A Chance to Try Out Shopping Strategies -- Travel Savings Accomplished

If you've been reading my blog from the start, you know that besides posting great deals, I also made some posts on shopping strategies to find better deals while you shop. Last night I got to test some of those strategies to try and get a nicer travel deal for my wife.

Here's a quick recap. Luisa has a business conference coming up in Maui (oh, that's tough!). The rate the conference organizers had arranged at the hotel was $250 a night. Over the weekend we were checking airfares and the best we were finding was about $780 with taxes arriving midday on a Sunday and departing late on Thursday. One of the flight options was her preferred frequent flyer account carrier. So the deal had been looking at being in the range of $1,780 plus hotel taxes (about 13%) making it about $1,910.

One of the earlier things we did was check with AAA rates for the hotel -- I couldn't imagine that the special conference rate wasn't better than that, but lo and behold it wasn't. Triple A at that hotel was $212 a night, which would save $152 in hotel room costs (and about $20 in tax). We didn't book it right away since that was a regular AAA rate and we could get back to it. We also had held off on the airfare hoping to see if a sale to Hawaii opened up.

Last night it looked at first that waiting on the airfare had backfired a bit, as some of the flight choices had dried up. There were still flight on the dates, but the mid-afternoon arrival on her preferred airline was gone. We did some searching and found the fare for a later arrival (still the right date) but an extra layover. Oops. But since flights were drying up, we figured it was time. But to get the best deal we still used a bit of strategy. We were checking sites and looked at Priceline which offered a few more options than we could find elsewhere. Once I saw that, I used a cashback portal to get to Priceline. In this case it was fatwallet.com. Their deal would get you back 3% of what you spent (ebates was at 2% for this one). So with that cashback, the net would drop down to about $757 -- at least a bit better. Their site also showed that you could cancel within 24 hours with no penalty and seeing that seats were drying up we made that reservation.

We did another travel search through kayak and found that CheapTickets.com and United still had tickets priced at $778. Because the times we had found on Luisa's preferred carrier were no longer the ideal ones, we did a search on CheapTickets and United still had flights that would get her to Maui in the early afternoon and leave a bit later the last day, with one less layover in each direction. Much easier travel and better times. Fatwallet offered 1-3% cashback at CheapTickets. But then came a nice surprise, as we checked buying the hotel together with airfare. All the other sites we had checked for the hotel were showing $250 or more per night (Priceline had had a total of over $2,000 for a flight and hotel. But CheapTickets was offering the United flights plus the hotel for $1,559, including all taxes and fees. Even with the AAA rate added to the best airfare we could find, our previous best would have been $1,715 (4 nights at $212 plus 13% tax, plus the post-fatwallet airfare of $757). So this one looked like a no-brainer. The savings were worth more than the frequent flyer miles on her preferred carrier would have been, plus the reduction in changing planes in both directions... but wait, there was more.

I remembered my old advice (even I forget sometimes) to always check for coupon codes before buying something. So I did a quick google search for CheapTickets coupon codes and found a code valid now for the right travel period that gave $50 off a booking of 4 nights or more. I entered that code and voilá! The price droped to $1,509. With a fatwallet cashback of 1%-3% (their site doesn't show what qualifies for what level), the final net for flights and hotel comes down to the range of $1,464 to $1,494. That's over $400 in savings off the original hotel rate we were given with the best airfare we had found.

Before we booked, we contacted Priceline and canceled, and they held up their end, no cancellation fee within 24 hours as promised on their reservation.

And that's the tale of this shopping adventure, where a little digging (and a little luck) got some pretty hefty results. I went to sleep with a smile.