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.