How to Get a Complimentary Vacation to Atlantis Bahamas (Status Match)

Taylor and I recently went to Atlantis Bahamas for vacation and saved a lot of money on the trip. In total, we stayed at the Royal Tower at Atlantis Bahamas complimentary for 4 nights / 5 days. This would have cost us $2,018 or $504 per night but luckily we have some tricks in our back pocket to score some amazing deals!

If you aren’t aware, Atlantis Bahamas is a massive resort on Paradise Island of Nassau and it’s expensive! However, there are ways to save a tremendous amount of money, which is exactly what we did. We try to save as much money as humanly possible for every trip we go on so we can go on more and more trips!

Here’s a video of our time at Atlantis Bahamas, giving you a walking tour so you know exactly what to expect!

Let’s dive into the details on how we saved over $2,700 for our vacation.

How to get to Bahamas – Free Flights (only pay taxes)

If you don’t know already, Taylor and I rarely pay for flights. These days, we try to keep our travel cost to an absolute minimum by using points and miles to travel for nearly FREE. Yes! That’s right FREE. We do this by what many call “travel hacking”, which is leveraging credit cards to accumulate a lot, and I mean A LOT of frequent flier points and miles. Once we accumulate the points and miles we then redeem them for free flights and free hotels.

Many friends and families constantly asked about our travel adventures and ask how we afford it. Because of the feedback, we built an online course to teach you exactly how we do it, so you can start saving money on vacations too.

Using Miles For Your Flight

There are many ways to use miles to get to Nassau Bahamas. Depending on where you live you can fly American Airlines, Delta, United, Southwest, and Jet Blue directly to Nassau Bahamas. Fortunately, all of these airlines have frequent flier programs that let you redeem miles/points for flights, saving you hundreds of dollars.

Our main airport is Philadelphia, which has a direct non-stop route to Nassau Bahamas on American Airlines. We wanted to fly non-stop so we knew to look for a redemption method with American Airlines. Looking at the cash value for a non-stop flight from PHL to NAS cost $571 round trip for 1 person.

If you’re using American miles, a flight from North America to the Carribean typically costs 15,000 miles each way (30,000 miles total).

We Leveraged British Airway Avios to Fly on American Airlines

However, British Airways is a travel partner of American Airlines and instead of paying 15,000 miles each way, you can pay 15,000 miles round trip using British Airways Miles (also known as British Avios) for the exact same flight!!! We teach you about the airline alliances and miles partner programs in our online course so you can learn these techniques too.

British Airways recently devauled their short haul flights in North America for any flight booked after on May 31st. Now I believe it will cost 18,000 miles round trip (still beating American Airlines!).

Below is the redemption of our flight to the Bahamas redeemed through British Airways on the exact same flight listed above.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to avoid paying the hefty tax the Bahamas charges every passenger flying out of the country. But our total cost of the flight was only $112.93 each instead of $571 through American.

We saved $458.07 each ($571 – 112.93 = $458.07) or $916.14 total! That makes a big difference when deciding whether or not we can afford a vacation.

Save on Hotel Costs with a Complimentary Vacation to Atlantis Bahamas – Status Match

Atlantis Resort is very expensive if you’re trying to pay cash for your stay. For those Marriott fans, Atlantis Resort is technically affiliated with Marriott so you can use your Marriott points to redeem a vacation at Atlantis.

However, you still have to pay resort fees as well as taxes when redeeming points. In fact, there is a better way to travel to Atlantis without using any Marriott points.

Instead of redeeming points, simply take advantage of a status match! Caesars casino has a partnership with Atlantis resort offering a free night stay for Ceasar’s total rewards Platinum, or Diamond members.

We chose to go off-peak to stay at the more luxurious Royal Tower hotel instead of The Beach hotel tower. We wrote a review of the Royal Tower and what you can expect if you plan on staying there.

How did we do the Caesars status match?

Now unless you’re a big-time gambler, you’re likely not a Caesars Platinum or Diamond Total Rewards Member.

However, since we have Diamond Status with Hilton Hotels we are able to status match our way to Caesar’s Diamond Total Rewards.

Instead of spending money on hotels and staying at Hilton’s for 60 nights to get elite status, we leverage credit cards. With Hilton elite status we are able to status match our way to the complimentary 4 night 5-day stay at Atlantis.

I teach how to perform the status match in our travel hacking course which you can sign up here.

How to Save Money While Traveling – Online Course

Summary – How much money did we save?

If we paid for our travel in cash, without using any travel techniques, Taylor and I would have no savings.

The total cash price of this trip is a whopping $3,160 and if we spent this kind of money on every vacation, we’d probably go broke!

If you recall from the screenshot above, our flights on American Airlines was $571 per person. Multiply $571 by 2 and that brings you to a total of $1,142 total. In addition to our flights, the costs of the hotel room during our dates was $2,018, see screenshot below.

Luckily due to the status match, we were able to save an incredible amount of money! We only had to pay for the resort fees and the VAT tax, which came out to $66 a night or $264!

Here’s our email confirmation that we had 4 complimentary nights thanks to the status match.

Tallying up our savings:

Airfare Cash Price: $1,141	Airfare Redeemed:  30,000 British Airways Avios Points and $225	Savings = $916
Hotel Cash Price $2,018	Hotel Redeemed: Status Match $264	Savings = $1,754
Casino $100 Free Slot Play	$100 Free Slot Play turned into $73 cash!	Savings = $73
Total Savings = $2,743. Total out of pocket costs for both airfare & hotel totaled only $416

As you can see from the table above we were able to save over $2,500 on our vacation to Atlantis and only spent $416 on both our flights and hotel for 4 nights and 5 days.

Travel hacking allows us to travel way more often without having to worry about spending all of our money. The more money we can save the more places we can see!

Any Questions?!?

I hope this post opened your eyes to the power of travel hacking and to use these techniques if you have any interests in getting a complimentary stay at Atlantis Resort! If you have any questions on how to get a complimentary vacation to Atlantis Bahamas then leave a comment below!