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Getting back to my European summer adventure – after ten days throughout Ireland and Greece, it was time to wind down my summer vacation and move on to the France and Austria portions of my itinerary. It just so happened that the last day of the Greece group trip was the day before the final match of the Women’s World Cup in Lyon, France. In order to get to Lyon with enough lead time to allow for delays, I spent a little extra to fly from Paros back to Athens early Saturday morning.Read More →

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About three days before embarking on the luckiest vacation ever, I checked my Marriott app and saw that the Le Méridien Bora Bora had already processed an advanced upgrade to an overwater bungalow at the end of the pontoon (like a dock) – one of the most desirable rooms at the property which would have cost an extra $500 per day for an upgrade from the base points reservation for a Classic room.Read More →

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Choosing hotels was probably one of the harder tasks on our trip around the world. We wanted the bulk of the cost to be covered by hotel points, but we obviously weren’t working with unlimited amounts of points – especially with the one realistic Maldives option being 20,000 Starwood points per night – so we had to be as strategic as possible. Except for a bed & breakfast booked through Airbnb in Colombo, all the lodging was in fancy-ish hotels via loyalty program points or certificates. Read More →

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ONLY FOUR MORE DAYS (!!!) until my round-the-world summer vacation with my friend Rosio! We’re heading to 8 countries in two weeks (gotta maximize that annual leave), and booked our flights and accommodations using a mix of loyalty points and money. We ended up with a nearly $37,000 trip for 2 that was booked with about 600,000 points and roughly $2,000. I’m so excited, and I want to share bit about the plan and how we booked it.Read More →

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February is clearly the best month of the year (how could it be otherwise when it signals my entrance into the world?) and every year I try to make sure my birthday provides an occasion for everyone to recognize February’s awesomeness. This year’s flu season actually loosened its grip on me long enough to allow me to properly celebrate, so I headed off to Portland, Oregon. Originally, I didn’t plan to do much for my birthday, but then I remembered I now have the power of Southwest’s Companion Pass* at my disposal, and I couldn’t miss the chance to use it. Helloooo short getaway!Read More →

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The Perfect Accommodations There are many things in life to which I sometimes arrive very late (dinners, nearly all TV shows, most entries on Urban Dictionary…), but a hotel reservation is not one of those things – a late hotel reservation can mean spending hundreds of dollars that I could otherwise be using to eat delicious foods, or it could mean compromising on what I want out of my hotel stay. Neither is an acceptable outcome when both can be prevented. The two biggest expenses of most trips are flights and lodging. If you can control these costs, then the overall cost of your tripRead More →