Helping you and your family save money on your vacations to Disney and beyond
In the first half of this Real Life Award Booking, I outlined how you can earn enough miles for a round trip business class tickets to Europe in just a few months. For an extra few thousand miles per person, I helped my friend book a ticket from Washington DC to Auckland, New Zealand, and then back to the US through Tokyo, Japan. It costs 107,500 miles plus taxes and fees per person, with TWO long haul legs in business class. In this post I’ll outline how you can do that – right now! Or later…
Shireland: Introduction
Shireland: Day 1 – Aer Lingus Business Class, the Burren, and Moher
Shireland: Day 2 – Driving Dingle
Shireland: Day 3 – From West to East
Shireland: Day 4 – Exploring Dublin
Our third day in Ireland was a pretty long travel day – it takes about four and a half hours to drive from the west coast of Ireland, where we were staying, to Dublin on the east coast. We took a couple of detours along the way, but mostly we just enjoyed the greenery as we drove from coast to coast.
For the past couple months, I’ve been helping a friend plan a big trip to New Zealand using frequent flier miles. I helpd out at the beginning, but he did most of the work in the end – it’s not too bad once you get the hang of it! In this post I’ll outline how he earned the miles, and then in Part 2 I’ll discuss how he strung together New Zealand and Japan into one award trip. Frankly, I have traveling envy – I’d love to book this trip for myself!
Shireland: Introduction
Shireland: Day 1 – Aer Lingus Business Class, the Burren, and Moher
Shireland: Day 2 – Driving Dingle
Shireland: Day 3 – From West to East
Shireland: Day 4 – Exploring Dublin
If you’ve taken the redeye to Europe before, you know that first day you end up going to bed really (REALLY) early. I slept from 8 PM to 8 AM, which was good because we had a long scenic drive ahead of us on day 2. We spent our second day in Ireland driving the beautiful Dingle peninsula, which is said to be one of the most scenic places in Ireland. It did not disappoint.
The biggest game changer for me when I realized I wanted to get into the points game was finding out I could apply for multiple credit cards and receive multiple bonuses at once. In this post, I’ll quickly review why that doesn’t hurt your credit score as much as you might think, and a general strategy for a multi-card application. This is a fairly long post, so feel free to check out the summary at the end, or just read the section titles.