I don’t hate winter, truly I don’t. However, even I enjoy a little sunny respite to get through the cold, dark months. My favorite time to escape is around January 41st, right around the time when Pittsburgh’s third polar vortex hits. Last year we didn’t plan a winter sun escape and I solemnly swore to plan a warm island adventure for the next year.

One of my favorite little free tools for this hobby is PointsYeah. There are many such paid and unpaid sites like this that help you figure out how to find good award availability; however this site has a feature called “Daydream Explorer” which lets you search from up to 3 regions to up to 3 other regions and play with ranges of dates. You can also filter out the type of points you actually have, the number of stops you’re willing to take, the amount of taxes and fees, and on and on. Through searching PIT to Caribbean, I found that there was pretty cheap award availability to Aruba at around the time I wanted to skip town, and thus our trip was born.

My favorite search 🙂

We found roundtrip flights on American Airlines for 20,500 points and around $95 in fees per ticket, and booked it. When we were about a month away from the trip, our college age daughter decided she would come with us too, and I was able to find her a Jet Blue flight there for 7,000 points plus $15.60 in fees. The return flight for her was a little trickier – there was not a lot of availability at one month out for the day she wanted to travel. It turned out that Southwest had the lowest award fare at 25,000 points plus around $80 in taxes and fees. Flexibility is key in this endeavor, and if you can’t be flexible with dates, then having a stash of points across many programs comes in handy.

If you have Alaskan Airlines/ATMOS rewards, the American flight can be booked pretty standardly for 12,500 points each way with slightly higher fees as they impose an additional $12.50 partner airline booking fee. When scrambling to leave the island a little earlier than expected due to the impending snowmageddon in the US, we found, to our surprise, that we were able to find a Delta flight for 8,000 points (actually, 6,800 points because Tom gets a discount as a Delta Amex card holder). All of this to say, there are many options to book award flights from Pittsburgh to Aruba. Most of the programs have dynamic pricing, meaning you can find great deals but sometimes points prices can be higher than 50,000. No thanks. The return fees out of Queen Beatrix airport are all around $80. Please enjoy my completely non-exhaustive chart below:

Airline	1:1 Transfer Partners	Lowest Points Price per One-Way
American Airlines	Citi Thank You Points	10,000 points
Alaskan Airlines	BILT Rewards	12,500 points
Delta	American Express*	As low as 8,000 points
Jet Blue	Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo	As low as 7,000
Southwest	Chase, BILT	As low as 7,500

*American Express charges a transfer fee to US airlines of $6 per 10,000 points up to a max of $99

Now, before blindly booking these flights, I wanted to make sure we had somewhere reasonable to stay. Pretty much all of the major hotel brands have a property or three in Aruba. I started out by looking at the Hyatt Regency, which is a Category 7 hotel with standard award availability of 30,000 points per night. This hotel also has a Regency Club, and I happen to have Hyatt club certificates I rarely get to use. These certificates can be applied to get free breakfast and nightly hors d’oeuvres for the length of your stay. This hotel is massive with great pools and sits right on Palm Beach. Alas, there was not award availability for every night of our intended stay, so I moved on to Hilton. 

View from our balcony

After comparing the Embassy Suites Aruba and the Hilton Aruba Resort and Casino, which had similar standard room rates of 85,000 vs 90,000 points per night,  we opted for the Embassy Suites. What put me over the edge was that every room is a 2-room suite that can sleep up to 5-6 people. Additionally, each reservation includes daily breakfast and nightly snack and drink reception. This hotel sits off the beach slightly, but there is tunnel access to a private beach with plenty of palapas and lounge chairs. Here’s my brief list of pros and cons for this hotel.

Pros

• Close enough to both the Palm Beach and Eagle beach scenes of bars and restaurants but removed enough to not feel like you are on an episode of MTV’s Spring Break.
• Great pool with a large hot tub. We never had any trouble finding lounge chairs/shade
• Amazing free breakfast spread with many hot dishes, fresh fruit, omelet station and more. The entire hotel had access to this the but lines and table availability never felt difficult
• Two free drink coupons per guest per evening with rotating fun drinks as well as beer/wine/classic cocktails. This was a really nice touch.
• Access to a quiet beach with chairs and palapas – we never had any issue getting chairs.
• Very kind, helpful staff.
• Nearly every room had an ocean view with a balcony.
• Free (and extremely easy) parking.

Cons

• The beach area was great for us, but there are no amenities other than the chairs and palapas. If you are looking for someone to bring you a pina colada, this is not the place
• The beach looks sandy, but it is sand deception. Once you are about 1 meter in, the rocks and coral starts. No big deal if you bring water shoes.
• The snack/drink reception is a lovely touch, but the line to the bar gets long and the snacks get descended upon by all of us, the vulture guests of the entire hotel. Ultimately, if you set your expectations and remember that everyone in the 330 room hotel has access to these perks and plans to take advantage of them, you will have a better happy hour!
• For us, being a 10-15 minute walk from the hubbub was great, but for some this might not be what you’re looking for. There were a couple of restaurants close by, a favorite of ours was Poke-Ono, which was right in the next condo complex, but most everything else is about a 15 minute walk.

Embassy Suites Aruba beach area

The Embassy Suites ended up the perfect choice for our travel sensibilities. A couple of other interesting options for points accommodations are the Radisson Blu, Tryp by Wyndham, and the Holiday Inn Resort. The Radisson Blu  is of particular interest as you can book a spacious two bedroom suite that sleeps four for 30,000 Choice points per night. Since Citi points transfer to Choice at a rate of 2 to 1, that’s 15,000 Choice points. You could have a rather luxurious Caribbean get away for 60-75,000 Citi Points, which is about what the sign up bonus is for the Strata Premier.

While most of our trip was spent lounging at the pool and beach (until it was cut short by the great snowstorm of 2026), I would be remiss to not share about our favorite activity, which was a relatively short hike from Daimari beach to Conchi natural pool in Arikok National Park. This hike was about 3 miles round trip of easy to moderate hiking. Most of it was along the coast with beautiful ocean views. The end reward was a dip in a deep pool that formed in the middle of a rock formation at the edge of the sea.

We set out for our hike around 9am and saw very few people along the trail. There were plenty of people at the pool as there are jeep tours that take people to it, but there was still plenty of room to cool off after the sunny hike.

Conchi Natural Pool

To do this hike, you have to first purchase Arikok admission wrist bands ($22.00 per adult over 18, free for kids) at the Santa Cruz visitor center, and then drive about 10-15 minutes to the trail head. The dirt road to the trail head is a little rough in places, but we had no problem with the tiny Honda HRV SUV we got as our rental. There is a much longer hike right from the visitor center, but with temps hanging out around 80 degrees, we preferred the 3 miler to the 7 miler.

Our little rental got over some rough terrain on the dirt road

Two logistical notes to add: We rented a car, but the island is so small, it would be very possible to use rideshare to get around. We also noticed both a National and Enterprise rental center very close by in the Palm Beach area. It would be very easy to rent a car for just a day if you wanted to explore. Additionally, leaving Queen Beatrix airport was a slightly longer process because we also went through pre-clearance with US Customs Border Protection before boarding our plane. Keep this in mind to not cut it too close getting to the airport. The great news is, once you de-plane stateside, you’re free to go.

All in all, this was the perfect little family escape. I’m not sure Aruba was on my “need to get there” list, but I’m happy we took advantage of some great deals to go. The relative ease of getting there with many options to play around with for flights and hotels make this island a travel hacker’s dream.

One of the many gorgeous views on our hike