Category ArchiveEverywhere Once |

How to Find the Perfect Hotel Room

by Brian on February 2, 2015 in How To, Planning and Prep, Travel, Travel Tips

Brundholme B&B, in the Lake District (Keswick), England

(Update: The Chase Ultimate Reward portal no longer offers bonus points for booking hotels through Hotels.com)

As full-time travelers we live our lives out of hotel rooms and other rented spaces. Sometimes we’ll sleep in as many as three different cities in a single week. That adds up to a lot of hotels over the course of a year. As a matter of necessity, we’ve become pretty good at finding the best places to stay.

And by “best” we don’t necessarily mean cheapest. While we definitely consider ourselves budget travelers we focus at least as much on value as on absolute cost. Some things, like private rooms and central locations, are worth paying a little more for, in our view. So this article won’t teach you how to find the cheapest bed anywhere within commuting distance of your chosen destination. But if what you’re looking for is a great room, in an awesome location, at a terrific price then the process we outline below should work as well for you as it has for us.

How We Saved for Travel, and For Everything Else Too

by Brian on January 21, 2015 in How To, Money & Finance, Travel

With New Year’s celebrations now over it’s time for the hard work of resolution honoring to begin in earnest. Many of us will start the year resolving to spend less money and save more. If you’re like Shannon and me, the objective may be to accumulate enough to travel the world; or maybe you’re trying to build a college fund or pad a retirement nest egg. All worthy goals.

Unfortunately our good intentions are typically doomed to failure right from the start. By mid-year most of us will have fallen back into the same bad habits we resolve each year to end. We do that not because we lack the necessary willpower, but because we lack the correct perspective. To change our financial behavior we need to fundamentally change the way we think about money. We need to find a way to turn human nature, which constantly tempts us away from our long-term goals, to our advantage. Fortunately that is easier to do than you may think.

How to Avoid Foreign Currency Fees While Traveling

by Brian on January 14, 2015 in How To, Money & Finance, Planning and Prep, Travel

Of all the digital ink devoted to budget travel advice this one topic is strangely overlooked: How to avoid getting screwed when exchanging your money into a foreign currency.

Traveling overseas almost always means paying for things in a currency other than your own. And while today’s travelers have more options than ever for obtaining local currencies, almost all of those options have costs.

Make a mistake converting your money and you can easily add 10-20% to the price of everything you buy. Here’s how to avoid doing that.

Pay for your stay and fly for free

by Brian on December 5, 2014 in Travel, Travel Tips

We’re always on the lookout for unique ways to stretch our travel dollars. And amassing frequent flyer miles for things we do anyway, like simply using our credit card, is always a great option. So when we learned that a new hotel booking site was offering thousands of frequent flyer miles with each booking, we were naturally intrigued – and skeptical.

The promise of Rocketmiles is that you can earn as many as 5,000 frequent flyer miles for every night you book (although many hotels award between 1,000 and 3,000 per night). To put those miles into perspective, major carriers like United and American offer one-way domestic flights for as little as 12,500 miles. That means it’s possible to get a free domestic flight after booking just three nights with Rocketmiles.

But does it work?

One obvious question when using Rocketmiles is whether you’re getting the best room rates. There’s little point in earning thousands of airline miles if it means massively overpaying for a hotel room. And that is where a little research is in order whenever using their site – or anyone else’s for that matter.

Having said that, we found Rocketmiles hotel rates pretty comparable to the other online booking sites we use regularly, like Hotels.com and Bookings.com. Rocketmiles wasn’t always the lowest, but they weren’t always the highest either. That’s pretty typical of our experience. No one site ever offers the best rates so it’s always worthwhile to shop around. And that is exactly what we do. We use multiple sites to find the right hotel in the right location at the right price.

And sometimes we really do find the best deal with Rocketmiles. Just recently we used them to book a stay in York, England. Their nightly rate for the Park Inn City Center was as low as any other we found. What put Rocketmiles over the top, though, was that they were also offering us 8,000 miles to book with them – an award we valued at about $160. Done!

The booking process went as simply as with any other site we’ve used. The hotel had our reservation when we arrived. We weren’t charged any extra fees and experienced no surprises. Within about two weeks after our stay, the 8,000 miles appeared in our frequent flyer account just as promised.

Sign up and get 1,000 miles as a bonus

And now we’ve been given the opportunity to offer our readers a 1,000 mile bonus for signing-up with Rocketmiles. Creating a new account is free. If you use the affiliate links on this page, you’ll automatically get an extra 1,000 mile bonus to the frequent flyer program of your choice after you complete your first stay using Rocketmiles.

This is the second time we’ve shared an affiliate link like this. The first time we offered our readers a $25 credit for creating a new account with Airbnb.com. That offer is still valid (click here) for anyone who hasn’t take advantage of it yet.

As with the Aribnb referral, we’ll also get a little something when you book through Rocketmiles using our link. In both cases, these are sites we’ve used personally and have had good results with. We wouldn’t share them otherwise.

How to Make (and Keep) a Traveler’s Hippocratic Oath

by Brian on November 28, 2014 in Asia, How To, Thailand, Travel

Tours you can take, although we’ll pass

First, do no harm.

It’s an oath sworn by physicians and a pledge that every traveler should make as well. As guests in the places we visit the very least we can do is respect our hosts by not hurting their country or their people.

Unfortunately such pledges are easier made than kept. That’s especially true in areas of the world that lack strong regulations protecting vulnerable populations. It’s not uncommon to see plenty of exploitive activities marketed to tourists. And sometimes those activities are even cleverly disguised to prey on our very desire to do good.

Visiting and volunteering in a children’s orphanage in Cambodia, for example, sounds like a good way of directing your travel dollars to a worthwhile cause. That is until you learn about the fake orphanages that separate children from their parents for the sole purpose of separating tourists from their money.

So how do you travel ethically when unscrupulous tour operators do every thing they can to hide the truth of their operations? Here are some suggestions.