Takeaways from a trip cancelled at the last minute

I’ve often said that one of the things I value most about award travel is flexibility. Before I began in this hobby, everything I booked was nonrefundable. Being able to change and cancel award flights and stays has been an absolute game-changer over the decade-plus that I’ve been in the hobby. However, this year I’ve booked a number of nonrefundable plans, including some for a trip I was supposed to have been on right now. Then, life reminded me why I valued flexibility. Let my canceled plans be a reminder to you that flexibility is worth something.

Devastating wildfires in Utah led us to cancel plans

We had plans to fly to Salt Lake City, Utah, on Saturday, June 27th, to spend 8 nights at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley in Park City this week. I know that Park City is more of a winter destination, but the area looks beautiful, so we were excited to explore.

I made use of several credits and savings techniques in preparation for this trip:

• We used Several Fine Hotels + Resorts® credits from Platinum cards for the hotel
• We purchased tickets to see the Monster Jam World Finals in Salt Lake City this weekend (my kids love monster trucks) using my wife’s Chase Sapphire Reserve card’s January to June $150 StubHub credit (tickets were more than $150, so we redeemed Capital One Shopping rewards for a StubHub gift card for the balance above $150)
• We bought a gift card for Matteo Ristorante Italiano, a restaurant on Sapphire Reserve Tables in Salt Lake City, to use the associated credit on my wife’s Sapphire Reserve card last year
• A rental car booked with Sixt after clicking through from a Capital One Shopping offer for 45% back and intending to stack an Amex offer for $100 back on $500 or more

As the trip approached, I was embarrassingly unaware of the devastating wildfires that were and still are happening in Utah; I’ve since read that they are the worst fires in the state in recorded history. I had not been following the news and was completely unaware until an email came through from the hotel last Friday (likely sent to all guests with 4th of July reservations), noting that the Governor of Utah had issued a ban on fireworks for the 4th of July weekend. The Grand Hyatt Deer Valley was making guests aware that its fireworks show was cancelled and that the hotel would be providing transport to a drone show in Park City.

If not for that proactive email from the Grand Hyatt (huge credit to them for emailing guests in advance), I wouldn’t have found out until we arrived that air quality was expected to be poor this week in Park City, with smoke floating from other nearby fires (not even the largest fires in the state) affecting Park City and Salt Lake City. Quite a few members of our Facebook group shared opinions and experiences on the ground, which quickly made it obvious that we should cancel our trip. We had been due to fly out on Saturday morning, so this was a last-minute decision (less than 12 hours before we were due to take off).

Obviously, needing to cancel our trip pales in comparison to the difficulties faced by many in Utah this week. Beyond the obvious physical loss and life-threatening nature of the situation, I am familiar with the emotional toll associated with losses from natural disasters. My heart truly goes out to those affected.

My own canceled plans aren’t nearly so important, but as this is a blog about maximizing ways to travel for less, I thought it pertinent to share some of my own mistakes (and some of the things that worked out well) in my approach to this trip.

My mistakes

I booked a prepaid/non-flexible car rental

As noted at the top, I highly value flexibility. As a result, I usually avoid any sort of advanced purchase/prepaid options that restrict cancellation. For rental cars, I almost always book a rate paid for at the counter that can be cancelled up until the time of pick-up.

However, there was an Amex offer expiring at the end of May that was good for $100 back on $500 or more at Sixt.com.

That offer required making payment directly with Sixt before May 31st. At the time, there was also a Capital One Shopping offer in my email for 45% back on a Sixt rental, and Sixt happened to have a price that was among the best for my eight-day rental. I booked a prepaid rate through Sixt of about $530. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t get the $100 Amex offer credit. That was disappointing.

More disappointing yet was the fact that since this was a prepaid rate, it was not fully flexible. If I had canceled at least 24 hours in advance, the penalty would have been $100. Since I was canceling fewer than 24 hours in advance, Sixt charged a penalty of $200. Oddly, Sixt’s cancellation penalty is $200 plus tax, so the penalty actually worked out to be about $236.

The good news is that I did get almost $300 back on the cancellation, and although I paid $24.95 for the Amex premium rental car protection, I expect to get that back (though it looks like I’ll have to manually request that credit). The bad news is that ignoring my own preference for a flexible rental cost me $230. I shouldn’t have chased the Amex offer — I should’ve stuck with a flexible booking.

StubHub credit lost (again) & lesson learned

I mentioned above that we had used my wife’s Sapphire Reserve StubHub credit from the first half of 2026 in conjunction with gift cards redeemed from Capital One Shopping to purchase tickets to see Monster Jam in Salt Lake City. The full cost of the tickets we purchased was more than $500. Unfortunately, we won’t be recapturing anywhere near that much.

