I recently put a FB post up on my personal page asking what people would like to know from this blog. One thing that came out of it was that other people are now looking at doing their dream holiday, but don't know where to start. Well, neither did I! Looking back, the thing that helped me most was reading. SO much reading. Travel magazines, websites, blogs, eNewsletters, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Escape section of the paper, everything. I spent literally hundreds of hours (my poor kids can attest to this!) on the computer or with my head in a book, dreaming and mulling things over. So, from all of this research, I can tell you what worked for us. Hopefully this gets you started on planning your next holiday! 1/ Start dreaming. Yes, you may have picked America/Europe/Asia as your general destination, but it's time to start looking at what you REALLY want to do while you're over there. Cut things out of magazines, bookmark webpages and print articles as you see them. The more you dream, the more your trip starts to take shape. The image on the right here is what my "Holiday" bookmarks bar still looks like. 2/ Slowly start chipping away at the trip. I do this before I set the budget. If you find that most of the attractions you reeeeeeally want to do are condensed in the one area, slowly remove all the experiences that you deem are too far away/not worth adding on to the expense. 3/ Don't commit to anything too early! Pick out 5 must-do things and be flexible with everything else. Keep adding/subtracting from the list until it starts to shape into a trip you can picture yourself getting excited about, being able to afford and being totally worth all the hard work! You would hate to nail down all the details but then find out that if you had travelled a week later you could have saved $700, or had you been in a city two nights later you could have seen your favourite band! If you have time to plan it, allow yourself to be flexible until you are ready to book. We added the Rocky's back in to our itinerary only 3 weeks before we booked our trip! 4/ Do a 'mock trip' the year before. Attend a travel expo and ask around to find when they anticipate flights to your chosen area to be cheapest. Use that info to check out what's on offer through the year before your trip. eg. I spent a lot of time in 2016 pretending to book flights to different parts of the states. It gave me a good guide to what I can expect at different times of the year, and is how we decided on October, booking the trip in Summer. 5/ Find a travel agent! They are usually renowned for ripping you off, pushing insurance and booking based on commission. However, we have used the same travel agency (Escape Travel in Booragoon, WA) for about 3 years now. If you find someone you respect and get along with, it's quite easy for them to use your research and the information you provide to them to book the trip you want, at the price you want. The bonus of maintaining a relationship with a travel agent is that you don't feel guilty for picking their brains on all the little issues, getting the security of someone on hand if things go wrong, and they will look after you with repeat business. Our travel agent gave us a $100 off our Whitsundays sail just because I rang her to book it instead of doing it online! 6/ Set a few budgets. Mentally, $20k on our trip makes me die a little inside. However, I remember the following and it makes me feel much better. (PS. See other post on Vision Boards to watch your savings grow!)
So, narrowing it down made it not seem to daunting when trying to save. Over 2 years, the $15k I *needed* worked out to $144/week in savings (which we did as $100/wk then boosted with our tax returns) and spending money was just $35/week. I am pleased to say that so far, we have only spent $13,800 on our expenses, which includes our new laptop (blogging expense!), action cam, snow clothing, pre-booking our entry tickets and an allocation for fuel. Plus, I have managed to save $5k for spending money ($166/day), so the budget is sitting pretty at $18,800! 7/ Don't listen to the naysayers! I learned this one the hard way. Everyone dreams differently. I don't have the desire to build a house, while others don't have the desire to travel. Just because we are spending money on travel instead of a house/car/kids/etc. doesn't mean that our dream is worth any less than theirs. So when someone says "Why would you want to go there?' (because it's my trip and I want to?) or "You could put a deposit on a house with that!" (and?!) just remember that you are working towards your dream, not their idea of what a dream should be! "There are 7 days in the week, and "someday" is not one of them." I hope this helps you get motivated to start your big family trip! Han.
