Two people, ten days, three countries on airline miles, hotel points and $1,250 in Amex Platinum FHR, Capital One and Delta Stays credits. Which card paid for what.
By Vamsi, RewardsGuru.club. Published September 14, 2026, updated October 2, 2026.
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Two of us went to Paris, Switzerland and northern Italy for ten days in late summer 2026. Nine hotel nights, eight properties, three countries, one drone that never left the bag.
This is the index to the whole thing. Eleven parts, one for each day from Day 0 to Day 10, each answering one question we could not find a straight answer to before we left, plus the wallet rule underneath all of it.
We are not going to pretend it went to plan. It did not, in ways that cost real money and one entire afternoon, and those parts are written up as carefully as the wins.
There is a market for exactly this document. A ten day Swiss itinerary sells as a PDF template for about $10, and Europe planners covering France, Switzerland and Italy sit alongside them. What you are reading is 10 daily guides and a closing ledger, roughly 20,000 words, with the receipts and the mistakes left in.
We are not charging for it, and how we do get paid is worth saying plainly, because it tells you how to read everything below.
The site earns from affiliate links to tools and retailers: award search subscriptions, shopping portals, that kind of thing. It does not earn from credit cards. We have no card affiliate programme. The card links here are personal referral links, the same ones any cardholder can send a friend, and they pay in points rather than money.
That is worth a sentence of its own because it is the opposite of how most of this industry is funded, where one approved application can pay a publisher a few hundred dollars. It also points our incentive somewhere useful: this has to be good enough that you come back, rather than thin enough that the useful parts sit behind a payment.
It also means you should read every card mention here the way you would read any recommendation from someone who gets paid on it. Which is the reason the series shows what things actually cost, names the benefits that never turned up, and says out loud where a card did nothing for us at all.
| When | Day 0 to Day 10, late summer |
| Where | Paris, Swiss Alps, Ticino, Italian Lakes, Milan, back through Paris |
| Nights | 9, across 8 properties |
| Airline miles spent | 30,000 Atmos Rewards + 139,400 Delta SkyMiles |
| Hotel points spent | 170,000 Hilton Honors + 8,800 Accor |
| Card credits used | about $1,250, plus status |
| Longest single day | 15 hours, three countries, one missed connection |
Most trip write-ups tell you which award they booked. The interesting part is smaller and far more repeatable: which card comes out of your pocket for a CHF 7 locker, a EUR 2.20 metro tap, a bakery, a mountain railway counter.
We ran four cards on one rule, and the rule never changed for ten days.
| Card | When it came out | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bilt Palladium | Everything, by default | 2X on all spending and no foreign transaction fee |
| Amex Gold | Restaurants | 4X at restaurants, also no foreign transaction fee |
| Amex Platinum | Only where Fine Hotels + Resorts required it | The hotel credit and the FHR benefit suite |
| Venture X | Only inside the Capital One portal | The travel credit only works there |
The card rule never changed for ten days. The timing rule changed once.
Bilt runs Rent Day on the 1st of every month, and Day 4 fell in the middle of this trip. Bilt's own promotion for that day read: "Earn 4X points on everyday purchases (excluding housing payments), up to 1,000 bonus points. Starts 9/1/26 at 12:00AM ET and ends 9/1/26 11:59PM PT." Day 4 was our Jungfraujoch day, so the summit tickets and the rest of that day's spending went onto the Palladium rather than onto anything else.
Be clear about what that is and is not. We did not rearrange a holiday around a credit card promotion. The mountain was already booked for the 1st. All that happened is that we noticed which day it was and reached for the right card, and that is the entire technique.
Now read the second half of that sentence, because it is the half every write-up drops. The cap is 1,000 bonus points. The Palladium already earns 2X on everyday spend, so the promotion is worth 2 extra points per dollar, and 1,000 bonus points arrives at about $500 of spending. Past that you are back on the normal rate for the rest of the day.
Which turns a slogan into something you can use. Moving a whole month of spending onto the 1st gains nothing past $500. Moving one purchase does: the largest eligible one whose date you control. On a trip that is almost always a ticket, which is why the 1st is worth checking before booking anything flexible.
Three habits made that rule work, and all three are free:
Always pay in the local currency. Every terminal in Switzerland and Italy offered to bill us in dollars. Declining takes a second and it happened every single time.
Most of it ran through Apple Pay. Which matters more than it sounds, because whichever card is set as your Apple Pay default is your real daily driver. Set it deliberately before you fly rather than discovering it at a till.
Ask for the guest card at check-in. Every property we stayed in charged a city or tourist tax on top of the room, per person per night. In Switzerland that tax is what funds the local transport card, so you have already bought it before you reach the desk. We collected four different ones: the Lucerne Visitor Card, the guest card that comes with a Jungfrau region stay, the SaastalCard in Saas-Fee, and the Ticino Ticket, which covers free transport across an entire canton. It is not always handed to you. Ask by name.
