The Camino on Points: Flights, Lodging and Transfers

~10 min read · Last updated: October 2026

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend gear and services we’ve personally used.

As Shana and I were flying from JFK to Paris, thinking about how to navigate from our arrival gate to the storage location, it dawned on us- our flight back to Paris wasn’t taking us back to CDG. We were flying to Orly. Which isn’t near CDG. Which is where our bag would be … ugh.

That is the part of a Camino de Santiago trip on points nobody writes about. The award gets you across the ocean. Then there are three weeks of beds, bags, buses and one suitcase full of Paris clothes, and the points mostly sit that part out.

At a Glance

🎯 What this covers

every booking on our Camino Portugués Coastal trip, Denver to Porto to Santiago to Paris and home, and which ones points paid for

📅 When we did this

flights booked 2 March 2026; walked 15 September to 4 October 2026; Paris 4 to 10 October

💰 Cost

285,000 Flying Blue miles, almost all moved over from Chase, and $930.66 in award taxes for the flights, one Hyatt free night, and about €8,200 in cash for the beds, bags and short flights for the two of us

⏱️ Time required

one evening for the award; the CaminoWays booking, the bag store and the Paris hotel each took their own sitting

📈 Difficulty

moderate- the points were easy, the logistics around them were the work

👥 Best for

anyone walking a supported Camino who wants to know how far points really stretch

⚠️ Watch out for

which airport you fly home into, and what week it is in Paris

The Setup: What Points Can Pay for on a Camino

We walked the Camino Portugués Coastal from Porto to Santiago de Compostela with Shana’s parents, self-guided, with CaminoWays booking every bed and moving our bags every walking day. Four of us in two rooms, nineteen nights, 259 km on paper.

Before we booked anything, the question was the one every points person asks: how much of this can the points cover? The honest answer is the long flights and the bookends. A self-guided Camino is sold as one package in euro- the beds, breakfast, some dinners and the daily bag van all in one price. There is no hotel program on the other end of that. The family-run pensions and the 1762 manor house on the route are not in anybody’s points catalog, and the bag van doesn’t take Chase.

So the plan split in two before we started. Points get us there and home. Cash walks us there. If you are weighing whether to book a package at all, we went through that in is CaminoWays worth it; this post is about paying for it.

How We Booked It

The flights. One evening, 2 March 2026: Chase points moved to Flying Blue, and 285,000 miles bought Premium Economy from New York to Paris and from Paris home to Denver for the two of us. The whole story, including why we bought the short hop to Porto with money, is in our post on why Flying Blue is becoming our transfer partner for Europe. We won’t tell it twice.

The night before the flight. Denver is not New York, so we positioned the day before on a $158.40 United ticket and slept at the Hyatt Regency JFK on my annual World of Hyatt free night certificate. The room was going for around $600. The certificate covered the whole night, with nothing charged on top. That was the only night of the trip on points.

The night before the Camino. CaminoWays coverage started on 15 September. We landed in Porto on the 14th and paid for that first night ourselves, at the same hotel the tour used, so we could see Porto before the walking schedule owned the days. Two rooms for the four of us (us and Shana’s parents), booked direct by Shana in March, €160.75 for ours with the city tax. The desk posted the room at 300 euro the night we checked in.

Was the extra night worth it? For most people, perhaps too much. CaminoWays lets you arrive on the 15th, have the 16th to get yourself sorted, then walk out on the 17th, so for just the walking people that is probably sufficient. We wanted time to see the city, so the extra day was what we paid for. You’ve paid a lot of money to get here; why not a little more to actually spend the time here.

We took a Bolt from the airport, €16.20 plus a €4 tip. As we arrived at the hotel, an elderly American woman asked me if I was in an Uber. I said, “No, ma’am, it is a Bolt. It is like an Uber, but in Europe they prefer to use Bolt.” So, then she asked the driver if he was an Uber and if he could take her and her husband somewhere. Makes me wonder how I’ll be with changing technology in another 20-30 years, presuming I’m still able to travel.

