Hi, friends! Today I’m excited to share what we spent on our recent trip to Hawaii! Jacob and I spent a week on the island of Kauai soaking up all the sun, adventure and culture the island has to offer.

We had been planning this Kauai vacation since October 2017. That month, Jacob and I became debt-free, and we even went on a Caribbean cruise with my husband’s family! It was an awesome vacation. But when we got home, we were looking forward to our next trip.

We created a budget for our Kauai vacation in October. I estimated the costs of airfare, hotel, rental car, food and activities and came to a grand total. We then created a sinking fund for this trip. I divided up the total cost by the number of months remaining until the trip and we saved that amount each month! A sinking fund is the perfect way to plan for a vacation.

We Did Not Travel-Hack

I want to preface this post by sharing with you that we did not travel-hack with this trip. I’ve read many other blog posts about how to travel for basically free thanks to a web of different credit cards and their rewards. For those of you who do travel-hacking, props to you! But it is WAY too complicated and stressful for me. ha!

But I do know that we did save A LOT of money on this trip. And it was simply by planning, setting a budget, and being proactive about finding a deal (which I’ll be sharing in this post).

I’ll also say that we fully enjoyed ourselves during this trip. We experienced a lot and spent money where we wanted to spend it in order to fully enjoy this trip. All this to say, you can have a FANTASTIC vacation even when you’re on a budget and trying to save money. Here’s how we did it.

Airfare – $527.00 

Contrary to Dave Ramsey’s beliefs, we do use credit cards, which we use responsibly and pay off in full each month. One of the two we have is an Alaska Airlines credit card, which we got in June of 2017. With the Alaska Airlines credit card, every year you get a free companion fare!

We used our companion fare with Alaska to book this flight. Meaning that we got two tickets for the price of one. I booked a round trip flight from Portland, Oregon to Lihue, Kauai in early May.

When I booked our flight in October, I paid over $800 for the tickets. The day after I bought the ticket, I noticed the price went down $100! And since it had been less than 24 hours, I called Alaska and they refunded me the $100 straight to my bank account.

Alaksa also has a policy where if the price goes down until the day before your flight, you can call up and they’ll issue you a credit for the difference that you can use on a future flight! So every day, I’d check the flight. And if it went down (even $10), I’d call Alaska to get my credit. Although this isn’t cash right back in my pocket, we ended up with over $200 in credits. Which I recently used to cover half of our flights to L.A. in December! It was an awesome deal.

So as a total, we spent $527 on 2 round trip flights from Portland to Lihue.

Rental Car & Gas – $273.03

I am a child of a military family so we have USAA. I love everything about USAA. And one benefit they offer is discount car rentals. Between Costco travel and USAA rental cars, I kept checking websites for the cheapest car I could find.

I ended up booking one first with Costco for over $375 for the week. But as time went on, I checked both websites every day. And it eventually worked out that booking with Hertz through USAA was a cheaper rate! The great thing about booking a rental car is that you don’t pay at the time of booking, but you reserve the rate. So I booked, canceled and rebooked about 8 times between October and May.

The cheapest car I found was with Hertz and the USAA discount for $234.47 for the week. We rented an economy sedan, but it was all we needed for the week! We ended up with a 2017 Nissan Altima. And since we drive 20 year old cars anyway, we felt like we were living the life of luxury in that thing all week! Back up camera, aux port, automatic locks, whatttttt?!?! We were well pleased. 🙂

And since the car got over 32 mpg (far better than our cars) we drove around the island every day and only had to fill up once! So we paid $38.56 at Costco gas and called it a week!

Hotel – $264.64

This is the main thing that really helped us keep our expenses low for this trip. For Christmas, my parents wanted us to use their hotel points for our vacation! So we split our time between the Hilton Garden Inn at Wailua Bay and the Worldmark at Kapaa Shores. Both were great hotels! Nothing too fancy, but they both had great pools and were right on the beach so what more could you ask for?

We paid the daily resort fee at the Hilton. Included in the resort fee were free Mai Tais every night as well as a free bike rental and free beach mats. You bet we went to the bar every night for our free drinks! And one day when it was a little cooler, we did the bike rental along the coast. It was so fun with a great view, and the price of free was also great!