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I have been toying with the idea of another travel-tips post for a while but couldn't really nail down a topic (well, one that would be specific enough that wouldn't result in a huge off-tangent post). After spending the morning researching the Maldives (my Aunt and Uncle are currently enjoying their over-water bungalow) and reading other travel blogs, it inspired me to finally start typing on our own. There are three reasons I got in to blogging as the Winter Wanderers. Firstly was to provide the family with updates during our travel that don't flood the Facebook feed of our acquaintances. The second reason was to create an online diary that one day the kids can look back on (or, in my case, uploading it all to Snapfish and printing photobooks as their keepsakes). The last one is to help others prepare for their own travel goals. I am passionate about doing things cheaply. Years of tight budgeting has taught me to appreciate being frugal. This won't work for everyone- if you are happy to spend $1400 a night on a luxury resort, you are reading the wrong blog. A friend commented on one of my posts that it makes her feel that travel is achievable. After many years of thinking it was a pipe dream, I have learnt that it 100% is achievable no matter what the budget or family size. Shane and I were in the bank yesterday, and asked about the access to Amex Connect on our new Amex card. "What is Amex Connect?" she asked. I stared at her blankly. How did she not know? How do so many people not know the perks associated with everyday shopping, and how you can use these to your travelling advantage? I realised that I needed to keep posting different ways to knock down the cost of your next escape and make them seem like a goal, not a dream. So, how do you make a big dream achievable? 1. Plan way in advance. As you know, this Canada/USA trip is 4 years in the making. We already have our next trip booked, and have created a savings plan for our 2021 holiday (plus a goal to buy a house that year too! See the post below re. Vision Boards and Goal Setting, as we have a new one gracing our house!) 2. Make your spending work for you. Velocity, Qantas, Amex, Flybuys, Everyday Rewards- there is a way to earn rewards on maybe 90% of your purchases. All of these programs have access to redemption or discounts on travel, such as car hire, flights or hotels. 3. Use a variety of research methods. Blogs, Google Flights, Expedia, travel agents, friends and the tourism board website of your destinations are your best friends. Use them all! 4. Be willing to adapt/change your plans and expectations. Our #Canada2017 trip has had many (many, many) amendments that has seen the timeline fluctuate, removing and readding destinations and finally, reversing the direction of the entire trip to make it work best for us. We lost time in NYC, but gained a week in the Rocky Mountains and a few extra days in Texas! How I use these tips- a Maldives example. $1400 a night for an over-water bungalow? Pfft. I don't love water that much. But $1,400pp for a week in the Maldivian Islands is highly tempting. Say I decided that Shane and I have decided to go to the Maldives in 2018. A quick check on Flight Centre quotes me $1,399 for flights in January. A deal on LuxuryEscapes.com.au reveals a 'great' deal on 5 nights in the Maldives for 'just' $9,999! Return speedboat trips from Male' to most resorts come to $280pp. Bargain! However, after reading a few blogs, I have found that there is so much more to the Maldives than the resorts. Low Season falls between April-October. Being flexible reduces the flights to $1,100 with Cathay Pacific in July. The government has also enabled locals to start opening Guesthouses, disabling the monopoly held by the exclusive resorts on many of the islands. This means that there are now many guesthouses, Air BnB's and home-owned cottages available to rent at around $6--80/night. Breakfast included. Plus, earn/ redeem Qantas points at Air BnB so you're getting ahead there too! Want to walk the boardwalk of the over-water bungalow? Get a local fishing boat to drop you over and back for $20pp. Snorkelling trip? Tell your Air BnB host and they may know someone to take you out for more than half off the tourist price at the resort. Need to move between islands? $3pp ferries instead of $200 sea-planes! You will also find priceless information regarding food, beaches and Muslim restrictions on the Maldivian Islands all over the internet. So, what my 2 hour research journey taught me, was that the Maldives is now not a pipe dream for when we offload our livers or win the lotto. It can easily be done for around $3,000 for 2 of us. Granted, we would have to rely on ourselves to get around and do a lot more research than if we just jumped on a deal from a travel agent, but that's what we are about! This has worked for us for #Canada2017, will be employed when I start finalising our 2019 cruise and I am already toying with budgets and destinations for our final overseas family jaunt in 2021. Being flexible, knowing where to look, being independent and happy to rely on locals to get a real feel for the area is how we travel. If you have the time and the commitment to putting your own trip together, it is 100% achievable! Plus, I would LOVE to help you! So, get planning! YOU can do it!
We also started tracking our savings properly. It was disheartening spending 6 months feeling like we were not getting anywhere. Between rego, gymnastics, soccer and school fees, it genuinely felt like the trip just wouldn't happen.
However, starting the thermometer-style chart on the hallway door enabled us to see that $50 a week WAS making a difference. It wasn't tucked away in a corner account, it was there in front of us creeping up each week. It also tracks the kids pocket money- each week they grab the nikko and colour in another notch- a great incentive for them to save when they can't physically see their money. Come January 2017, we had actually booked our flights and secured our dates/itinerary. Aunty Yaya gave us a gorgeous pin-board that we could use as we wish. Again, Brock, Zach and Emme got hacking at the travel brochures and we scrapbooked our new vision board. The 'Dream' board sits on our main facing wall in the bedroom, and reminds us that we worked (and saved) hard for our trip of a lifetime. ********************************************************************************************************* Han: I don't think I could have stayed as motivated through broken down cars, excessive education fees and keeping a beer fridge stocked for the hardworking husband if I didn't have these charts and boards in front of me reminding me that I can still making progress. Shane: I hate feeling like I work really hard but we don't get ahead so it's good to see we are saving a fair bit and it's not just disappearing. Brock: I like that we can see what we are going to do on our trip and how much money I have. Zach: I like that it tells us how much money we have so we know if we have spent too much or if we have enough to buy treats. I am saving my money for a remote control. Emme: I like making the boards and cutting out my favourite pictures. They look pretty. I like seeing my money go up. Have you heard of ITA Matrix?
