We have made reservations for Cincinnati. We are doing a weekend due to time frame and the cost of travel. But!!!! Let me tell you about the deal I got for our hotel room. I wanted to stay at the river near all the shops and entertainment. When I started checking prices, the hotel rooms were going to be $149 and up. OUCH! I went to priceline.com and started bidding for a room. I first chose only 4 star hotels and put in $60. REJECTED! :( But then I looked at what the options would be if I chose a 31/2 star hotel. The hotels that were 3 1/2 stars were the ones I was looking at in the first place. I changed my ranking and bid $70 (because you have to change the price also) I WON!!! We are staying at the Millennium Hotel in Cincinnati. It looks great! I can't wait. So I figure, we will be able to stay, park and eat 1 meal out for the price I would have paid for a hotel room if I just booked it from the hotel.
So, Be sure to check out Priceline.com when you are traveling. It does save you big bucks!!!
Well, day two on trying to choose a place for us to go. We have narrowed the time frame down for our summer get a way to just be a Friday through Monday. Now with putting this time frame on it, it has also put limits on how far we can travel and also if it is worth to fly or not.
Well we have definitely decided not to fly. So that limits the area that we can go. Driving is not one of my husband’s favorite things to do so I try to limit the driving to less than 6-7 hours for short vacations.
So here is the plan if we choose to go to a big city and tyr to keep our budget in tact and also experience as much as possible.
*Check out all the big cities that are with in 5 hours of Louisville.
*Check the gas prices for the routes that we would take to the big cities. Map quest has a great feature that will tell you the gas prices.
*Check on Priceline to see what the face rate would be for hotels in that area. Just a little hint, all the travel search engines are all the same. They get the same deals. Don’t waste too much of your time checking all of them. I use the bidding feature on Priceline when I am ready to book at hotel room. I make sure I am already ok with the price that I could get for just buying the room without bidding. If I bid, chances are that I will get it a little less but the worst case scenario is that I get it for the price it was listed in the first place.
*Check Restaurant.com and see if there are any restaurants that we would like to eat at. Right now you can get the certificates for 50% off with using this link and putting in ENTREE in the coupon code at checkout.
*Check out the tourism site for the city. See if there are any festivals, plays in the park or museums that would be of interest to our family. Usually the festivals and plays are free and most cities are starting to do free or discounted museums to try and bring in the customer.
After looking over the options that we have, Chicago, St. Louis, or Cincinnati is going to be our best option for a vacation. Memphis is a possibility also but just a little further than I would like. The first three mentioned all have great attractions that my family would love. If I had to rank the choices before talking to my family, I would say St. Louis, Chicago and then Cincinnati. But you never know with my crew.
Give me your feed back. Where would you choose out of the three? Do you know these cities well? We have been to all three but Chicago is the only one we know best.
if you have a family or friend that works for a hotel they would be able to get you a friends and family rate. usually its about 1/2 off the usual rate. that really helps out on vaca's.