The Camino itself. CaminoWays, all cash: €2,447 a person, €4,894 for Shana and me. Nineteen nights, breakfast every morning, dinner on most nights, and our bags waiting at the next hotel every afternoon. Bags were down at 8 am, the front desk knew and told us at check-in, and that was the routine for two weeks.

Here is where the points side and the cash side met. Shana split the CaminoWays bill across two cards on purpose: our Bilt card, to get to Bilt Platinum, and another card earning travel points toward a sign-up bonus. Bilt Platinum makes you Flying Blue Gold, and Flying Blue Gold is what got us the SkyPriority line and the Air France lounge on an economy cash ticket through Paris. The money we spent walking bought the perks we used flying.

We didn’t get to pick the beds, either, and that cuts both ways. In Caminha, Shana wanted to stay in a castle or old albergue. Instead we were booked in a luxury hotel, and she has to admit it was nice. Very NICE. Three nights later CaminoWays put us in the Parador in Baiona, and she got her castle.

The bag. This is the booking I’d tell a friend about first. As we were planning this trip the one challenge that kept coming up was how to pack for walking the Camino and a week in Paris, while keeping our single transportable bag under the weight limit. Answer- we couldn’t, not without looking like we were hiking around Paris, which would limit what we could actually comfortably do while in Paris.

Enter Bagages du Monde, a luggage storage service INSIDE the CDG airport. It is not in the secure area, unfortunately, but in the Terminal 2E Station Complex, opposite the Sheraton, in the luggage store. You book online via a website called HelloPassenger and then drop your bag at the location. Ours was €155 for twenty days, booked on 4 August. They charge by size and weight, kinda like an airline.

And so, we packed our Paris clothes into that suitcase, picked it up in baggage claim, dropped it with Bagages du Monde, and then went back through Security to the lounge to wait another 6 hours for our flight to Porto. Yup, another 6 hours. Because we landed CDG at around 6 am and our flight to OPO wasn’t until around 2 pm. So we had plenty of time to navigate the process of leaving the secure area, getting the bag from baggage claim to the storage company, and then get back through security and to our gate. We didn’t need it all, but I’m glad we had it because … Charles de Gaulle. (The champagne comes out around 10 am in the Air France lounge. The cork makes an undeniably unique sound that cannot be confused with any other in this world. Or airport lounge.)

Back to the Orly problem from the top of this post. We dropping th bag, we asked the nice man at Bagages du Monde about our dilemma, and he told us how we could arrange for the bag to be transferred from CDG to ORY to be there the day we arrive. Bam! Problem solved. So glad we thought of that before we started walking.

Except, in reality the problem wasn’t solved. The man said the transaction we had paid for was the storage of the bag at CDG. To get it to ORY, we had to go back to the website and fill out a new request for the transfer from CDG to ORY on the day we wanted. So, while in Porto before starting the Camino, Shana made the transfer request. A few days later, Bagages du Monde comes back with a revised cost and Shana says fine, let’s do it. Except, now we’re on the Camino and why we wanted to get this done before starting the walk intrudes and the transfer gets lost until Sept 25 when we finally return the paperwork needed to finalize the transaction. But because of an email mixup, it never got to Bagages, and on Oct 2 we realize the bag isn’t moving. On Oct 3, I call and by some miracle I actually speak to Lisa and she says the transfer can still occur if I get her the paperwork, as she will still be in the office ‘for a few more minutes.’ So, I send the paperwork, wait 15 minutes, then call back and now I get her colleague who specializes in animal transfers but assures me she will get my message to Lisa, who has gone home for the weekend.

That day and the next, Shana and I never hear from Lisa- nothing, and her reply to me on the phone wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring. I had spoken with her, sent an email with the required paperwork, and requested a call or email to confirm its receipt. Having received none, when we landed in Paris, Shana and I checked into the hotel, left our bags at the front desk, ate a nice relaxed lunch and again checked our emails. I then checked my ‘Find My’ app and looked at the bag’s AirTag location (what, you don’t travel with AirTags or similar in your luggage … you should!). With the bag solidly at CDG, Terminal 2E at Bagages du Monde, and nothing from Lisa or Bagages du Monde, we bought our RER tickets to CDG to get the bag ourselves.

