The time is upon us to start thinking of our family travel plans. I’m always very excited about the summer and the wonder of where we can take the family. However, it can often be a struggle to find deals and stay within budget.
Some of the tools that have proven to be useful for me are highlighted in this post. I’ll start with finding a good deal on flights. This is usually the most expensive part of my trips so I’m always trying to look for a special sale or deal.
- What has significantly helped me with this frustrating task is google flights. It allows me to look for flights based on price. It pulls up a calendar with the daily prices for all the major U.S. airlines. Now, I’m able to easily determine what time frame is the least expensive and plan our trip accordingly.
- Unfortunately, Southwest Airlines is the only major airline not included in Google Flights. So next, I’ll just check Southwest’s website and save any flights that look promising into my free account. My last step for searching for airline tickets is…
- Taking advantage of any credit card travel reward miles I might have. I now know the cheapest times to fly, which helps to hone in how to fly with the least amount of miles, as well. This is where I can finally pull the trigger and purchase tickets knowing I did my due diligence.
Next stop: Rental cars. A great service I’ve used in the past is called Autoslash.com. Here’s how I finagle the process.
- My first step is to book a refundable car reservation through one of the major brands or Costco. The key is that it needs to be refundable, in other words, you pay when you pick up the car and don’t pay a dime if you decide to cancel beforehand.
- Then I head over to Autoslash to do some price comparisons. Autoslash is an aggregator so it’s able to look at a variety of brands and select which one is the cheapest. However, in this part of the planning process, the prices are roughly the same as the big brands. The biggest difference with Autoslash is that they will continue to look for the best price for me until I tell them to stop. What normally happens is a few weeks prior to departure, Autoslash is able to find a better deal. At this point, I then book the deal through them. But wait, now I’m double booked! Oh no!
- Oh yes! I then go back to my original refundable reservation with the big brand and cancel the reservation. This process allows me to have my bases covered. If Autoslash doesn’t find me a better price, no harm, no foul. I just go ahead and stay with my original reservation at the big brand.
A new service I’m trying out is called Pruvo.com. They operate in the same fashion as Autoslash, except they handle hotels. I recently tested them out and they actually did save me about $30 for a hotel stay during the holidays.