Search Results for: blog planning your vacation via the internet

Reasons You Shouldn’t Get Rid Of Your Travel Agent

When was the last time you called a travel agent to help plan your family vacation? Personally, I don’t remember the last time I consulted a travel agent… and I’m related to one. I know I am not the only one. In fact, according to AAA, back in the mid 1990s travel agents booked 75% of travel reservations. Compare that to 2006 when some 77 million travelers turned to the Internet to book their airline tickets. Interestingly, in the first 6 months of 2007 those numbers dropped significantly. Travel agents appear to be experiencing a resurgence of sorts as many … Continue reading →

Planning Your Vacation Via The Internet

When was the last time you stepped foot into a travel agency? With the dawn of the Internet and the tens of thousands of travel resources available online, travel agents seem to be a dying breed. My aunt retired from the travel industry last year after spending more than 20 years as a travel agent. She was, by all accounts, the only person anyone in my family dealt with when it came to booking a trip. Now she’s spending her days on the golf course and we have all begun turning to the Internet to secure our travel plans. Now … Continue reading →

Giving Your Homeschooled Child the Reins

A major goal in our homeschooling experience is to make sure our children can function as independent adults when they leave home. To ensure they can handle adult tasks without calling mommy and daddy, we have them handle difficult tasks now. One major adult task that our kids handle are family vacations. We give the children a budget and talk about where we want to go and leave the rest to the children. Frankly I think they do a better job than we do. To plan a vacation, the children usually decide how much we have to spend on hotel … Continue reading →

Get It While It’s Free

When was the last time you calculated the entire cost of your vacation? And by entire, I mean from the trip planning stage until the minute you pull back into your driveway following your dream getaway. Many people neglect to tally the total cost of a trip. Consequently, they aren’t able to determine ways to save on their next escape. One of the best ways to cut costs when traveling is to utilize free trip planning services. The Internet is teeming with sites aimed to help you to get from point A to point B in the most convenient way … Continue reading →

Are You Addicted to Genealogy?

Genealogists, as a group, seem to have a sense of humor about their favorite hobby. It might be a side effect of spending so much time doing precise research and serious fact checking. There are genealogy jokes that get passed around the internet, and several websites that sell shirts with amusing genealogy images and sayings printed on them. So, when genealogists refer to their hobby as an addiction, I believe they are joking around. There are genealogy blogs that use the word “addiction” in their title! Pamela’s Genealogy Addiction is the name of a blog run by Pamela. She uses … Continue reading →

Saving Money at the Shore 3

We just got back from our vacation this weekend, and we are now catching up with the regular routine. An unplanned side trip extended the vacation by a day, and so there is a lot to share with you. If you missed the first two posts in this series, you can catch up here: Saving Money at the Shore Saving Money at the Shore 2 I promised to talk about some free and low cost forms of entertainment when at the shore. While I will give you some examples of the things we did that were fun and frugal, you … Continue reading →

The Cost of Flying is Soaring

I have written extensively about the increasing cost of fuel and its affect on the travel industry. If you haven’t already purchased plane tickets for your summer vacation brace yourself for some serious sticker shock. Last week United Airlines raised fares in the United States and Canada by up to $30 round-trip in an effort to combat high fuel costs. Less than 48 hours later several other carriers followed suit including American, Delta, Continental and Northwest, which raised domestic round trips by $10 to $20 per ticket. Times are so tough that even discount airline Southwest raised its rates–twice. Last … Continue reading →

More Ways to Find Cheap Airfare Online

Regular readers of this blog know that I am all about finding new ways to take the hassle out of the time-consuming process of tracking down the best online airfares. I’ve shared a few of my standbys in previous blogs and have a few more to add in this post. BROADEN YOUR HORIZONS It’s not a bad idea to add a few new fare-comparison websites to your list of “regulars.” I’m guilty as anyone when it comes to sticking with tried and true favorites such as Kayak, BookingBuddy.com, SideStep, Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity, but several new fare-comparison websites have joined … Continue reading →

Finding Cheap Airfare Online

I’ve written about strategies to find the cheapest airfare in cyberspace in previous blogs, but in the last few weeks I have discovered a couple of new sites that are worth mentioning. Since most of my family lives 5,000 miles away from me I regularly scour the Internet in search of discounted airfare. However, there are times I get lazy and visit just a few particular online travel agencies. As such I often miss out on cheaper fares not available through those types of booking websites. For example, last year new carriers such as Skybus and Virgin America began flying, … Continue reading →

Say So Long To Paper Tickets

Bad news for my mom and others like her who are resistant to change. This time next year paper airline tickets will have gone the way of rotary telephones—-not completely obsolete, but very hard to find. According to the International Air Transport Association, currently, less than 14% of the 400 million tickets it processes are paper tickets. And that number is expected to drop again next year. Beginning June 1, 2008, the IATA will stop issuing paper tickets. Some small regional or foreign airlines will continue issuing paper tickets, but they’ll be few and far between. The reason for the … Continue reading →