Welcome to my first trip report! At the beginning of each trip report I publish, I’ll be posting an introduction post that includes some details about the planning/booking, and some highlights of the trip.
3 weeks ago, my dad and I spent a couple nights in Denver. There was no particular reason for this trip, but after we had to cancel an August trip to Hawaii, I was desperate to go somewhere. We ended up picking Denver due the ease of flying there for a short trip and the affordable prices.
Of course, we were flying United. The outbound flight was on a United 737 MAX 9, which was very exciting for me as it was my first time flying the plane. The return was on a less exciting 737-900. Although, I think the 737-900 is my favourite jet in United’s narrowbody fleet.
We applied 20 PlusPoints per person, per direction, since my dad had an excess of them that needed to be used up. They cleared on the outbound leg, but for the return we were stuck in Economy Plus. The coach experience on United’s 737-900s isn’t bad at all, however.
As for the hotels, I opted to try out two different ones – both for the sake of this blog, and for fun. We spent the first night at the Hilton Denver City Center, which was convenient for our late arrival. For a reason that is unknown to me, everything in Denver was pricing at peak rates that weekend. So the Hilton was a great deal – especially because it cost $50 less than the nearby Holiday Inn Express.
The second night I chose to stay at the Element Denver Downtown East. We had an expiring Marriott free night certificate, and this seemed like the best place to use it. Unfortunately, thanks to the peak pricing, we couldn’t stay at any of the Category 5 properties. Even though we were redeeming it for a hotel that only cost 30k points per night, I would still say we got a solid value out of the certificate, given that the paid rate was just over $300 including taxes and fees.
Both hotels were decent, although nothing special. We did run into some service issues at the Element, which I’ll cover more in a later post.
All in all, I had a good trip to Denver. The highlights included accidentally discovering delicious Neapolitan pizza, catching the last of the fall foliage, and walking a half-marathon over the course of 10 hours.
Keep a lookout for the next installments of this trip report, which will be coming in the following days.
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