First Vacation After COVID: Making Travel More Affordable

A few weeks ago, the PiN household returned from our first trip out of town since COVID hit. I had previously written:

I didn’t have much of a budget for this vacation–after over a year at home, I sort of didn’t care what it cost. Sometimes it is time to loosen the purse strings, and for the PiN household, this was that time; though I still like to get a good deal if that is possible.

It isn’t quite true that we didn’t have a budget: I gave Mr. PiN a rather high number as a limit to our hotel spending, thinking that our food budget couldn’t possibly be a big issue. (I haven’t seen all the credit card bills; I am not sure that assumption was correct!)

Nevertheless, even though we had a very high budget (for us) for our vacation, we both like to get a bit of a deal.

Below are some ways we saved money on our trip, and some thoughts on ways to make future trips affordable. As well as things that, to us, are worth spending more on.

I hope you may find some of these tips helpful in your own travel planning in the future.

Saving on lodging

Our trip was planned in several segments: visit my parents, stay at two places we reserved in advance, and improvise a few nights that weren’t planned yet.

Get the family rate

To state the obvious, staying with family is a great way to reduce lodging costs. After more than a year apart, my parents were pretty happy to see us. We certainly got to stay in my childhood room for free, and they wouldn’t even let us treat them to dinner.

Of course, this wasn’t quite the same as staying in a hotel. This time, we had some issues sleeping due to some needy pets. That scratching at the door at 3 AM was a real issue.

Credit card perks: travel credits and points

Many travel rewards credit cards offer ways to offset your purchases: an annual travel credit, or using points to “erase” your purchase. Other rewards cards let you use points to pay off your bill, no matter what you used the card to buy. Any way that lets you pay for travel, but then avoid sending money to the company sounds like a great way to save money.

For our travels in Maine, we booked two places in advance. Neither were part of big chains, or available on travel sites (with their own rewards program) like Hotels.com. I won’t say that we got a bargain, but we knew the prices before we left home.

I had written last year about our collection of frequent flyer miles and rewards points. I was able to use Capital One Miles and some of our Chase Sapphire travel credit (some got used earlier in the pandemic for groceries) to get rebates or credits for our stays. Overall, we were able reduce our cash outlay by about $600. That was nice.

Loyalty Programs

Airlines, hotel chains, gas stations, internet travel companies: they all want you to keep coming back, over and over again, so they will offer loyalty programs. Spend so much money with us, or stay so many nights, they say, and we will give you a free something. These rewards are not transferable, and often have expiration dates, though since the pandemic many programs are more forgiving about the latter.

We used loyalty program rewards to cover 3 nights on our trip.

These nights were not booked before we left. Mr. PiN and I loved the feeling of freedom we had–like the road trips of our (separate) youth–and the ability to adjust our plans depending on the weather.

Unfortunately, 2 of our unscheduled days fell around the July 4th weekend. As you may imagine, last minute hotel prices in lovely summer destinations were much higher than we felt like paying. The Portland area was especially expensive that weekend.

We visited Portland well before July 4th, and found the Holiday Inn Portland-By-the-Bay listed on Hotels.com for much cheaper than hotels in the Old Port area. The location worked very well for us, as it was across the street from the Portland Museum of Art, which I had wanted to visit anyway. As a bonus, we got lost getting there, and enjoyed a tour of some beautiful neighborhoods.

We used one “free night” from Hotels.com to reduce our bill to $35 plus parking.

We decided to return to Portland for the day on July 2, and would have loved to stay at the same hotel. Unfortunately, room rates had increased by $200. Ulp.

Instead we visited the museum again, and then headed out of town to the suburbs. We blew nearly all our points with Hilton to stay for free at a lovely Homewood Suites. Our room was as big as an apartment, with a kitchen, and even a laundry room across the hall. The best part (besides room to lounge and clean clothes to lounge in) was that we didn’t even have to pay the room taxes: using points covered it all.

For our last night before staying my parents again, we found a cheaper hotel ion the way–as it turns out, it was right near a train station and the neighborhood was a bit iffy. It was nice inside, though. Another “free night” from Hotels.com, and our bill was under $16.

Other Ways to Save

Some of these we actually did. Others we thought about “for next time.”

Enjoy less expensive pursuits

Overall, many of the things we enjoyed the most did not cost very much. This was a big help in keeping costs down.

We visited public beaches (free), walked around small towns and a big city, drove US-1 along scenic routes, and played tennis on free-to-us courts.

We paid a little money to enter Acadia National Park: $30 for the car (pass good for a week; if only we had stayed that long!) and another $6 for a reservation to drive up to the top of Cadillac Mountain. (Totally worth it, as far as I am concerned).

The Portland Museum was probably the most expensive attraction we paid to see, $36 for admission for 2. We returned on a Friday afternoon (free admission!).

The running total, if you are keeping track, is $72 and gas, for a week.

We did not pay for amusement parks, expensive souvenirs, or, despite my complaints about the price of eating out, super-fancy restaurants.

Pay Your Memberships At Home

We love going to museums. Many museums participate in groups that allow members of one museum to get free entrance to another.

Unfortunately, we let our memberships lapse during the pandemic, mostly because I was distracted by work.

If only we had kept our memberships active (and remembered to bring our cards), we could have supported the arts at home and enjoyed free admission when we traveled.

We will do better next year.

Book Places with a Kitchen

We went nuts eating out, mostly because most of our hotel rooms did not have anything like a kitchen.

At first it was fun, but after a few days we really wanted more simple food. I would have been happy eating just one restaurant meal a day.

Based on our bills, and large tips, I think that probably could have saved us a bundle.

Get Paid to Travel

We most certainly did not pull this one off.

However, I do recall that there are often multiple listings for locum tenens positions in Maine.

I suspect that those positions may not be in the picturesque vacation towns, and probably in worse weather. However, it was nice to think about a retirement gig or two that might get us free travel and lodging.

Reasons to Spend

All of this talk about saving money brings me back to my budget at the beginning of our planning.

We had not spent any money on travel in the past year, and just wanted to have a good time in our first trip out of town. I wouldn’t say it was revenge spending, just making sure we enjoyed the stuff we spent money on.

I would say there were three expenses that were totally worth the money this trip.

Our beach stay. We stayed at a beach resort for several days. The price per night was a good bit more than we usually pay for a hotel, but included breakfast, parking, access to a swimming pool and tennis court. Also a common room in case the weather was bad. It was in walking distance of the beach and town.

We enjoyed every minute of our stay there. In fact, driving out of town, I reflected that it would be worth working a little longer in order to be able to afford a stay there every year. We will see how that works out.

Flexibility. While making reservations ahead of time is probably the best idea for saving money, at least in high season, I really enjoyed the freedom of deciding at the last moment where to go and where to stay. I honestly had plans to go further east or further north after Bar Harbor; a few rainy days changed our minds quickly and we enjoyed our return to the big city.

Throwing out the budget (sort of). We ate lobster rolls despite their increased prices, paid more to eat lunch at restaurants on the water, and tipped generously. It felt great to know we could afford to pay for our indulgences, support people working in jobs that did not offer much security last year, and not to spend our time stressing.

What are your favorite ways to make travel affordable? Are you sticking to your budget this year for travel after our year of stay-at-home orders?