Our son was kind enough to offer to drop us off at the hotel the night before! Since we have TSA pre-check we knew we could take the 4:30 shuttle, be there by 4:45 and be checked in by 5:00. They have a shuttle that departs every 30 minutes, 24/7 which was perfect. We chose the Holiday Inn Hotel and Suites.
We remembered how tired we were last October getting to the airport that early and since we had some leftover points from Holiday Inn we chose to use those and stay closer! Plus it would give us at least an extra 1/2 hour of sleep! We live about 45 minutes from the airport and debated between driving ourselves and paying a crazy amount for parking, getting a private shuttle van or staying at a hotel by DIA. Obviously this was way too early to ask anyone to drive us.
Our flight from Denver was departing at 6:00 am. By the time we were about 1 week out, and after canceling and re booking at least 20 times, we had our final price of $389!! That’s more like it! Of course we were praying that price would come down.
We prefer full size cars because as you’ll see in a photo on our arrival day….we are not light travelers! LOL We booked Alamo, a full size car for $638 for 14 days. I booked thru Costco as soon as our flights were settled. The prices actually do fluctuate quite a bit at different times of the day. I do the same dance with the car rental checking once or twice daily. With the air miles sale, we were able to get our tickets for 35,000 miles each round trip! Every mile saved is a mile we can put towards another trip. Normally it would be 45,000 miles each round trip.
Thankfully I was diligent in my obsessive checking because the sale only lasted 2 days. With the condo already booked for a few months we were just keeping our fingers crossed. Paul and I had been watching the United website daily, patiently waiting for the air mile deals to appear. I booked direct through the Mahana and was able to secure an excellent rate that allowed us to stay 14 nights. We stayed at the Mahana in October and loved it so much we wanted to stay there again. The weather at that time of year is “generally” perfect and the water is so warm it’s hard to get me out of it! Unless you’re waving a glass of wine at me……then I’ll come out running every time!! Just look on the right under my vacations section), we started our usual process of trying to figure out if and when we could go back! We choose to try for September. After we returned from our October – 2015 trip (Which I have completed that trip report.