I immediately listed the tickets for sale on StubHub, and 3 out of 4 of them have sold, but at a significant loss, which is to be expected given the recent conditions in Salt Lake City and the fact that we’re pretty close to event date. There’s not much I could have done differently here, but it does illustrate a potential drawback of the StubHub credit. We used it to buy more expensive tickets than we otherwise would have to an event far in advance, and we ultimately couldn’t make it. This is actually the second event for which we purchased expensive tickets only to ultimately miss the event (one of our kids got sick, and we missed a touring performance of Dancing with the Stars in February, which we had purchased in part with the credit from last year). We’re 0-for-2 on StubHub.

In the future, I’ll look to use these credits for nearer-term events and/or avoid spending far above the credit since the ability to recapture the money is limited if we can’t make an event. Truthfully, this “benefit” has now cost us hundreds of dollars that we may not have spent without it, and we haven’t yet attended anything.

My multi-Platinum approach made cancelling and re-using credits challenging

My wife and I have multiple Platinum cards in our household, both Business and Consumer. One of the marquee benefits of those cards is up to $600 per year in semi-annual credits for prepaid Fine Hotels + Resorts® or The Hotel Collection bookings ($300 from January to June and $300 from July to December).

As we approach the end of 2025, I noticed that the Deer Valley Suite at Grand Hyatt Deer Valley was selling for between $300 and $400 per night during the last week of June 2026. That was less than the price for a standard room at the time.

On December 30th, I booked several dates during this week, one day at a time, to use the $300 credits across multiple Platinum cards. Then, early in the new year, I booked a couple more nights with some of our January to June 2026 credits. I did not expect to get multiple property credits by booking several back-to-back nights since the official FHR policy is that you’ll only get the $100 property credit once per stay, even if you book back-to-back nights separately. However, we would still get a great room at a nice hotel, free breakfast, and I’d earn both Hyatt elite night credit and Hyatt points on the stay (Note that to get the Hyatt stays attached to my World of Hyatt profile, I did have to chat with Hyatt support and provide my confirmation numbers, asking them to add my World of Hyatt number to each reservation. Then, the reservations all showed up in my Hyatt app).

On the one hand, booking the nights individually worked out OK. The Grand Hyatt Deer Valley had a three-day cancellation policy, so we were able to easily cancel six of our nights (Monday through Saturday night) without penalty.

However, that made for a real headache as the credits started to roll in for cancellations. Some of those nights had been booked using late 2025 credits, and others had been booked in January 2026.  After getting refunded for all of those bookings, I assumed that Amex would claw back the Platinum Hotel Credits from my December 2025 bookings, but I wanted to re-book new FHR reservations for any of the bookings made in 2026 to make sure that I still used my $300 credit for bookings made between January and June 2026. It didn’t help that I immediately began booking, cancelling, and rebooking as we tried to create new plans to use Platinum hotel credits on short notice.

It took me a lot of time to sort out which charges and which credits corresponded to which reservations. I spent hours yesterday poring over old confirmation emails and new statement credits to be as sure as I could be that I had bookings from January to June 2026 that would correspond with all of our early 2026 credits. Thankfully, I haven’t had last year’s Platinum hotel credits clawed back after receiving the refunds from my late 2025 reservations, though they certainly may yet be clawed back.

Ultimately, my own lack of organization here cost me a lot of time and headache in figuring out which cards I had to use to make new bookings before June 30th in order to make sure that I retained my January to June 2026 Platinum hotel credits. I wish I had kept a spreadsheet with all of the reservations, prices, and associated cards so that I would have easily known which reservations/credits were associated with which time period (and which hotel!). Moving forward, I’m going to commit to being more organized with my future FHR bookings (and cancelling a couple of our Platinum cards).

The Sapphire Tables gift card workaround would have been great….

One of the many benefits of the Chase Sapphire Reserve card is up to $300 per year in statement credits for charges at restaurants specifically listed in the OpenTable list of Sapphire Exclusive Tables. Since those Sapphire Exclusive Tables restaurants are mostly limited to bigger cities, we hadn’t been able to use my wife’s late 2025 credit before the end of December.

