Try This, Not That: An Alternative Travel Guide for Austin, Texas
This post contains affiliate links. For our full advertising disclosure, see our about page. After publishing my last post, about the steps and sites I frequently use to plan our vacations, a friend was surprised to learn that I don’t just look to travel guides like Fodor’s or Lonely Planet for advice. “Wouldn’t it be easier to […]
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How to Maximize Your Vacation With a Well-Planned Itinerary
It’s probably not a secret to any of you who actually know me in real life, but…I’m definitely a planner. Like, intensely so. If someone tells me their grand vision for anything, I immediately start trying to work out the logistics in my mind. And the same goes for vacations. I’m not a “hop-a-last-minute-flight-to-wherever-and-then-see-where-fate-takes-me” type of […]
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Trip Review: Our Weekend at the San Antonio Cocktail Conference
If the slight pounding in my head is any indication, then I’d say we had a very successful weekend visiting the San Antonio Cocktail Conference. This was our 3rd time attending the festival, and it always makes for a great little getaway with lots of fun festivities. Of course, since San Antonio is just an hour and […]
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Love what you read here about free travel? Now you can have it too!
Important announcement time! As of this week, I’ve officially launched my own consulting business, Magnuson Consulting Group, LLC. Primarily, I’ll offer consulting in the areas of travel planning and a mile- and points- booking service, as well as some other areas. I even have packages developed for first time campers! Why, you may ask? Well, because […]
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My two newest credit cards: both Southwest Airlines Visas!
If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to travel more, then it’s time to jump into action and earn yourself one of the best travel-hacking values on the market: the Southwest Companion Pass. I’ve written a lot about the Southwest Companion Pass in the past, but here’s what you need to know: You earn it […]
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4 Steps We Took to Save $700+ on Flights to Cancun
This week, after planning out our travel itinerary for all of 2017, it was time to turn to booking and making those vacations we’d planned out in a document actually come to life! As I discussed in that last post, one of our strategies for elongating our vacations is to book over holiday weekends; unfortunately […]
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Why We Plan Our Travel A Year In Advance
It’s no secret that the hubby and I travel…A LOT. And one question I get asked often is “How do you manage to get all that time off work? Do you guys have unlimited vacation days, or what?” Well the answer is no, neither of us have jobs that afford us with unlimited vacation days. […]
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Trip Review: Weekend in Seattle at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue & the USC Trojans!
This weekend we took a quick fun trip for one reason, and one reason only: to watch the USC Trojans play the spoiler for the University of Washington’s (as-yet) “perfect” season. And we got to see just that! But of course, a fun football Weekender requires transportation and a place to stay, and (being me) I […]
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Trip Report: 48 Hours in New Mexico
With our current Southwest Companion Pass set to expire at the end of this year, we’re all about maximizing the value of our remaining Southwest points while they still essentially count for double. So when we surveyed our points balances at the end of August and noticed we had about ~15k points still remaining in the hubby’s […]
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How We’re Saving $1,200 on our Five-Star Dublin Hotel
If you’re a fan of the blog, then you’ve likely been following our planning for next year’s UK & Ireland trip, including how we saved $6,500+ on our business class flights using Citi & Chase points on Singapore Airlines, and how we saved ~$600 on our hotels in Manchester & Liverpool using Starwood points. The next item up […]
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