Family Trip to Taiwan Using Airline Miles and Hotel Points

In search of wow-worthy deals, I found excellent amenities.

When people asked why my family picked Taiwan for spring break, I cringed a little as I admitted the answer might just be beef noodle soup. Prior to the pandemic, my husband traveled to Taiwan a few times a year for work, and he missed it, though the strongest draw seemed to involve a specific beef noodle soup stand. Relatable, but not quite enough to compel me to pay for four trans-Pacific flights.

Then, at the end of last year, Alaska Airlines announced its partnership with Taiwan-based Starlux Airlines—all those points he’d racked up over the years could finally get us back to Taiwan. We cashed in 75,000 points per person for round trip tickets during spring break and started planning—not yet realizing that my points-and-miles-guided planning led me straight into an amazing family vacation.

An Upgraded Airline

Before we left, I dreaded the 13-hour flight. I’ve flown the same route on EVA and the plane and service were a significant upgrade on Starlux. We boarded efficiently, back to front—and we were at the front, thanks to the policy allowing families with children to choose those seats in advance. The kids were big fans of the large in-seat entertainment screens, while I appreciated the cleanliness and comfort of our seats. Also the real silverware with our meals, which included pomelo, Jin Xuan tea, and cocoa nib gelato. At this point, I’d rather take a longer Starlux flight than a shorter one on most domestic airlines.

Hotel Points Giveth, Hotel Points Taketh Away

We landed at five in the morning, so I planned our trip to start with a high-speed train ride south to Tainan. I figured the two-hour journey would eat up a bit more of our morning and prevent me from having to book an extra night at the hotel. After arriving, we sleepily trudged through some breakfast noodles on the street, stumbled on a god’s birthday festival at a temple, and cooled off with giant bowls of fruit-topped shaved ice, then got a mercifully early hotel check-in.

Since our 2023 spring break trip lives on in infinite infamy as “the time mom booked two weeks of hotels without a single pool,” this trip, I filtered for central locations and a pool. The Tainan Silks Place cost 15,500 Chase points per night for the four of us—which saved me money in the short term. Long term, it busted my budget, because we all fell in love with the brand and I ended up splurging on the brand’s Silks Place Taroko for the final two nights of our trip.

My daughters raced wiggle scooters on the rooftop patio, swam in the pool, and discovered the kid’s club, an indoor play place with endless toys, video games, and climbable furniture. I discovered that kids seven and over didn’t need a parent to stay with them and popped out for one of the best coffees of my life at Django, next door. Each kid got to choose either candy or a toy from the cart in the hallway each day of the stay, and the staff gamely invented reasons to send the hotel’s robot butler to our room, much to the glee of my children.

From Tainan, we spent a few days meandering north, taking the famed Alishan Railway, chasing fireflies and sunsets through tea country, before meeting friends in Taipei, where we both booked the Sheraton Grand (26,000 Chase points per night for a room that fit four) because it was central and had a pool. But when they left town, we still had two more days to plan, and I was ready to get out of the city and relax hard-core.

App It Up

Initially, I’d hoped to make it to the beaches in the south, but the timing to meet our friends killed that plan, so I started looking at Taiwan’s East Coast. Silks Place, the brand that we loved so much in Tainan, had a hotel there, and while it didn’t take points, I decided we’d saved enough on the rest of the trip to splurge—the total cost, with transportation to and from Hualien train station, breakfasts and dinners for the four of us, was about $550 per night. It was worth every penny.

In the interest of saving a few of those pennies, I spent much of our trip scouring Klook, an app full of discounts on everything from foot massages to high-speed rail tickets to multi-day tours. The translation and purchasing functions made it easy to buy things like our reserved-time tickets up Taipei 101—the tallest building in the world until 2009—and, in this case, it led me to the Sanrio-themed train we took out of Taipei.

All of Hello’s Kitty’s friends were there: We ate and went on a scavenger hunt for and Cinnamoroll as we chugged along rugged beaches. We managed to navigate the on-board karaoke machine just well enough for my nine-year-old to belt out a meandering version of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” before we pulled into Hualien and hopped on the Silks Place Shuttle.

Taroko Is Gorges

Much of Taroko National Park has been closed since a 2024 earthquake; the Silks Place Taroko itself served as emergency shelter and command center in the months after; it reopened only a few months prior to our arrival. Due to the ongoing, multi-year recovery process, vehicles could enter the park at just a few select times. Thankfully, the hotel shuttle scheduled for those times, and whisked us from the train station, through the famous river-carved marble gorge, and up to the hotel.

We climbed to the temple, we hiked a second trail, complete with rocky scrambles, to the remains of an indigenous town. In the enormous kids’ room, a play structure designed by Taiwanese toy brand Wooderful Life echoed the hike.

We sunned ourselves on the rooftop pool and watched the attendant perform the ultimate Instagram husband duties, framing each guest perfectly in front of the pool with the Xiangde Temple, pagoda, and Bodhisattva statue in the background. One evening, we watched a movie from the pool deck, projected in front of the gorge, another we hit the indoor pools, where one pool was kept warm and filled with rubber ducks. The duck pond, as we called it, was an absolute highlight of the trip for the kids, and I practically had to tear them out when we needed to head home.

My husband’s highlights included stopping for breakfast at the beef noodle soup stand he spent the last few years waxing poetic about. Having now tried a bowl, I’m rethinking my stance about that not being enough to plan a trip around. Luckily, a surprise bonus to using points to purchase Starlux flights that I learned after we get back is that you still earn points for the flight bought with points, which means that we’re all about one-sixth of the way to another round-trip ticket to Taiwan.