Travel Planning Archives - Page 4 of 10

Jan 04 2016

Daring to Disney: Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

With Disney fast approaching, I’ve been in turbo planning mode. You’d think that once you’ve booked your flights, hotel (though that’s changed), dining reservations, and tickets you’d be done right? For most people that’s true, but for the truly crazy – you can plan out your day to the minute thanks to Touring Plans. I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found out.

What exactly is Touring Plans?

Touring Plans is a website designed to help with Disney planning created by the same people who wrote the Unofficial Guide(s) to Disney. The site has a ton of features, including super helpful stuff about when to go, where to stay (including info on pretty much every single room in every single Disney resort), links to cheaper (barely) tickets, info on every single ride and restaurant, but most importantly: access to their premium touring plan creator and optimization software.

You can get a lot of this stuff on their free site, but signing up for a year long subscription is where the magic truly happens. The site subscription only costs $12.95 a year, though if you scroll all the way down on the homepage you can find a 20% coupon code making it even cheaper.

The crowd calendar is what initially attracted me to Touring Plans

Almost everything I’m going to be talking about is as a subscriber, I decided early on that ~$10 was well worth it. But I should let you know the one big caveat: you need to trust that Touring Plans has quality crowd calculators and line optimization software. They supposedly have people in the parks every day and they also crowd source data via their Lines app, but if you don’t trust their ability to make the right calculations then you probably think the entire website is a crock. I choose to think that they take their jobs pretty seriously and know what they’re doing, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard a ton of good things, but who knows. Anyway, let’s go through Touring Plans features one by one. They have a handy dandy checklist for planning a trip, so I’ll just use that. I’m sure they have a ton of features I haven’t even scratched the surface of too!

Pick Dates and Pick Parks

I originally paid for the Touring Plans subscription for one thing only: the crowd calendar and tracker. Basically, Touring Plans uses historical data, data they gather from the parks daily, and…I dunno, magic? They use this information to predict the sizes of crowds at each of the four Orlando Disney parks for every single day of the year. They offer an overall crowd level for Disney, along with individual crowd levels for each park. It’s on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most crowded. Also if you want to get into the nitty gritty they have graphs for how long you can expect to wait at certain attractions depending on the crowd level.

Graph of potential wait times with variance!

Without a paid subscription, you are limited in the days you can look at (usually I think it’s just some upcoming dates). With a subscription, you can look at all the days they have predicted thus far, up through a year in advance or so. So you can plan your vacation around less busy times. Most of these coincide with what you would think, but Touring Plans takes into account the school vacations of the entire country and just has access to more information than your common sense.

Another nice feature with the paid subscription is you can track dates – Touring Plans will notify you if the crowd sizes they are expecting changed. I booked this trip over six months ago and have received one or two such notifications for our trip.

Finally, using the Lines app, you can actually track how crowds are looking on the day of, including current wait times at the park. Obviously I haven’t tried this yet but I’m looking forward to seeing how well it does. Touring Plans also uses this information to reflect on how well their predictions went.

Find a Hotel

Touring Plans also has a lot of information about on site hotels. What is specifically useful is they have pictures of many (all?) of the rooms on site. They also will fax in a room request for you if there is a particular room you like. Their room search is very extensive. You can search view, floor, accessibility, walking distance from lobby – you name it you can probably search for it. While I think there are better resources out there when looking at Disney hotels, Touring Plans definitely has a lot of breadth that you can get lost in if you want to find that perfect room.

There are tons of search criteria to help you find the perfect room

Buy Tickets

If you want to get a feel for how much money you can save on tickets, you can use Touring Plans to do that as well. They have links to various places you can buy tickets for a slight discount (I assume they are some kind of affiliate links). Ultimately, I ended up making my own discount – check out the comments from that post for a lot of great ideas from people better at this than me!

