When it comes to travelling on a budget, we are all about it! With all the travel point programs, home share websites and budget blogs out there, it’s easier than ever to design a relatively budget friendly trip. While we are generally frugal when we travel, we made our first concerted effort on this tropical getaway. Between Spirit Airlines Miles, Airbnb and Chase Sapphire rewards, we were able to travel from Myrtle Beach SC to St. Croix USVI for a week, for less than $600! How you ask? Let us explain…

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Flights

This is where it all started. We were motivated by points we had sitting around on a credit card. (Don’t we all? If not, it’s definitely something you need to consider – especially if you have good credit.)  Phil has held a Spirit credit card for about 5 years, during which he has accumulated nearly 40,000 pts. We recently revamped our personal budget schedule and decided it was time to can the credit cards with annual fees. This meant using up those points!

As we came to find out, however, there is a very strategic method to get the ‘most bang for your buck’ with Spirit. There are ‘seasons’ and ‘regions’ that must be considered when deciding how to spend your points. Check out their chart here. Spirit has come a long way over the last few years and now offer a plethora of options, making our destination decision even harder! So, Phil called in to their customer support line to figure out what our best options were.

Interestingly enough, the customer support representative explained that getting the most ‘bang for your buck’ is actually a tricky process. Spirit designates a certain number of seats/tickets per category to credit card/points member. So, it’s really a matter of timing and luck if you get the best value for your tickets unfortunately. We actually missed out on getting the best deal for our flights by a matter of minutes. So, we ended up paying a little more than we had originally planned. That being said, we committed to the flights and continued on planning our tropical budget vacation.

With Myrtle Beach as our designated Spirit hub, St. Croix USVI ended up being the winning spot! This works out well because ever since our trip to Puerto Rico in 2016, we’ve been itching to get back to the Caribbean!

Additionally, Spirit has an extremely conservative luggage allowance of one free personal bag (18″x14″x8″) per passenger, so we added one checked bag to supplement our trip.  All in all, we did OK with flight costs on this trip but based on our experience and restriction in processing the trip details, there are definitely better travel credit cards out there.

Two roundtrip flights from Myrtle Beach, SC to St. Croix (+one checked bag each way) cost: $295.52.

Accommodations

As full-blown Airbnb supporters (have you checked out our post on Hosting a Successful AirBnB?) we naturally decided to go the Airbnb route. We found an extremely reasonably priced and well-reviewed space for less than $40/ night! Kat had a $30 credit from using Airbnb for a business trip recently, so we put that towards it as well.  It’s a studio space but provides all the amenities we’ll need on our vacation – linens and essentials, Wi-Fi, a kitchenette breakfast and even a bottle of rum!

Seven nights’ accommodations cost: $273.65. (Note, since we took the trip, rates are about $50/ night)

Island Transportation

Lastly, we had to find a mode of transportation to be able to travel the small island at our convenience. Unfortunately, transportation options are extremely limited once you arrive on the island. The main methods of travel from point A to point B are car, cab or bus. And depending on your agenda (and budget) these can be rather limiting factors. If you are considering cabbing it, check out this comprehensive list of island cab fairs. Depending on where you are staying, for how long and what you plan to do while you are there, these could really add up! And from our research on public transit, it is both very unstructured and unreliable. Hence, renting a car is the best fit for our trip – the freedom to go wherever we please whenever we please!

Did you know they drive on the left in USVI?

Ascertaining rental car rates became the next hurdle in our travel planning and required a bit of googling. There are a couple name brand rental agencies on the island as well as some competitively priced local businesses. According to our Airbnb host, a Jeep or SUV would provide the best mode of transportation, which also bump the budget up quite a bit. So, we settled on a Jeep. I mean, would it really be an island getaway in any other vehicle?

Now here’s the real kicker! We recently signed up for a Chase Sapphire credit card to use towards the purchase of a new roof. (By spending a minimum of $4,000 in the first 3 month, you get a 50,000 point sign up bonus. That’s $625 in travel funds – free!) So, we decided to go this route for booking our rental car. We ended up using less than $500 worth of points to secure the rental car.

Eight-day car rental cost: $0!

There you have it!

There it is – flight, accommodations and transportation for seven nights, for two people, on St. Croix, USVI for a total cost of $569.17!

This is most definitely a number you could drop even lower if you tried! In our research we’ve seen that traveling with a group can also significantly cut down on the cost of a trip. Divide lodging and transportation by four or five people and you’re really cooking! Travelling solo? You could of course book accommodations through Couch Surfing and save even more money. Camping is also an option, whether you bring a tent along or want to rent a private cabana, there is something for every budget! We are celebrating our anniversary on this trip, so we decided to go just the pair of us and aimed for a more private space.

We plan to follow through with this “budget trip” theme once we arrive on the island as well. By purchasing groceries, rather than eating out regularly, and partaking in mainly free activities, our spending should remain relatively low.  We also plan to spend a bit of time with our behinds in the sand, doing NOTHING, which is always budget friendly 🙂 You can follow along with how we stayed on budget by following us on each day of our trip. Start here on Day One.

Alright, so we aren’t quite there yet as ‘masters’ of budget travelling, but I’d say we’re off to a good start!
And now, on to planning our 8-day St Croix itinerary (my personal favourite!) Stay tuned and…

WHAT ARE YOUR BEST RESOURCES WHEN TRAVELLING ON A BUDGET? WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRAVEL ON YOUR NEXT TROPICAL GETAWAY?