Costa Rica has so much to offer. With volcanos, jungles, and beaches, it’s an incredibly diverse country. We were fortunate enough to be able to spend a week experiencing all it has to offer. We always prefer transparency, so our hope with this article is to show you what we did and how much we spent. These are our travel hacks for Costa Rica.
Flights
We used two of our favorite hacks. Miles and points and finding cheap flights.
Miles and points are the gateway to seeing the world. Back in 2021, we both opened American Express Delta Gold cards. This gave us a combined total of roughly 150,000 miles. Up until this point, we’d only used these miles for a variety of small trips throughout the U.S. We did book a trip to New Zealand with them, but we ended up canceling with fear that the flights might be a bit rough for our baby at the time. After cancelling we had the itch and needed to book something else. After looking at our options and using Pointsyeah.com to help us find cheap flights, we came across Costa Rica roundtrip for 18,400 miles each. Because we have Delta credit cards, we get 15% off award bookings. With the discount, our 3 tickets from Salt Lake came out to be 48,000+$264 in taxes.
Delta has dynamic pricing when it comes to redeeming their SkyMiles. This means the price can be random and doesn’t follow any specific chart or pattern. In this case, the cash value of our flights would’ve been $1,428, giving us incredible value for our 48,000 points.
Hotels/Airbnbs
Depending on location and availability, hotels can be booked with miles and points just as flights can be. That being said, we didn’t use the traditional hacks for this trip as we wanted to book some nights through Airbnb. So, our travel hacks for Costa Rica hotels came from a hidden gem, Capital One Shopping. Capital One Shopping (you don’t need to be a member) lets you earn cashback when making online purchases. If you’re already buying things online, you may as well be rewarded. This cashback can be redeemed for gift cards. We used our accumulated points to get a few hotels.com gift cards and then booked some of our stays.
Another favorite of ours is Pepper. (Use our promo code 589236.) Pepper gives you 5% back in points anytime you purchase a gift card from them. It may not seem like much, but you get to use your credit card to earn miles and points as well as get 5% back in the app. Like Capital One, these points can be used for buying gift cards like Airbnb, Amazon, and even Walmart.
We were in Costa Rica for 7 nights and we spent a little over $400 through Airbnb. We love these types of hacks because they are usable by anyone and don’t take much effort. Accumulating points on both platforms continues to save us tons of money on travel.
Rental Cars
Rental cars don’t have many secret hacks, unfortunately. If you want a car, you’re stuck at the price you can find. There are options such as erasing travel purchases with Capital One cards, but we typically advise against this as it’s not the best way to get the best value.
There are some tricks though that can help. In our case, we have the Venture X card through Capital One. This card comes with Hertz presidential status, which gives us free upgrades, skip-the-line benefits, and car rental insurance. Costa Rica, it turns out requires insurance when renting cars. Because of our credit card, we were able to skip the Collision Damage Waiver fee (CDW). The second trick is to always cancel and rebook as prices drop. Our rental started at $260 but after canceling and rebooking twice, we got the price down to $127 for a week. Now the unfortunate news is that Liability Insurance is also required in Costa Rica… So, our rental ended up being $250 for the week. Regardless, canceling and rebooking saved us $133.
On top of the rental car, we paid roughly $80 in gas and less than $10 in toll fees.
Conclusion
Travel can be expensivee, but with a little work those prices can be redeuced drastically. Our travel hacks for Costa Rica saved us so much money and made for an incredible trip. Miles and points are extremely valuable, but even changing a few spending habits can be just as effective.
We spent $264 on flights, $430 on hotels/Airbnb, $340 on a rental car, $235 on activities and pre-travel baby gear, and then, as always, too much on food. This was mostly because we chose restaurants over groceries.
Our total set expenses came to roughly $1300 for 7 days in Costa Rica.
Want to see more for our trip? Check out our Instagram.