Explore the Parks – Attractions, Shows, and Dining Options

Again, Touring Plans does a comprehensive job of listing all the attractions, shows, and dining options in the World. They have information about wait times, busy times, whether rides are good for kids, height restrictions, rider switch availability – again, it’s very comprehensive. They have a rating for pretty much every single attraction for every age level which I found very useful. I also found it useful to know what kind of “scares” to expect so I could decide whether to take M or not.

Touring Plans

Now the absolute, most wonderful thing about Touring Plans, to me, is their touring plan software. To simplify: they basically take all the knowledge they have about park attraction wait times, throw it into a computer, and help you determine the best route through the parks. But that is worth a post in and of itself, because I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole. Let’s just say that if you like maximizing itineraries and want to go to Disney, Touring Plans is the website for you. But more on that later.

Final Thoughts

Even without the touring plans themselves, Touring Plans is a great website for planning a Disney vacation. It can assist in planning every aspect of your trip, even if you are using the free version. If you pay a little bit of money for a year long subscription, you get a ton more features that personally got me more and more excited about the trip (if that were possible). Stay tuned to see how crazy using Touring Plans can get!

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews

Tips for parents of toddlers and infants

Things I wished I knew before I went to Disney

Oct 16 2015

Family Travel for My Real Life – Splitting the Team

I had originally planned to attend FT4RL3, but unfortunately I’m not going to make it due to real life circumstances. Instead, our family is going to embark on a new adventure – splitting the team. I thought I’d share some of my thought process and how this illustrates my evolving view of my points and miles.

Actually going to FT4RL3 was always a longshot – I bought the ticket before H was even born and once I found out I was going to Las Vegas sans wife and kids I knew another trip was probably not going to happen. Still, I had a cheap flight booked for 4500 Avios outbound and held onto it for awhile. But then about six weeks ago I decided I definitely wasn’t going to attend so I cancelled that flight. That was a mistake, which I’ll get into later.

In the meanwhile, Jess decided she wanted to go to Charlotte to visit her sister that same weekend (apparently she likes to go to Charlotte on weekends that coincide with FT4RLs). Since her and H are pretty much attached at the hip at the moment, that meant a weekend at home alone with M.

I bought Jess’ ticket using Citi Thank You points, so it only ended up costing around 12,000 points with the 1.6 cents per point you get for AA flights (Prestige cardholders). I have over 100K Thank You points that I never use – yet I still debated just paying in cash. But ultimately, I asked myself, what am I saving these points for? I have them for this exact reason to save money on travel – so I used the points instead of the cash.

Anyway, so M and I were stuck at home until I got to thinking – what if we took a trip somewhere? So I started looking into ticket prices for one stop destinations, though I was basically focused on D.C. I knew I wouldn’t make it to FT4RL especially as a solo parent, but there are some friends I’d love to see in D.C. and I love free museums.

Tickets were cost prohibitive for that weekend – I’m not sure what’s going on but the cheapest non-stops were pricing at like $200 and the cheapest non-stops that were practical for a toddler were more like $300.

Enter US Bank Flexperks. I’ve been earning about 20,000 points per month, or enough for an (up to) $400 ticket. So I had enough to buy tickets for both M and myself and not worry about the price. Again, I considered saving it for something else, but ultimately decided – what is the point? These points are to decrease travel costs and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

So next weekend we’re splitting the team. Both of us are taking our first solo flight with the kids and H is taking his first flight ever. Should be a ton of fun!

Sep 17 2015

Portland the Third: Travel with Four

As I mentioned in my parking post (thanks for all the feedback calling me crazy after I said so myself, btw!), we were back in Portland, Maine, our favorite local vacation spot, to test out traveling with four. Things were definitely different with a 2.5 year and 2.5 month old, but the trip went well and we’re ready for more. Here are some things I observed about traveling with four.

Packing

All credit goes to my wife for this one. I’m just recently back at work so I literally gave her a pile of my clothes and she did everything else. With two kids, it’s double the diapers (potty training only half complete), wipes, eating stuff, clothes, baby carrier – all the stuff adds up.

