying us back twenty years later.
📍Monteverde, Costa Rica
P.S. If you're curious how the vacation club system works, including the weeks-vs-points decision, the resale market, and how we use Interval International to swap into resorts worldwide, I've written it up in the Smart Travellers' Bundle - 3 PDF’s covering everything you need to book cheaper flights, 5* stays (at 3* prices) and build a life around travel. Included free in the Backpack this month for paid subscribers, or available standalone on Gumroad for $27.
