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 →
If you follow my Instagram – and let’s be honest there are few good reasons not to – you’ll have seen that I was living my best #luxelife in Bora Bora last month. Given that I was furloughed for most of January (#IdiocyInAction), the primary question from most of my friends was HOW?! Welp, in the interest of transparency and full disclosure and all that jazz, that trip was about as close to free as it was probably going to get. I went with my mom, and for my portion of the trip, the flight, lodging, and daily breakfast came to about $500. That’s travelingRead More →
This summer, my friend Rosio and I traveled around the world in two weeks, stopping in eight destinations, and in each place we tried to see and do as much as possible. There’s no way I could share everything we did in those two weeks, but here are a lot of the highlights! Even the highlights turned out to be crazy long, so I’ve split the post and this is part two of the activities recap, covering Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Maldives, and Sri Lanka, and Hong Kong. The first half of the trip is located here.Read More →
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 →
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 →
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 →
