How I'm Turning Our Wedding Expenses Into 250,000+ Hotel Points for Our Honeymoon

I'm using our wedding expenses to pay for our honeymoon, and the whole idea rests on one boring fact: we were going to spend that money regardless. The florist, the reception, the deposits — those bills exist whether or not I'm thinking about points.

So instead of paying them from a debit card, we're running the eligible ones through a hotel credit card we opened specifically for the wedding. Same expenses, same budget, but now they're also earning points we can spend on a trip afterward.

By the time the wedding is over, we expect to have at least 250,000 hotel points sitting there for the honeymoon. Nothing about our spending changed. Only where the payment went.

There are two pieces stacked on top of each other, and it helps to see them separately.

The venue. Our reception is at an IHG property, and when we booked, they told us we'd get 60,000 IHG points just for holding the wedding there. I didn't do anything clever to earn that — I asked, and it was part of what they offer. That's the part I'd never have known about if I hadn't brought it up.

The card. We opened the IHG Premier card to put our wedding expenses on. It has a $99 annual fee, and when we opened it, it had a 180,000 point welcome offer. Wedding spending is the one time in my life when hitting a welcome offer isn't a stretch — the bills are already lined up.

Add the 60,000 from the venue to the welcome bonus and we're at 250,000 points minimum before I've even started thinking about flights.

Only put expenses on a rewards card that you were already planning to pay off in full. That's the whole thing. Points earned on a balance you're carrying at credit card interest rates aren't free — they're expensive, and the math turns against you fast.

For us that meant being honest about which wedding costs we had cash for and which ones we didn't. The ones we had cash for went on the card and got paid off. The card is a routing tool, not extra money.

A few other things I keep an eye on, because they're easy to forget in wedding chaos:

• Vendor fees. Some vendors add a surcharge for card payments, so I check before assuming the card is the better route.
• The annual fee. $99 is a real cost, not a rounding error, and I'd rather name it out loud than pretend the points are free.
• Timing. Welcome offers come with a spending window, and wedding payments are spread over months. I wanted to know those dates lined up before counting on anything.

Welcome offers also change constantly. The one we got was the one available when we applied — I'd never assume the same numbers are sitting there today.

This isn't the first time I've done it. Last year we went to Japan and got around eight free hotel nights from credit card points, which saved us literally thousands of dollars. That trip is what convinced me the effort is worth it.

Hotel nights are the part of travel where points feel most obviously useful to me. Eight nights is a real chunk of a trip's cost, and covering it with points I'd earned on spending I was doing anyway made the whole trip feel completely different.

So when the wedding venue mentioned points, my brain went straight to the honeymoon. The pattern already worked once.

Honestly, the fun part right now is that we don't know where we're going. I've been browsing properties and there seem to be a lot of genuinely good options, which is a nice problem to have — usually I'm picking a destination first and then wincing at hotel prices.

Doing it the other way around, points first, changes the search. I'm looking at places I probably wouldn't have priced out at all if we were paying cash.

If you've used credit card points for your honeymoon, I want to know where you went. That's genuinely the research I'm doing at this stage.