We’re a couple of months into this project, and I’ve been asked “What have you learned?” Quite a bit, actually, starting with a sharpened focus on what we’re trying to accomplish at TET. Simply put, we’re doing our best to share what we know about travel, travel planning and using points and miles to pay for it with our subscribers. It’s our passion, and though we certainly don’t know it all, we have a lot of travel experience and are constantly learning more about how to make travel dreams come true. Even though a lot of those dreams are temporarily on hold due to the pandemic, the world is slowly showing signs of re-opening. . .so it’s time to get going again, at least for planning purposes.
As we all start to formulate our travel plans, we thought it would be a good time to summarize and share some of the go-to resources we’ve been using. Here they are, categorized, linked, and tied to any applicable TET post on how to best use them:
- For general travel planning, Trip Advisor https://www.tripadvisor.com/ A great place to start to learn about a potential destination and save your thoughts and ideas. You could literally plan and book your entire trip, with the exception of flight reservations, with Trip Advisor; although you wouldn’t be using your points or miles, so we don’t recommend that. Instagram (get their app for your phone) is a terrific place to learn about what to do in a specific locale.
- For flights: Kayak https://www.kayak.com/ and Google Flights https://www.google.com/travel/flights for North America, Skyscanner https://www.skyscanner.com/ for international flights.
- For hotels, Trip Advisor will give you a good idea of what hotels are available in a particular area, as well as reviews of each one. From there, look at that hotel’s website for booking rates and details. If you’re looking for a condo or home to stay in, we like Airbnb https://www.airbnb.com/ , VRBO https://www.vrbo.com/ and RedWeek https://www.redweek.com/.
- For Points and Miles advice, we’d like to think we are your primary source! But we learn a lot from several sites, including Frequent Miler https://frequentmiler.com/ for their thoughtful analysis of credit cards and point values and The Points Guy https://thepointsguy.com/ for their sheer breadth of travel news.
- For general travel hacking advice, we really like what Julia Menez is doing at GeoBreeze Travel https://geobreezetravel.com/. Her pointers (especially on Instagram @geobreezetravel) are very specific and well done. Just this week, we picked up 10,000 Hilton Honors points just for doing a survey, thanks to Julia.
- For specific help in using your points, turn to Pam Keystone and her team at Award Tickets https://www.awardtickets.com/. For a fee, they will navigate the tricky world of booking first class and business class airfare, using your points and miles. If you don’t have the time or patience to try it yourself, it’s a great value. And if you’re looking to book custom or small group travel, hop on over to her sister site The Art of Vacationing https://www.theartofvacationing.com/ to see what’s on their agenda.
We’ve also learned that the people involved in this corner of the travel world are welcoming and gracious with their time, thoughts and advice. Much like each of you and your fellow TET subscribers, who have been extremely encouraging to us as we try to put together our brand of useful information and advice. Thanks to all of you, we have some interesting interviews, reviews and ideas coming your way in the next few weeks.
Photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash
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