While getting our bag, the young woman next to us scanned her ticket and the bag they brought out wasn’t hers. To make it worse, she had two bags and they said they only had one. Not confidence inspiring.

Fortunately, the bag they brought out was indeed ours. So we took our bag and went back to the hotel. Shana asked if we should tell Lisa. I said no. I was curious how long it would take her to actually process the paperwork and ask for payment. Turns out, it was the next day. I guess I had cause for not being confident we were going to get our bag on the 4th. Or the 5th, or at all, because I never replied to her email and she never followed up. I was ghosted by the bag lady.

The train out to CDG and back was €14 a ticket each way, €56 for the two of us. The transfer we’d been quoted was €70, and we never paid it. And Shana loves the train.

Santiago to Paris. Vueling, Santiago to Orly, a cash ticket: €525.20 for the two of us. Nobody runs an award you’d want on that route.

Paris. We used several portals to price and compare rooms (Rove, Gondola, Max My Point, Hotels.com and a few others) and the points needed were crazy high. Turns out Fashion Week was Sept 28 to Oct 6, and the prices were still very high our week. So, cash was the right answer for a room. The funny thing, the rate we got for our room was great compared to other hotels. And the rate kept going up! We had alerts set and checked by hand periodically. We were amazed at how much the rooms kept increasing. We booked the Hôtel Trianon Rive Gauche direct in March, six nights with breakfast, €2,390.70 after a €375.30 discount. And we were glad for it!

The Numbers: What It Cost vs. What It Would Have Cost

Points only touched two things on this trip, so the redemption maths is short. The flights:

Metric	Our Booking	Cash Price
Out of pocket	$1,574.46	$9,708.00
Points spent	285,000	0
Cents per point (CPP)	2.85cpp	n/a
Value vs. our 2 cent target	above	n/a

The cash column is the Premium Economy fare for two, New York through Paris to Porto and Paris to Denver. Our column is $930.66 in award taxes plus the $643.80 we paid to get from Paris to Porto, because the cash fare goes all the way to Porto and our award stopped in Paris. (How we work the number is in how we calculate cents per point.) The Hyatt night sits outside the table on purpose: a certificate isn’t points, so it gets no cents-per-point figure, just the $600 room it saved us.

Everything else was cash, and this is the table that matters for planning a Camino:

What	How we paid	For the two of us
Hyatt Regency JFK, 1 night	free night certificate	$0
Moov Hotel Porto, 1 night	cash	€160.75
CaminoWays, 19 nights, bags moved daily	cash	€4,894.00
Bagages du Monde, CDG, 20 days	cash	€155.00
RER B to CDG and back, to fetch the bag	cash	€56.00
Vueling, Santiago to Orly	cash	€525.20
Hôtel Trianon Rive Gauche, 6 nights	cash	€2,390.70
Bolt, Porto airport to the hotel	cash	€20.20

Count the beds. Twenty-seven nights from the Hyatt to the morning we flew home, and one of them was on points. The points carried the two most expensive tickets on the trip. The cash carried the trip.

No Foreign Transaction Fees, and Always the Local Currency

When most of a trip is cash, how you pay the cash matters more than which card earns what. We have a rule for it.

Which card we carry changes trip to trip. Sometimes we are working toward a sign-up bonus. Sometimes it is whichever card has the right multiplier for what we are about to spend. That part is never settled and it is not supposed to be.

What does not change is the fee. If a card charges a foreign transaction fee, it does not come with us. It comes out of the wallet before we leave and it stays home. You cannot use a card by mistake when it’s at home.

Then there is the part that catches people who already got the first part right. When you pay abroad, the tap-to-pay gizmo the waiter hands you (because, they never take your card and walk away, which I think is pretty cool) or the app you used will offer to bill you in dollars. That sounds super helpful because converting to euros is annoying. Well, it can also be super expensive. You have to do both- use a no-fee card and select the local currency.