I hadn't either. But once I learnt about it and how to use it, it because my obsession. ITA Matrix is a platform that pulls flight data from all carriers into one place. Instead of relying on Flight Centre or individual carrier websites, you can do a search that pulls all the results in to one place. It's essentially what the Travel Agents use and was purchased by Google to operate Google Flights. Check it out here: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ There are many, many blogs that can show you how to use Advanced Routing Codes, open jaw, multi-city, stopover allocations and many more criteria to help you find the best deal. I'll keep it simple though and just add links to the bottom if you're interested in learning. The quickest way of using ITA Matrix to find a deal is using the Return Flight tab. The beauty of ITA Matrix is that you can specify nearby airports to check as well- eg. selecting Newark and LaGuardia in your destination results will make a trip to NYC about $300 cheaper than arriving in JFK. You can also use their awesome calendar to see what time of the month/duration would be cheapest to fly. eg. September flights to New York from Brisbane are cheapest if you depart on a Monday and return within 7-8 days. The Multi- City function was my best friend. I spent HOURS (actually, days) trying different combinations, flight times and route directions to find the best option. The program allows you to select "+/- 1 or 2 days" so it's great if you are flexible as it shows you that it is cheaper to fly out of NYC on a Wednesday than a Tuesday. Open jaw flights can work out much more economical than a direct return flight, and advance routing codes enable to to change your stopover time. eg. you can increase a stopover in each direction up to 24 hours with no penalty on most airlines, which enabled us to increase our stop in Vancouver from 1.5 hours to 7 hours so we could check out the city. Between playing with ITA Matrix and reading blogs by Secret Flying, Nomadic Matt, Skiplagged, FlightFox and many, many others, we managed to score a phenomenal deal, and also found that if we reversed our trip (eg. Dallas> East Coast> Rocky Mountains instead of Rockies> East Coast>Dallas) saved us over $1,500. Flexibility is a huge thing when booking flights! There is one problem with ITA Matrix though- they don't pick up airline sales, such as Jetstar's Friday Frenzy or a Qantas New Year sale. They also can't access SouthWest airlines, which is a great internal USA carrier (look in to them- they do free baggage!) and you can't book your flights directly with them- you have to copy the code and email a travel agent to book it for you. Thankfully our travel agent is an absolute goddess and booked it at the exact same price- even she was shocked at how cheap we got them! Our flights: Open Jaw and Internal flights booked with ITA Matrix code... Brisbane to Vancouver (Air Canada) Vancouver to Dallas (Jazz) Chicago to Calgary (United) Calgary to Vancouver (Jazz) Vancouver to Brisbane (Air Canada) Total Price: $7,497 AUD for 5 flights Internal Flights (done by agent at Flight Centre who allowed us to use a FC gift card). Adding this flight on with the rest resulted in an increase of $800 to the price so we looked into SouthWest. Dallas to New York City (SW Airlines) Price $434.75 USD ($574 AUD, less $200 gift card) TOTAL FLIGHTS: $7,871 (around $1,800/ adult and $1,400/ kid) Original Quote with Flight Centre: $12,500 So, if you're interested in learning ITA Matrix for a big trip, I would highly recommend it! Reward Expert Travel Codex Upgraded Points I'd like to tell you all that our ability to go overseas was just by saving and finding a good deal. Honestly though, it was that plus a LOT of work! Those that have known us for a while know that we struggled for MANY years to break even, let alone get ahead. It wasn't until Shane was made redundant from cabinetmaking that we became debt free and could really get into saving for our holiday. Having a 3 year planning session meant that we already had an idea of what we would be paying for, but a lot of research into 'points hacking', using ITA Matrix and taking advantage of special offers made a phenomenal difference. For 'Part 1' I am going to detail how we used these to our advantage when booking accommodation over 4 weeks. Of course, having friends invite us to stay in both Alberta and Toronto made a huge difference, but we still had 17 additional nights to book and pay for. If you have a look at the table below, you can see that a majority of our accommodation has been paid for using reward program points. Apart from New York, Chicago and Banff- who we booked through aggregate sites such as Hotels.com when a great sale came on- all of our hotels have been booked through rewards programs such as Velocity, Flybuys and Qantas. This saved us over $1500. There are plenty of websites out there to help you take advantage of rewards programs and how to 'hack' them. I only started collecting points seriously in about June 2016, 6 months before we started booking. I'll explain how... Flybuys:
