The Long Way to Zion

This was the second trip I ever booked with points, and I want to get the bad news out of the way first, because if you came here for a masterclass you are going to be disappointed.

I redeemed at 1.25 cents on two hotels. I redeemed at 1.00 cents on a flight. I burned 25,844 points on a hotel room we never slept in. Every one of those was a bank travel portal booking, which is what I knew how to use at the time.

Two of those three numbers are fine and one of them is not, and it took me a while to work out which was which. I'll come back to it.

It is also one of the best weeks the three of us have ever spent together.

Those two things are both true, and holding them at the same time is most of what I've learned since. The points were not the point. The points got me and my two youngest daughters to four national parks and a state park in March for a fraction of what it would have cost in cash, and then a blizzard rewrote the itinerary and handed us two parks we hadn't planned on seeing at all.

The plan, and the weather

The plan was to fly from Raleigh to Colorado Springs, pick up a car, drive to Moab for the Utah parks, come back through Silverthorne, and fly home from Colorado Springs on the 14th.

Then the forecast filled up with a storm that eventually closed I-25 and I-70 and put multiple inches of snow on Denver. We were in Utah. Our flight home was on the other side of it.

So we stopped going back. That is the whole decision. Instead of driving east into a blizzard to catch a flight that was probably not leaving, we kept going west, and I spent an afternoon on the phone rebuilding the back half of the trip.

I want to be straight about that afternoon, because the version where I calmly rerouted a trip is a nicer story than the one that happened. I had my two daughters a long way from home, a storm closing the roads between us and our flight, and a phone that kept telling me no. It was a humongous ball of stress. The trip you are reading about is the good part. It is on the other side of a day I would not want to do again.

Southwest was excellent about it. They had already moved us once on the way out, rerouting us through Phoenix at no charge when our original connection got tight. When I cancelled the return they credited all three of us, and those credits were good. Hertz let me drop the car at Las Vegas instead of Colorado Springs and didn't charge me a dollar for it. I called Chase Travel twice to get the Silverthorne hotel cancelled, and twice the answer came back no, the second time from a district manager whose reasoning was that it is Colorado and it snows there.

That night cost 25,844 points and we spent it four hundred miles away.

Arches

We did the whole park. You can see arches from the road almost immediately, and the temptation is to look at them from the pullout and drive on. Don't. We hiked out to the ones we'd been looking at through the windshield, and they are a completely different object up close.

We hiked the Delicate Arch trail. It is the famous one for a reason.

Canyonlands

Mesa Arch is the one everybody photographs, and the trail out to it is short. We took it, then spent the rest of the time working through the overlooks, which is where Canyonlands actually earns it. The Grand View Point trail is the one I'd tell you not to skip.

Dead Horse Point, after dark

This is the one that is not a national park. It is a Utah state park, and it is the part of the trip I think about most.

It is a dark sky site. Properly dark. We braved a cold night for it and got the most spectacular view of the sky I have ever stood under, and while we were out there we watched a Starlink launch go up.

Here is the detail I would want somebody to tell me. It is cold enough that you will want to get back in the car to warm up, and the car has lights in it. So we worked out a system. Whoever wanted to go back out would warn everybody else first, and we would all shut our eyes while the door was open, so nobody lost their night vision for the next twenty minutes. Three people, one car, eyes closed on a countdown. It sounds ridiculous written down. It is the reason we all still saw the sky.

Bryce Canyon

We got to Bryce and the road to Rainbow Point was closed. That is March. We went to the visitor center, we used the bathroom, we made our peace with it, and as we were walking back to the car the road opened.

So we drove the whole scenic drive to the top. We got out at Rainbow Point and hiked a genuinely snowy, genuinely icy trail along the canyon rim. We walked an extremely icy walkway to see the amphitheater. Both were worth it and both required actual attention to footing.

If a road is closed when you arrive in March, go find something to do for an hour and check again.

Zion

We came in through the eastern entrance, which is not the one most people use, and it was not crowded. That alone is worth planning around.

We walked several of the short trails beside the road and got long views of the red rock. Then we took the Zion Canyon Overlook trail, and I am going to say this plainly rather than dress it up. That is one of the best views I have ever seen in my life. We stayed up there a long time.

We did not do Angels Landing. We did not do The Narrows. It was March, and this leg of the trip did not exist until two days before we drove it, so we took what was in front of us. I am not going to pretend that was a strategy. What we did was extraordinary anyway.

La Verkin

There is a little coffee shop and restaurant near La Verkin that has a gorge behind it. Not a view of a gorge in the distance. A gorge, right there, off the back.

We sat at a picnic table, ate lunch, and watched the sun go down. Six days of canyon country and one of the things I remember clearest is a picnic table behind a coffee shop.

What it actually cost

Three travelers. Here is every redemption, with what it returned.

The rest was cash. Southwest out of Raleigh, three nights at a Fairfield in Moab, a night near Colorado Springs, a night near Zion, and the rental car.

Count only the redemptions and this trip ran between 1.00 and 1.25 cents per point. Count the night nobody would refund, which is the honest way to count it, and all 86,022 points returned 0.73 cents each. That is the real number and I would rather print it than hide it.

It is worth being precise about what dragged it down, though, because it was not the portal. Thirty percent of the points went on a room a blizzard made unusable, and that is the whole gap. Strip that one night out and what is left is two sensible hotel bookings and one flight I would do differently.

Why I am fine with 1.25 cents on a hotel

One last thing, because it is the part people argue with.

A flat portal rate is a poor deal for airline miles and a perfectly good one for hotel points, because hotel transfer partners are mostly terrible. Amex into Hilton at 1:2 lands you about eight tenths of a cent. Marriott is three quarters. IHG is six tenths. Of the twenty-two bank-to-hotel transfers this site tracks, fifteen return less than the portal would have.

So 1.25 cents for a room I needed, on a night I had to be near Bryce Canyon, is not a consolation prize. It is the answer. The flight is a different question entirely, which is why the 1.00 cent one still bothers me.

One thing has changed since. In 2024 the Chase portal paid a flat 1.25 cents on a Sapphire Preferred, which is the rate these bookings got. In June 2025 Chase replaced the fixed rates with Points Boost, so a point is now worth one cent by default with a boosted rate on selected bookings. The numbers above are what I actually paid at the time, not what you would get today.

The full argument, the six transfers that do beat the portal, and the order I book a hotel in →

Going in March

March is a trade and you should know which side you are taking.

You give up roads. Rainbow Point was closed when we arrived. Trails are snowed and iced and some of the famous ones are not sensible. Weather can close an interstate and eat a hotel night, and it did.

What you get is Zion's eastern entrance with nobody on it, a rim trail at Bryce in the snow, and a dark sky park in the cold where the air is so clear you can watch a rocket go up. In July you would be sharing all of it.

We took that trade without really understanding we were taking it. I'd take it again on purpose.