Bought OUr Tickets To the RIVIERA Maya

After using several pricing websites and Google's wonderful "cheap flight" locator (https://www.google.com/flights), we finally got some affordable flights to Cancun. We used Amex to book the flights. After a year of charging everything to our Amex gold cards, we had over 60,000 points. This allowed us to get 4 tickets for just over $400, including taxes and fees. An absolute steal. The original price was almost $2,000 (which was still pretty good!).  I sound like a commercial for American Express, but honestly the travel perks are wonderful. Even if you only travel of take a vacation once a year, Amex is the way to go. 

My husband and I have been using our American Express cards exclusively for about 3 years now, (this means that we use Amex everywhere, even for groceries, and we just pay it off every month) and we have taken at least a dozen "free" vacations by using our points. 

We are still accumulating points now, and hopefully by the time we leave in a few months, we will have enough points to get at least 3 or 4 of our hotel days for free. 

We reserved a car with Hertz at the Cancun airport. American Express has excellent car insurance coverage for rental cars (confirm that your card has thing before relying on it, though!). I've had some bad experiences with Hertz in the past (stateside) but the price was less than $100 USD for 10 rental days, so you can't really beat that. 

From the Cancun airport, we will be spending a few days at Playa Del Carmen. Then we will explore down the coast and see all the Riviera Maya has to offer.