If you aren't using Flybuys at Coles, or think it is not worth it, you aren't using them right! We have used Flybuys Travel to cash in over $830 worth of Flybuys points. Tricks and tips: - Sign up for all emails. Every week I get at least two emails detailing how to get bonus points. From earning 300 points per pack of Doritos to 10,000 points if I spend $100 a week for 4 weeks, they are all worth activating. - Download the Coles app and link your Flybuys card to it, that way when you are shopping you can see what bonus point items are available. - Check the fine print of your offers- some can only be used once per flybuys household while others enable you to purchase multiples. For instance, I once bought 18 packets of Vege Chips, which were not only half price but also gave me 300 points per packet. Not bad for something we eat anyway! - If they start pushing your minimum weekly shop amount up (eg. it jumps from $50 a week to $90 for bonus points) go shop at Woolworths and accumulate Qantas points instead. Flybuys calculate your average shop over 8 weeks, so this will help gradually bring it back down. - Use Flybuys Travel to book your accommodation and flights- they are often the same price as buying from the carrier or an aggregate site and offer you bonus points at times. - Cashing in your Flybuys points for accommodation on Flybuys Travel is also better than exchanging them to Velocity and booking through their site (usually exchanged at $.11 / 1 point instead of Velocity's $.05 / 1 point) - Exchanging Flybuys to Velocity won't be beneficial if you want to travel. 2,000 FB points is worth $10 on their site, while 2,000 points transferred to Velocity is $4.35 to use on Velocity's webstore. - Always check your docket- there are often bonus point deals attached to the bottom! Qantas: The easiest way to accumulate bulk Qantas points is of course to get a new credit card with a sign-up bonus. We did this and scored 50,000 Qantas points, which was worth more than the 1/2 price annual fee we paid. Tips and Tricks: - Apart from a sign on bonus, we also had access to Amex Connect, which provided discounts and cash back offers. We used our complimentary Gold Hertz Status to book our rental car which saved us an additional $380. - Use the eStore and keep an eye out for bonus points! Kogan often offer 10 points per dollar, which was a great boost to us when we bought Shane's camera. (a tip- store your Qantas FF number on your Kogan account but use Velocity eStore to enter the website- that way you get Velocity AND Qantas points!) - Birthday emails- always check them! We got a voucher for $30 off an accommodation booking, which we added to a points redemption to get $100 off our Fort Worth stay. - Woolworths- if you don't need the $10 off your shop, or don't shop there often, log in to your Woolworths rewards account and switch to Qantas points. Keep an eye out for emails with Bonus point offers, and around Christmas they send out a booklet where you can earn over 200 points with each weekly shop. - Moving between Woolworths and Coles when the other has better bonus points ensures that your minimum spend amounts for grabbing Bonus points stays lower. - Unlike Coles, Woolworths bonus points don't have to be done in one shop. If you have to spend $100 in the week to get the bonus points, this can be done in a number of transactions between Monday to Sunday. - Got a fitbit or a member of Snap Fitness? Bonus points are awarded on the Qantas Assure app when you reach a step goal or check in to the gym. We also have Qantas Assure Health Insurance which gives us points with each premium payment. Velocity I don't use Velocity much, but as we have Virgin Mobiles we do accumulate points each month. I do prefer Velocity eStore to the Qantas eStore as they have more retailers and more bonus point offers. Tips and Tricks - I use the eStore when I know I need something from a retailer I usually use. eg. I log in through the eStore and redirect to PetStock's website. I use their click and collect service and it earns me 4 points/$. - If you shop online a lot, there eStores cover a HUGE range! Pricline, Groupon, Review, Asos, Boohoo, Hard Yakka, Strawberry Net... If you need anything it's always worth seeing if they are listed and getting the points, and they often have codes for free shipping. - Global Wallet- the online/app currency exchange card I use offers 1 point/$1 spent overseas or 2/$1 in Australia, and often offers bonus points. I just transfer $100 a week to it as my travel savings. So that is the first part of how we could afford to travel overseas! Of course there is much more to it, such as having additional tax taken out of our pay each week so we get a massive tax return at the end of the year, but I wanted to point out how easy it is to use everyday shopping tricks to book accommodation! Part 2 will include details of how I used ITA Matrix to get our flights SUPER cheap! |
The WintersShane, Hannah, Brock, Zachary and Emmelise are all off on an adventure! Join Us! Categories |