You may have heard about the recent flooding on the Kauai north shore (receiving over 50 inches of rain in 24 hours). The flooding occurred almost over a month before we were there, but we did see some of the damage left. The beach at the Hilton was actually covered in log debris washed down the shore. It was crazy! So we didn’t actually get to go out the beach and water there, but there were plenty of other beaches on the island that we took advantage of!

Activities – $425.15

Now for the super fun parts of our trip! When we went to Hawaii on our honeymoon, we were super poor and felt like we couldn’t spend money. So this was something that we planned to spend money on back when we first planned the trip.

The first activity we did was a luau at Smith’s Family Luau. The grounds there are amazing, the food is delicious, and the show was beautiful. This is definitely the best luau on the island. It was $196 for the both of us so not cheap, but you have to do a luau at least once in your life!

The second activity we did was a UTV tour at Kipu Ranch. This was a thrill and Jacob’s highlight of the trip. We got to drive our own UTV around a private ranch. With that, we learned about movies that were filmed right in that location (including Jurassic Park!) and then we took the trails through the jungle. We crossed mud, dirt, rocks and more. And we ended at a waterfall! It was an awesome 2 hour excursion and cost us $229.15

We also did an amazing sunset sail which you can check out more about here.

Free Activities – $0

The awesome thing about being on Kauai is that there is a TON to do for free! Some things we did that cost us the gas to get there was exploring Hawaiian towns like Hanalei, Lihue, Poipu, and Waimea. Just wandering the island streets with local chickens is enough to soak in those vacation vibes. And lounging on the beach is a free activity I’ll always say yes to!

We also did a lot of free sight-seeing. We drove up to see Waimea falls (although I will forewarn you that there is hardly any parking) which was neat and easy access. A drive over to the Waimea canyon was planned for our last day, where the views were breath-taking!

We went up the Princeville on the North Shore to see Queen’s bath. It’s a little hike down to a naturally-made pool of water. Although during the time of year we went, the pool wasn’t fully enclosed. And having had rain the night before we were there, it was a treacherous muddy hike down. I stopped half way down after falling once and let Jacob go the rest of the way and take pictures. 🙂

There are several ways to enjoy this island for free and we definitely took advantage of that!

Food – $292.19

Similar to our activities during our honeymoon, we also didn’t really eat out during that trip. And we wanted to change that for this Hawaiian vacation! So I had budgeted $30 per person per day, coming out to $420 for the entire trip. But we actually spent a lot less! And we ate at a lot of different places! I was actually surprised to see that prices were honestly the same if not cheaper than Portland.

We ended up twice at Verde which was delicious! And Happy Hour was a great deal. A burrito was enough to feed the both of us which meant that we got to try out more restaurants while on vacation. 🙂

We also went to Puka Dog in PoiPu. A fun and yummy take on a traditional hot dog, but Hawaiian style. They were $8 a piece (pretty spendy for a hot dog…) but was great to try once!

We tried the Hawaiian BBQ sample platter in Hanalei at Chicken in a Barrel. And for $20, the platter feed us both plenty! It was delicious and authentic.

We also had our fair share of shave ice! We did stop one evening at Panda Express because we weren’t very hungry, but let’s pretend that we didn’t and ate something out a coconut instead. 😉

When we first landed in Lihue, we went straight to Costco to grab some groceries, which also helped us keep food costs down. We picked up fruit and muffins for breakfast, cheese and crackers for snacks, chocolate-covered mangoes for dessert and water bottles to keep on hand. It was very affordable to stock up on snacks at Costco so that we only at out 1-2 times per day depending on how hungry we were.

Misc – $100.00

As with any household budget, it’s important to keep a miscellaneous budget line item in your vacation budget! We took out $100 of cash before our trip. We used this cash for our friends who took us to the airport, tips throughout the trips, and souvenir spending money. I always by an ornament wherever I go, so I had to purchase one on the island!

Since we just kept the money in our wallets, I don’t know exactly how much we spent… But I believe we were right around $100. This gave us the permission to pick up a few extra things and treat ourselves on this vacation!

#DebtFreeVacations Are Awesome!

Now that we are debt-free, Jacob and I are excited to be able to travel more! And just because we’re traveling on a budget doesn’t mean that we don’t get to enjoy ourselves. We had an amazing time on this trip of a life time. We were able to eat delicious food, explore this island to its fullest, and experience some amazing activities–all while spending a conservative amount on a vacation and staying under budget!

What is your favorite place to travel on a budget?