Get your hotel upgrades here!

Here's a great article out of the Yahoo travel department. It lists 10 top tips for getting a room upgrade at your hotel. #1 is for our honeymoon couples. If you're interacting with the hotel management in advance, by all means take the opportunity to mention that it's your honeymoon. It's a lazy staff that won't at the least mention it when you arrive or have flowers or a bottle of wine in your room. If you don't get the opportunity to mention it in advance, then do so when checking in. Of course, if you're registered at Smart Honeymoon, then you can use your Smart Honeymoon debit card when you check in to get instant honeymoon recognition.

Good luck and happy honeymooning!!!

We've Reduced Our Transaction Charge!

Smart Honeymoon has reduced their service charge from 7.9% to 7.5%. It's not a lot but we feel it's better than raising the fee as our competitors have done recently. Every little bit helps, right?

Wedding Gift Etiquette

Here's a great link to an Emily Post Institute article on wedding gift etiquette. Here's the follow up specifically regarding alternative registries, like a honeymoon registry. Great points, mainly they focus on the etiquette being a function of "delivery" by the bride and groom, and less about where they register. "Always from the heart" might be a good motto for everyone.

Happy Registering!

Kayak & Sidestep merger: Benefits them or you?

It was interesting to hear about this high-impact merger of Kayak and Sidestep. Both are lauded, successful travel search companies, each claiming their share of devoted users. There is an immediate benefit to each company from a cost savings standpoint. Each generates traveler traffic through online relationships where they will now see a larger volume discount, pay-per-click savings, and reduced competition previously driving up ad prices.

But what do the travelers get? Sidestep will incrementally benefit from Kayak's technology. You'll see a faster search with a greater content footprint, resulting in a potentially lower ticket price. With larger traffic volume, you'll see more meaningful fare predicting data too. For example, you are going to Hawaii in May for your honeymoon but are willing to leave up to ten days after your wedding if you could save $400 on airfare. Sidestep gives you a chart section that shows you what days are the cheapest for your desired destination over the next month. It's based on other users' stored data, so with more data now we'll see more meaningful results, giving you handy access to the cheapest travel days.

Kayak will benefit from Sidestep's larger hotel business, but I'll talk more about hotels in the next few weeks. In the meantime, while it's not a sea change, sidle on over to Sidestep for a test spin if you haven't already.

Cheap Airfare Ideas: My Approach. What's yours?

Finding the cheapest airfare is as much an art as a science. There are nuances aplenty in this hourly-changing industry. The large travel search sites like Travelocity and Orbitz are no longer your one-stop-shop, though don't think you should avoid them. Those larger sites should still be part of your overall strategy. You can find specials there that the faster moving and harder working little guys haven't uncovered yet.

My general strategy for finding the best airfare is a multi-step process. It's a filter down approach starting with the big airfare search engines, especially when I'm researching destinations. If you know when you're going but not where (like our honeymoon couples, often), then this is a great place to start. You can fairly reliably find out which destinations are running discounts for your dates by doing an Orbitz, Travelocity, Kayak or Sidestep type search, or any of the like. They are all very different; try them out and tell me your favorite! Try Farecast too - Farecast may take this segment by storm if they can work out the kinks. Add a day or two of flexibility to your search to see how much you can save (we began our honeymoon to South-East Asia on a Tuesday, rather than Sunday or Monday, and saved hundreds). Then check the airlines that you may not find in these searches, the Southwest's and the Jet Blue's of the world. Jet Blue is starting to appear in most of these searches finally, so check out the one you're using. Southwest remains adamantly independent. You can often find specials directly through all the airlines' websites too. Then look for deals through budget sites, like Travelzoo. I've used Travelzoo several times for their great hotel specials. Airfarewatchdog is unreal for truly last minute deals. They have some super insider tips too. I'm not opposed to using travel agents for airfare, but you need to find a hungry one that will check several times each day, which is the frequency with which airlines change their fares.

I know that many of you have little golden nuggets to share. What are your tested strategies that can really pay off? Visit us at Smart Honeymoon and drop me an email. If you had 20 minutes to book a flight, who would you use? What was your best "score"? I once paid $6 o/w to fly from Sandakan to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia (June, 2006). The only way to get that was to walk into the Air Malaysia office in Sandakan.

Happy traveling!

The Honeymoon Registry

Traditionally, wedding gifts were household items for the young couple, as they set up a home for the first time. They'd need a blender and flatware, because, up until now, they've used Mom's. But couples are getting married a little older now for a myriad of reasons. They may live on their own already because of school or a career and have some or most of the household items that they need. This is where the honeymoon registry comes in. The honeymoon can often be the couple's vacation of a lifetime. By having a honeymoon registry, guests can pick up the tab for, perhaps, the couple's romantic sunset dinner, without actually infringing on their honeymoon privacy. The couple can register for any type of gift, from airline tickets to B&B stays, or even activities during the honeymoon, like scuba lessons or a horseback-riding trip. Perhaps this time, they'll fly First Class and get the convertible car rental. Their honeymoon memories will last a lifetime. For the guest, there are few gifts so dear.

Happy registering!

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