I don’t know about you & your travel partner, but when it comes to travel, Michelle & my preferences are like oil & water. (Or better yet – I have a beer budget, and she has champagne taste.)
- I like to go where the deal takes me so I can travel two or three times as often – knowing I will have seen as much as possible during my time here on this beautiful planet.
- Michelle has a specific list of amazing places she wants to check off her bucket list. Everything else is just getting in the way of checking off that bucket list.
- I love to visit a country with camera in-hand, be up early and see/do lots of cool “off the beaten path” stuff. The place I stay doesn’t really matter because it’s simply a place to put my head after a long day exploring.
- Michelle loves to relax, recover, and sleep in when on vacation. Because of that, she likes to stay in as nice a place as we can afford.
- If I’m out and about, I like to grab something quick at the closest local food joint and squeeze one more activity in before we head back to our room and crash.
- Michelle likes to enjoy the local cuisine and atmosphere – which means room service after sleeping in and then heading back late in the afternoon. That way, we have plenty of time to get dressed & ready in time for a nice sunset dinner at a place she researched and made reservations for long before we visited the area. (And I must admit – she always does an amazing job at finding amazing cool/memorable places.)
- I prefer to get to the airport early.
- Michelle wants to get there as late as feasibly possible.
We manage to find a good balance between our wants/needs, but…
Our opinions on how to spend vacation funds are like oil and water.
Early in our marriage, that was a bit of a struggle. (I was grumpy about how much we had to spend on each trip, and she was not getting that “relaxed and recovered” feeling with the quality of places we stayed. Don’t get me wrong – we stayed at nice places, but they weren’t the same quality as what she was accustomed to when going on her girls’ trips and fitting 3 or 4 friends into the best room/suite in the nicest resort that they could afford.
🤷♂️ [Side note: Does it make me a bad person if I can’t help but picture slo-motion pillow fights in nighties every time they go on these girls’ trips? I digress…] 🤷♂️
Fortunately, we’ve figured out a way to get the best of both worlds
- We still go to where the deals take us by watching for mistake fares. Now, we’re just a little more picky about which deals we pounce on to make sure we’re checking cool bucket list destinations off of our list.
- Then there’s the lodging. Before I discovered point hacking (which is like paying for flights & hotels with Monopoly money), this was a big struggle for us because I had a really hard time spending what I hoped to spend on activities – on one or two nights at a posh resort.
We still have to negotiate lodging most of the trips we take because we could stay much longer at places I’d be happy with, but considering paying with points is more like using monopoly money than real cash, staying at the nicer places is a MUCH easier pill to swallow.
I get to do my activities and check lots of destinations off of my list, we get to sleep in ocean-front rooms with 1800 thread-count sheets and turndown service, and there is still plenty of room in the vacation budget for excursions and “dress-up dinners.”
We still disagree on airport timing, but being able to hang out in an airport lounge with free food, drinks (& sometimes mani/pedis) when we get there early definitely helps.
I know credit card hacking has a stigma to it because of all of the folks out there who juggle binders full of credit cards in order to support their habit of circling the globe 3 times a year, but it really doesn’t have to be that complicated. You could spend as little as 30 to 60 minutes per year getting one or two new credit cards that will give you $1000 to $8000 in “play money” to use however you like. (Which, by the way, is WAY less time than what most people spend trying to find reasonably priced flights or lodging “the traditional way” when reasonable flights or lodging don’t exist.)
If you are disciplined about finding flights that are cheaper than the cost of driving there, you won’t even need the points that often.
You can save (extremely) valuable frequent flyer points to open doors that would never otherwise have been opened:
- A backup plan for when you can’t find flight prices you’re happy with.
- Business/First class flights
- Hotels/resorts that would otherwise break the budget. (Sometimes including $1500/night over-water bungalows for under $100.)
- Free bags
- Free lounge access before/between flights (saving $50 to $200 in free food/drink per trip)
- Free Global Entry passes or TSA Pre-Checks
Here is a free report. Try it. I think you’ll like it.
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