Trip motivation
We have family who live on Oahu and love to mix our trips with some fun resort time. When searching for award flights back to Nashville, we found that many flights flew through Maui so we decided to spend a few days there at the end of our longer trip. For more info on where we stayed, see here
Flight 1 (Oahu to Maui): Using Southwest Travel Funds
For the short inter-island flight from Oahu to Maui, we flew Southwest. The cost per person was $79. We used travel funds from past trips and American Express benefits to reduce our total cost to $70 total for all 4 of us. The American Express Gold Card (and a few others) come with a flight benefit. Typically this is meant for flight extras and not actual flight costs, there is a small loophole where flights less than $100 can trigger the credit. Alternate options for this flight would be using Southwest points. You can earn these from Southwest Credit Cards or by transferring Chase points using the Chase portal.
Honolulu (HNL) to Maui (OGG)
11:15a-11:55a (40m)
Flight 2: Maui to Nashville
We used 22.5k United points each to book the flight from Maui to Nashville. The flight times we originally booked weren’t great but was what was available for the number of points (2 stops with 4 hour layovers).
United offers a feature of free standby so the day before our flight, I looked into getting us standby seats on a flight that would get us home earlier. On the website, I pretended as though I was booking a new flight so I could gather info on the flights I wanted including times, stops and flight numbers. Ideally, we wanted to switch from our 2 stop itinerary to a 1 stop itinerary I found that routed through Denver. I called customer service with the information about our desired flight number in hand. After being on hold for an hour, the customer service rep told me that since there had been a (small) schedule change a month ago, they could go ahead and just confirm us for the better option for free without us needing to be standby customers. Yay!
When checking in for the flight, I purposely picked 2 back to back sets of window and aisle seats with the middle seat open for the 4 of us. We hoped that no one would pick the middle in the next 24 hours. If someone did, we would ask them to switch. No one was seated in the middle seats, and this gave us extra room for the kids to lay horizontally with heads in laps for the whole overnight flight. Read more about tips for long airline trips here.
Maui (OGG) to Denver (DEN): 8:30p-5:54a (6h 24m)
To Nashville (BNA) 8:15a-11:54a (2 h 34m)
Airport Lounges
When traveling with layovers or to new cities, we always review the airport and Priority Pass website prior to the trip (link here). The Chase Sapphire Reserve card (in addition to others) comes with priority pass access which gives you a card that accesses to lounges at different airports. Often it is more common internationally.
In Oahu, the interisland lounge was closed (COVID) but the priority website shows a nice lounge with free drinks and food. We did go to the lounge in Maui, and it was small. the lounge had soft drinks and small bags of Japanese pretzels. There definitely have been better lounges but it was fine. There were no lounges in Denver.
Other Travel perks
Another perk we got from several credit cards is Global entry/PreCheck. This allowed us to skip security lines in Maui. For more on this benefit and how to use a credit card to receive it for free, see here.
Activities in Maui
To read more about where we stayed in Maui, see here