Jess, being a miracle worker, ended up getting all of our stuff into two carry on size suitcases (one is like European carry on sized). All of our clothes fit in one, all the child related accessories fit in another. It helps a ton that we don’t really need to bring toys for M – she loves playing with all the junk in hotels (read: ice bucket) so we banked on that and were rewarded.

Including the backpack that was on my back when I took this, this is everything we brought to Portland

On top of the two suitcases, we brought my backpack, Jess’ purse, a plastic bag with our boppy in it, and a diaper bag. Plus two strollers (really need to invest in some sort of sit and stand situation). So, technically, we could have gotten onto an airplane without checking any bags. Hey, you can still kinda travel light with two kids under three!

Getting Around

I know I got a lot of flak for not valeting the car, but I ended up only having to move my car once (for the record, even though it worked out very well doesn’t mean I think I made the right decision, but what’s done is done). The reason for this was because two strollers makes a twenty minute walk a much more cumbersome undertaking than it used to be, especially when you factor in stopping to deal with a fussing infant or stopping because a ridiculous toddler insists on pushing her little brother’s stroller.

So we ended up driving to a lot of the things we had walked to in the past, so I was glad to have my car readily accessible. And even though we were there on the weekend I had no trouble finding parking whenever we got back downtown. The hidden cost of having two strollers is it makes everything feel more cramped when you get inside, nobody has any free hands, etc. – so it was often just easier to drive. It might be easier with a sit and stand but like I said that’s next on the research list.

Eating

I’ll have a more comprehensive look at our various eating and sightseeing activities later, but eating went pretty smoothly. We skipped Fore Street just because I didn’t want to queue and I didn’t have reservations, but we did make it to Eventide Oyster Co. with both kids. Google has a neat popular times graph that we used to determine when we went (330 PM on Friday), although the graph isn’t quantitative and it’s mostly common sense. Still, a nice feature.

Eventide was so empty it would have been fine although my parents met us there (they decided to come to Portland but stay elsewhere) so that further alleviated any pressure we were feeling. The stroller space situation did come into play though.

Having a 2.5 year old and a 2.5 month old in the same restaurant isn’t too bad – one parent eats and feeds M and then we switch. If M gets antsy whoever’s not eating goes for a walk in the end.

Getting to eat oysters was a real victory and made our vacation a success within the first hour

Once again, free hotel breakfast came in very handy. Although we hit our usual Portland breakfast haunts, it was great knowing we could get M food as soon as she was up to avoid hangry-ness. Jess says that might be the number one feature we look for in hotels going forward and I am inclined to lean that way as well.

Sleeping

We stayed once again at the Hyatt Place Old Port. Even though we didn’t get upgraded to a suite this time, the room was plenty big. At night we each slept with a kid in separate beds (rotating as necessary for feedings); we requested a pack and play but didn’t end up using it at night.

M did, however, insist on napping in the pack and play for some reason. I thought it was weird but she went to sleep and we got a good photo op so everybody won. Once again we avoided the tiny pool, but other than that the hotel and staff was awesome. I was at first hesitant to drop the 24K Ultimate Rewards needed for two nights but ultimately decided to just bite the bullet – what am I saving them for, really?

Final Thoughts

Overall, having a second kid on vacation didn’t create as many logistical problems as I had feared. I think when H becomes a toddler things might change, but for now (and for our upcoming trip to Disney in January), I think we’ll be okay. We’ll see what things are like when the kid starts walking though! More on how awesome Portland is (again) in a later post!

Aug 19 2015

Delta Skymiles are not Useless

Delta gets a bad rap, and rightfully so. Delta miles are difficult to use, they switched to a revenue based system first, etc. etc. yada yada yada. Despite all that, I’ve been bullish on Delta miles and stockpiling for the past year or so with the specific goal in mind of getting three business class seats to Europe for summer 2016. This post is living proof that all is not lost with the Delta program, no matter how bad things have seemed. And I’m not even talking about the award sale that’s been going on (which is pretty great too!). Delta Skymiles are not useless!

