The Cost of a Free Room

Travel Unassigned - Unaccompanied Miner

Link to Laluna Review

The first night at Laluna Boutique Hotel and Villas, we were ready to eat like we were in Grenada. That was not in the plan. The food was good, but the menu leaned Italian, the owner is Italian and built the restaurant around it, which is his to decide. It was not what we had come to the table for. We got the local food we wanted during the day instead, oil down, roti, curried lambie, by way of the tours we had already booked. Just not at dinner.

It turned out to be more than a matter of taste. Dinners on-site were running $120 to $150 a night, and the math on that came clear after a single meal. Our travel usually includes one or two splurge dinners scattered among simpler, cheaper meals, not a run of $120 to $150 dinners every night. One dinner in, it already felt like a different trip than the one we had budgeted for.

My wife and I take different approaches to travel planning. Julie is the organizer. She plans for the expected and the unexpected, she is the reason we travel with sunscreen and backup sunscreen, and she maps the itinerary and the route. My method starts and mostly ends at booking efficiently with points and miles. Past that, I rely on her. I am very much the buy it when we get there traveler. So when the cost of dinner was the thing that got my attention, that meant something. Grenada has public bus and van service, but none of it reaches a property this remote. The closest stop was a twenty minute walk up and down a hilly dirt road, and with rainy season in full swing, walking it was not realistic. We had each packed a pair of shoes we would have been fine leaving behind at the end of the trip, but neither of us wanted to retire them to a muddy dirt road this early in the week.

Life is good from here-even in the rain

Rainy season, from the porch.

On the second night, the property arranged a taxi, and our driver was the one who recommended Aquarium, a restaurant only a couple of miles from the property as the crow flies, though the roads on that part of the island do not travel in straight lines, and the actual drive ran about twenty minutes each way. We went partly to get away from a menu we would have memorized by the end of the week, and partly to see what the math actually looked like. The seafood was excellent. Eighty dollars for dinner. Forty dollars for the taxi, round trip. One hundred twenty dollars, against the one hundred twenty to one hundred fifty we would have spent on-site.

Scotch Bonnet Hot Sauce- The perfect complement to my morning omlette

On-site dinner at Laluna — the $120–150 side of the math.

The test did not solve anything. Staying remote did not offer a loophole. There was a tax either way: eat on-site at a premium, on a menu that would grow stale by the end of the week, or pay a forty dollar travel premium on a dinner that already ran close to what on-site cost. None of that erases what the remoteness was giving us. It just was not something either of us weighed when we booked the property.

None of this should have surprised us, because the whole trip ran on a different kind of accounting to begin with. The room was booked with nearly 250,000 Marriott Bonvoy points across five nights, at a property listing around $500 a night, in the neighborhood of 1.0 cents per point, which is considered the floor for a decent points redemption. The tradeoff was flexibility: the reservation was for the place and the dates I actually wanted. When you chase a higher redemption value, you are usually at the mercy of someone else's calendar and someone else's map, not your own. We paid cash for the final two nights. Flights ran 44,000 Delta miles a ticket, with a global upgrade certificate that came through confirmed rather than waitlisted, which for once meant not needing a plan B. All of that is the normal apparatus of someone who has spent a career accumulating the exact currency this trip spent. None of it had anything to do with what dinner cost on night two.

We were, for a stretch of the week, close to alone on the property as overnight guests. One other guest checked out the morning after we arrived. For two days it was just us, with the run of the house: no rush to beat anyone to a spot on the beach, no schedule to work around but our own. Then a couple checked in who turned out to be friends of the owner, visiting rather than paying, worth noting on its own since even the company we had at the end was not really commercial.

Alone as guests did not mean alone on the property. Eight to ten staff were visible on a given day, more people than were paying to sleep there most of the week, and that was only the staff we could see; grounds and maintenance likely added more we never crossed paths with. The dining room still saw its own traffic: the occasional beachgoer, someone stopping in for an evening cocktail, floating through rather than staying. On two separate nights it was dinner parties of students from St. George's University, the medical school about two miles away, using the property as a nice escape to celebrate or unwind. As far as we could tell, we were alone, and that feeling is part of what a place like Laluna sells. It is real, even if the property was not as empty as it seemed. It is also why the property can hold its dinner prices: there is nowhere else to eat unless you pay for the drive, or rent a car and make the drive yourself.

Most beach days were just this crowded

The run of the house.

Add it up past the room and the flights, and the trip ran roughly $1,000 past what we had planned for. None of it showed up as one bad charge. It came in stretched across the week, close to the same one hundred twenty dollars over and over, a little at a time. A strong points valuation tells you what the bed and the flight cost. It does not tell you what the week costs. That holds true even with the best planning. Build in room for both the costs you can see coming and the ones you cannot.

None of this makes me regret going, and it does not make me think we did it wrong. It makes me think the plan needs to account for the season, and for what we actually valued about the remoteness once we had it. In high season, when the property is full and eating off-site actually has a shot at being worth it, split the stay: some nights remote, some nights closer to town, so the tax has somewhere to land besides the dinner bill. In the off season, when the two empty days and the run of the house are the whole point, the case for a full remote stay gets stronger, because that is the thing you are actually paying for. Points do know the season, in their own way: redemptions tend to run better in the off season, when retail pricing drops with demand. What they do not know is whether a full remote stay or a split stay is the trip I actually want. Working that out is my job, not the redemption's. The real benefit would have been knowing those costs were coming before we ever booked, not figuring it out one dinner at a time once we were there.