Some folks have had success buying a restaurant gift card for a restaurant that they intend to visit in the future. We purchased a $150 gift card for Matteo Ristorante Italiano in Salt Lake City at the end of December 2025. Sure enough, the gift card purchase triggered the statement credit. We intended to enjoy a meal at Matteo’s during our 8-day stay in nearby Park City. Unfortunately, with the trip now canceled, we now find ourselves with a $150 gift card for a restaurant across the country, in a city we’ve actually never visited. I do hope that we are able to re-plan Park City for sometime next spring or summer. Hopefully, Matteo’s will still be there and we’ll get a chance to use that gift card. If not, I don’t imagine that we’ll plan a trip to Salt Lake City just to visit Matteo’s, delicious as it may be.

Positive outcomes

Grand Hyatt Deer Valley deserves a lot of credit

First, credit where credit is due: the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley deserves some kudos here. They didn’t have to email guests more than a week in advance to alert them to the fact that fireworks had been canceled across the entire state of Utah. I imagine some hotel managers wouldn’t have proactively done that for fear of people like me canceling their trips. The fact that they still took that initiative really says a lot about the quality of service from the hotel leadership.

But that wasn’t the only way they impressed me. I noted that the hotel had a 3-day cancellation policy, meaning that reservations could be cancelled for a full refund at least 3 days in advance, but they became nonrefundable within 3 days. Since I was canceling reservations on Friday night, and thanks to having a collection of one-night reservations, I easily canceled Monday through Saturday night through Amex for a full refund of each night. However, my reservations for Saturday and Sunday night were non-refundable since I was cancelling close-in. I tried to change dates via Amex, but despite the system letting me search for new dates, it told me that the room wasn’t available on any future dates. As a result, I emailed the hotel early Saturday morning to let them know of our change in plans. I said that I would really appreciate it if they were able to waive the cancellation penalty for Saturday and Sunday night, but that I understood that the situation was no more within their control than it was within mine. I didn’t expect them to agree to waive the cancellation penalty, but much to my surprise, they emailed back the same day to confirm that they canceled my reservations and waived the cancellation penalty. Sure enough, I was refunded for those bookings. I was really surprised and incredibly appreciative that they were willing to do that. I would never expect this property or any other to waive the penalty in this type of situation, but the takeaways for me are that it is worth asking and that the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley offers well above-average service. I hope to get a chance to visit this property in the future.

Flights were easy to cancel, and credits have been reused

Our flights were the easiest piece of the puzzle, thankfully.

In February, we had booked our flights to Salt Lake City using Southwest flight credits that had been generated in December 2025. Those flight credits already had an expiration date in December 2026, and we used them to book a “Choice” fare to Salt Lake City. Because we booked a Choice fare, when we cancelled, our funds retained their late 2026 expiration date.

If we had booked a “Basic” fare, our flight credits would have been due to expire six months from the date of booking. That would have meant we would be stuck with a flight credit due to expire in August 2026. If that had happened, we would have used a technique incorporating a gift card to turn that into a travel fund with no expiration date. Read more about that here.

We ultimately used that flight credit to book a flight to Las Vegas today. More on that trip to come, but a sneak preview is that we will be using:

• Some of those Jan-Jun 2026 Platinum hotel credits (a quick pivot probably worked out)
• Several of my Caesars Diamond Plus benefits from my trip to Reno
• More Capital One Shopping offers
• Chase Sapphire Reserve tables
• inKind
• and more

Unrelated to this Salt Lake City / Park City trip, we booked our flights to Las Vegas using a 20% off promo code from my wife’s Southwest credit card. We changed the flight several times over the last few days, and by choosing to change instead of cancel, we retained the discount on our re-booked flights more than one time. My understanding is that if we had canceled, we would have lost that coupon entirely, but by changing, we kept the discount on the newly booked flights each time.

Bottom line

Due to the heartbreakingly devastating wildfires in Utah, we had to cancel a planned trip to Park City this week. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow my own usual advice to focus on flexible bookings. While the flight and hotel were easily canceled, we lost money on a prepaid car rental, expensive tickets we bought to use a StubHub credit, and we ended up stuck with a gift card that we may or may not ever use.

Those minor inconveniences are certainly trivial in light of the disaster being faced by many in Utah. Nonetheless, they served as a good reminder of the value of flexibility. I also should have kept a closer eye on the news as it relates to my destination, which I hadn’t even thought to do for a domestic trip. If I had paid closer attention, I might have been able to be more proactive.

Thankfully, the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley was great about our cancellation, and we were able to pivot to use many credits and benefits over the next week in Las Vegas.

Still, this isn’t the first time this year that we’ve lost a chunk of change due to cancellations (nor is it the most significant). After taking a few hits with non-refundable bookings this year, I find myself valuing flexibility more than ever.

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