A bit of quick background – I’ve always been keenly aware that Boston is a great place to live if you have Delta miles. BOS-AMS and BOS-LHR are routes that often have business class availability. While BOS-AMS tends to have more availability, BOS-LHR makes up for this with the fact that there are two frequencies: one Delta operated flight and one Virgin Atlantic operated flight. Virgin Atlantic has been historically pretty decent about award space.

My goal had always been to get a family of four to Europe in business class for summer 2016. Planning wise, I made a few changes – I’ve decided to be a little less adventurous with a 3.5 and 1 year old in tow next year. What that meant is finding flights that are more convenient, and paying more for them if necessary.

Bottom line: 62.5K per person might not sound amazing for a 7 hour TATL flight in business class, but that’s what we’re booking. On top of that, we’re leaning towards visiting Scotland (haven’t booked a return yet), which means we’ll eat the UK departure tax. Still, shorter flights with two kids and being able to converse in our native tongue is probably gonna win out over “maximizing” our miles and money on this trip. And if Disney World is a total bust I’ll even eat the cancellation fees if I need to.

I ended up booking 3 business class seats on Delta’s direct flight. I really wanted to fly Virgin Atlantic, but ultimately decided on Delta because

Booking infant in arms tickets with Delta partners can sometimes get annoying (I’ll deal with that when plans firm up more), and
The Virgin Atlantic flight leaves at 9:50 PM so I think leaving at 7:10 PM will be better for the kids.

Of course, that might totally backfire if the kids are overstimulated and don’t sleep on the plane, which is a distinct possibility but a gamble that I’ll take.

So here’s what I’ve noticed. There are at least four seats in business class on a bunch of flights from Boston to LHR/AMS. I’ve attached a bunch of screenshots below in case you don’t believe me. I even did two searches out of JFK – not as good, but still pretty good. There are still four seats on the flight that I booked three seats on, which means there were at least 7. I guess typing that out loud makes me wonder if it’s some sort of glitch, but you know what, Delta doesn’t have an award chart so who knows. Regardless, if you’re on the east coast thinking of traveling to Europe next summer in business – Delta might not be the worst currency to have. At least at this 11 month out kind of moment. Oh and economy has a ton of space too, if that suits your needs better.

P.S. – I got tired of screenshotting, but DTW looked pretty good too and I even found five days in July with seats to London from LAX.

Hey, Amsterdam for four looks pretty good too

There's even space from JFK — There’s even space from JFK

And if you search for only two people - even better — And if you search for only two people – even better

Jul 29 2015

Daring to Disney: Saving Money on Disney Tickets

This is my third installment of my Daring to Disney series, chronicling my planning of my first Disney trip as an adult. To see how I booked flights, car, hotel, and dining, click! In today’s post I’ll discuss saving money on Disney tickets.

After grabbing all my dining reservations at 180 days, the next step in my plan to conquer Disney was getting tickets. Now I don’t actually need to buy tickets 160 days before, but, you know, I’m crazy. Here’s how I ended up saving money on Disney tickets and why I didn’t think it was really worth it in the end.

Ticket Options: To Park Hopper or not to Park Hopper?

The first thing I needed to decide was what kind of tickets to buy. Basically, after you buy a four day ticket, each subsequent day on top of that is $10, so the number of days I was buying was pretty straightforward. I decided to buy two 7 day tickets for Jess and myself and two 6 day tickets for my parents. We’re planning a day at Sea World, but I figure the 7 day ticket for Jess and me might be able to get us a date night. A $20 risk I’m happy to make. I don’t need to buy tickets for my kids because M is turning three a few weeks after we go and H is tiny.

As I mentioned when talking about dining reservations, I was considering whether to get the park hopper option for our tickets. That would give us the flexibility to visit a second park in the afternoon post nap and/or go to Epcot for dinners. The park hopper option was about $64/ticket, around $10/day average. Ultimately I decided against getting the park hopper for now for two reasons. First, I’m realizing that I’m overestimating the stamina of a two year old – I’m basically projecting a 34 year olds’ stamina potential onto my daughter. Heck, I’m likely overestimating my stamina as well. Secondly, if I change my mind, I can always add the park hopper option on at a ticket kiosk once we’re there, so I have that insurance.