On this trip that meant the ‘local currency’ option in the app for the Bolt from the airport in Porto, and the euro button at the hotel front desk when we checked in. Dollars for none of it. For the Bolt and the Moov it was the Chase Sapphire Preferred in Apple Pay, which earns 2x on both; set it as the default in the app, set the app’s currency to euro, and you’re done.

Don’t even get me started on the ATMs.

Was It Worth It?

Yes, and the split is the reason. We could have spent a week hunting a points hotel in Paris and a way to put the Camino on a card with a better return. The Paris search ran into Fashion Week, and the Camino was never going to be on points at all. So the points went where they were strongest, on two long-haul seats at 2.85 cents, and the cash went where nothing else could.

What surprised us is how much of the trip lived outside the booking confirmations. The bag store, the train back out to CDG for the bag, the Bolt, the 8 am bag drop. None of it earns a point, and every one of them was the difference between a trip that worked and one that didn’t.

What We’d Do Differently

Check the airports before we leave home, not over the Atlantic. We booked the bag store at CDG and the flight home from Santiago into Orly, and only caught it on the plane. Then finish the fix before the walk starts. The transfer was arranged in Porto and never finalized; the paperwork went to the wrong address on the Camino, and by the time we caught it the office had gone home for the weekend. Book the storage and the transfer together, get a written confirmation, and put a tracker in the bag so you know where it is.

Check the calendar for the city at the end. We booked Paris in March, priced it on points, paid cash, and didn’t know why it was so expensive until Shana looked it up. Our first three nights fell on the last days of Paris Fashion Week, 28 September to 6 October. A week later, the points answer may well have been different.

And go in knowing what points can’t do on a Camino. If the plan is to fly business on miles and pay for the walk with a hotel program, the second half isn’t there. Budget the cash.

How to Book This Award

The award is the easy part. These are the steps around it, in the order we’d do them again.

1. Price the walk first. Get the package price, or your own bed-by-bed estimate, before you decide how many points the flights are worth spending.
2. Book the long-haul award to the gateway city. For Porto that was Flying Blue to Paris and a short cash flight; the Flying Blue post has the steps.
3. If you don’t live in a gateway city, use a free night certificate or points for the night before the flight. That was our one points night.
4. Pay for one night yourself before the package starts, at the same hotel. You will want the day.
5. Put the package on cards that are working toward something: a sign-up bonus, a status tier, a multiplier. It is all cash anyway.
6. If the trip ends somewhere you need different clothes, store a bag at the arrival airport, and check which airport you fly back into before you book it.
7. Pay everything abroad on a card with no foreign transaction fee, in the local currency.

If you want help working out which half of your Camino goes on points, this is exactly what we help with. For the rest of the walk, start at our Camino Portugués Coastal page; for more real redemptions, our Points & Miles page.

Found this helpful? 📌 Pin it for your next award booking decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you use points to pay for the Camino de Santiago?

Mostly for the flights. Long-haul awards to Porto, Madrid or Paris are where points earn their keep. Self-guided Camino packages are sold in euro and the small family hotels on the route are rarely in a points program, so plan to pay cash for the walk itself. We put one of 27 nights on points.

How many points did it take to fly to the Camino Portugués?

285,000 Flying Blue miles, almost all moved over from Chase Ultimate Rewards, flew two of us in Premium Economy from New York to Paris and from Paris home to Denver, plus $930.66 in taxes. A cash flight from Paris to Porto finished the trip out. Award prices change, so check Flying Blue for current pricing.

Can you store luggage at Paris CDG during a Camino?

Yes. Bagages du Monde runs a storage desk in the CDG Terminal 2E Station Complex, opposite the Sheraton, booked online through HelloPassenger. We stored one suitcase of Paris clothes for twenty days for €155. A transfer to Orly is a separate booking; ours was never finalized, so we took the RER B back to collect it.

Is it worth arriving a day early before a self-guided Camino?

For walking alone, CaminoWays’ schedule is enough: arrive, take a day, then walk. We paid for one extra night at the same Porto hotel so we could see the city without rushing errands. It cost us €160.75 and we would do it again.

---