And one thing the rule could not protect us from, which is the best card story of the trip: we ate at a restaurant that is part of a hotel in Montreux, on the Gold, exactly as the rule says. It posted under a lodging category rather than dining, so 4X paid 1X. Amex documents this in its own terms, a restaurant inside a hotel may be recognised as a hotel purchase. You cannot see a merchant category code from the table, and you find out weeks later.
| Redemption | Points | Cash |
|---|---|---|
| Outbound to Paris, two seats in economy | 30,000 Atmos Rewards | Taxes and fees only |
| One night on Lake Como | 170,000 Hilton | $0 |
| Pre-departure night at CDG | 8,800 Accor | about €0 |
| Return home, two seats: Comfort+ across the Atlantic, Main Cabin on the domestic leg | 139,400 Delta SkyMiles | $240 |
That table has no total row, on purpose. Two of those lines are airline miles and two are hotel points, and they do not convert into each other or buy the same thing. Adding Hilton points to Delta miles gives you a number that means nothing: the Lake Como night is roughly half the raw count and nowhere near half the value. Miles got us across the Atlantic. Points got us the beds. If you want one figure for a trip like this, it has to be in dollars.
Five card credits paid for another chunk of it:
| Credit | Where it went | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Amex Platinum hotel credit, first account | Fine Hotels + Resorts in Paris | $300 |
| Amex Platinum hotel credit, second account | Fine Hotels + Resorts in Saas-Fee | $300 |
| Capital One Venture X travel credit | Château Gütsch, Lucerne, booked in the Capital One portal | $300 |
| Delta Reserve Delta Stays | One night in Lugano | $200 |
| Delta Platinum Delta Stays | One night near Malpensa | $150 |
| Total | about $1,250 |
Two more benefits paid off without ever appearing as a credit line, which is why the $1,250 above understates what the cards did:
| Benefit | Came from | What it got us |
|---|---|---|
| Fine Hotels + Resorts property credit | Amex Platinum | $100 per stay, on two stays. Another $200 we have not counted above |
| Hilton Gold | Amex Platinum | Breakfast for two at a Small Luxury Hotels property, which is why we never needed a Hilton co-brand card |
Read those two tables together and the pattern is the point. The Platinum hotel credits and the Venture X travel credit paid for rooms outright. The two Delta Stays credits did the same on the Italian nights. The FHR property credit and Hilton Gold never showed up as money off the folio, but they covered breakfast and a chunk of each stay all the same.
The rail was the largest cash line and it is not on either table. Two Swiss Half Fare Cards cost $370 and discounted almost every train, cable car and boat for the rest of the trip.
We are not publishing a cash total for this trip. It would be our September, our routes and our exchange rate, and none of that is a number you could plan against. What carries across is the mechanism: which card paid for what, which credits actually posted, and which benefits returned more than they cost. That is what the eleven parts below document.
1. How many points for an economy award to Paris? 30,000 points for two seats, and the four-venue layover that was worth more than the flight.
2. Is Amex Fine Hotels + Resorts worth it in Paris? What the $100 credit, the breakfast and the 4pm checkout were actually worth against booking direct.
3. The Lucerne visitor card What it covers, who hands it out, and how to make sure you leave the desk holding one. Plus the 7:22 out of Paris and the Rhine Falls between two trains.
4. Pilatus, Rigi or Titlis? Picking one summit with a Half Fare Card, and the hotel mix-up that cost us an afternoon.
5. Is Jungfraujoch worth it in September? What it cost, and the valley descent the original plan had skipped.
6. Is the GoldenPass Prestige seat worth CHF 49? And does basing in Saas-Fee beat basing in Zermatt.
7. How much buffer does a train connection need? A 14-minute international transfer did not survive a 5-minute delay, and it cost us the evening.
8. Lugano to Lake Como without a car Train, bus, ferry or car, a slow morning, and the $200 last leg.
9. Does Hilton Gold work at an SLH hotel? Breakfast for two on a 170,000-point night, the €4.60 ferry, and what a 19:00 arrival did and did not cost us.
10. Is an airport hotel worth it the night before a flight? 8,800 points, a captive-audience dinner, and when this is the right call.
11. What does ten days in Europe on points actually cost? The closing ledger, and why we left for CDG at 6:30 in the morning.
Also from the trip: ticks and Lyme disease in Switzerland, and what to know before you hike.
We bought this kit to stay ahead of pickpockets, and it came with us for all ten days. In the crowd under the Eiffel Tower at nine at night, phone on its strap and bag zipped and clipped, we just stood there and watched the lights.
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The award search tools we used to find the flights, and what each one is good at, are in part 1.
Cross-check the town, not just the property name. Our booking said one town and a trip document said another. We rode up to the wrong valley and back before we found the hotel, and it cost about an hour and the afternoon plan.
Never travel on a time you copied from a document. A planning PDF listed a train that did not exist, and a separate note invented a departure on a line that runs three times a day. Search the station pair in the operator's own app on the day you travel.
Give an international connection more than 14 minutes. Especially the last one of the day. On a line that runs every two hours, missing one ended the evening.
Price the day pass every morning. Swiss Saver Day Passes are dynamically priced. On one day ours beat point-to-point tickets and we bought it; two days earlier the same product was worse value and we did not.
Buy mountain-railway tickets at the counter if your Half Fare Card is a PDF. The apps want a 12-digit SwissPass number that a foreign visitor's card does not carry.
Do not book an airport hotel for a day that has a city plan. Two nights beside an airport with a day trip into the city meant commuting to the city we were sleeping next to.
Check where you can legally fly a drone before you carry one. We did the registration, respected the banned zones, and still never launched it, because standing in the actual spot we could not be certain the spot was allowed. That is a real outcome and worth planning around.
If you want the rest as it lands, follow on Threads, Instagram or TikTok. We take one thing apart properly at a time.
Booked, flown and paid as described across ten days in late summer. Point valuations are our own published estimates and are not rates any programme guarantees. No names, no faces, our own photos only.