Apparently, according to the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2015 (which my mother in law graciously got for us from the library!), you can still pay for a “no expiration” option on your tickets if you buy them at the World. Though the guide itself is even unsure. Regardless, I decided it wasn’t worth it – I’d likely physically lose my tickets plus Disney has priced things so you’re only hedging against future price increases.

Looking for the Cheapest Price

Disney is a bit like Apple – you can get little to no discount off the sticker price most times (unless you are buying secondhand but I didn’t really want to deal with that). Still, I was looking to save whatever I could.

The very first thing I did, naturally, was plug in my preferences at the Walt Disney World website to see what showed up. Searching for the tickets I was looking for resulted in an overall price of $1405.82.

Next, I went to touringplans.com and used their handy ticket calculator. Think of it as the Kayak of Disney World tickets. There they list a few options and conveniently calculate how much you save off of the Disney price. The best rate I found was the Undercover Tourist rate coupled with signing up for the free Mousesavers newsletter (which I recommend anyway). This would have saved me about $50 off of the Disney price (total, not per person).

saving money on Disney tickets — The options from Touring Plans ticket calculator

A note on tickets sold by authorized dealers such as Undercover Tourist. You might be tempted to think they don’t convey the same benefits as tickets you get from Disney World, but that’s not the case. The only real difference as far as I can tell is that you need to link the tickets you buy from retailers to your account while tickets you buy from Disney are linked automatically.

The only thing you should be concerned about is if a retailer asks you specifically what dates you will be using the tickets for. If you buy from these kinds of places, make sure your dates are set in stone and you won’t deviate, otherwise you might find your tickets expire before you think they might (normal tickets expire 14 days from first use). You can read all about that in the Unofficial Guide if you’d like.

Ultimately, I decided not to buy from Undercover Tourist because I planned on…

Utilizing my 5% Target Redcard Discount

July was a good month for me. Stop and Shop was offering 2X gas points on Visa gift cards so I used that to save some money on gas and top off my Target Redcard. As you probably know, the Redcard offers 5% off of any Target purchases. This includes Disney gift cards! So I crunched the numbers – if I bought from Undercover Tourist, the cost of our tickets would be $1358. If I bought tickets from Disney proper using Disney gift cards purchased at Target with my Redcard the cost would be $1335.82, a savings of $22.18.

So I decided to buy 28 $50 Disney gift cards. 28! Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t use more than two gift cards to buy Disney tickets online – which would seem to render 28 gift cards useless. You can use them to buy at the park but that’s a major pain.

There is a workaround. I signed up for a Disney Vacation account. These accounts are designed to help families save money for Disney – you can direct deposit to them, set up monthly payments, etc. You’re supposed to make a goal for yourself and theoretically when you hit that goal you can plan your trip. Everything is self directed so it’s not like you’re locked into anything.

The great thing is you can add Disney gift cards to your account. So I loaded all 28 cards into my account – $1400 total. You can then use your account number to pay for your park tickets. I used the $1400 plus an extra $5.82 that I put on my credit card. Money saved!

That last statement is a little bit tongue in cheek, in the end, I didn’t think it was worth stocking up on all those gift cards to save twenty bucks. Typing in all the gift card numbers was mind numbing – next time I’ll probably just go with Undercover Tourist. But if you want to make every dollar count, that’s how you can do it!

Final Thoughts

There aren’t a ton of ways to save money on Disney tickets, but you can shave off a few dollars here and there. Using my Target Redcard, Disney gift cards, and a Disney Vacation account, I managed to save some money. In the end, I probably would have done it differently. In terms of tickets, I think the most important thing is to decide what kind of tickets you want – that’s the most complicated part! But I think you can “add on” when you get to Disney if you like, so in my mind booking less is more, at least at the beginning.

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews