We debated leaving out the US from our travel budget but let’s be real, it’s coming from the same stash of money so it’s going in the budget. Although our time in the US was brief and most of it was spent at my parent’s house, these outrageous US prices gave us (reverse?) sticker shock. We ended up covering the wedding hotels with free nights / points and covering the long-haul flight into the US with points. Additionally, we took a few domestic flights that we paid in cash with, which weren’t cheap.

Here is the breakdown:

– Flights were our most expensive category at $789. We used points to get us home from Tbilisi to NYC, however, when using points, you sometimes have to pay taxes and fees. We transferred 120,000 points to Turkish Airlines for this flight. For this flight the taxes/fees were $276. We also flew from NYC to Chicago ($335) and Chicago to Houston ($177)

– We also used IHG points of 108,000 for 4 free nights in NYC (NYC hotel prices are no joke)

– We also both redeemed our free night with our IHG cards for 2 nights in Chicago

Everything we did while in USA can be found in our USA Itinerary.

Click here to see what we spent in New Zealand.