Eurostar - How to find seats on a budget

Travelling from Paris to London couldn't be easier these days via the Eurostar high speed train. You can have breakfast in Paris and lunch in London. Amazing! I remember the old days when you had to take the train to the coast and then the ferry across. It was a 12 hour trek.
Couple of things you need to know to make your Eurostar experience a good one.
Book your ticket online early! Ticket sales open 60-90 days before the travel date. Check Eurostar.com for tickets and prices. The price will go up as it gets closer to the departure date. A friend of mine bought hers the day before and it cost $400 per seat. Ouch! If you book early, it will cost $45 per seat.
One of my favorite how to ride the rails website is seatguru61.com. By the way, the Eurostar train services London, Paris, Brussels and other cities in those countries.

The Eurostar leaves from Gare Du Nord in Paris and arrives at the Victoria train station in London. Arrive early for departure because you need to pass through passport control which took us almost an hour. Once on board, seats are comfortable and there is WIFI, but it is spotty. The train is very smooth even though you are travelling at 85 mph. In fact, it really doesn't feel like you are going that fast until you ride on a regular train.
So bottom line, book early and enjoy the ride!

Visiting Paris With A Teen On A Budget

We travel a lot! My younger daughter is 11 years old and has already visited 18 countries and 5 continents. But we tend to visit off the beaten path type places like Peru, Thailand, South Africa and Zambia. We prefer adventure type vacations to museum type vacations. My older daughter who is heading to college in the fall asked if we could visit Europe and some "normal" places.
So planning started on a 3 week European vacation. We dropped the younger siblings off with cousins in Sweden and headed off for a week in Paris and London.
I have been to Paris quite a few times, but it's been quite a few years. And of course, I have never visited the city with a teenager.
We arrrived in Paris on Bastille Day which made me a bit nervous. But the city had set up security checkpoints on nearly every corner and the crowd seemed subdued so we felt very comfortable. We headed to the Eiffel Tower to see the fireworks show. We chose a viewpoint on the other side of the Seine from the tower next to the Trocadero with easy access to the metro. I highly recommend this because the metro stations near the tower close early to help with security. This means after the show, you will have to walk a long way to get to an open metro station.

The fireworks show was amazing!

Once I secure flights, I move onto hotels. One of my favorite tools is awardmapper.com. You enter the city, choose your hotel brand and the website will tell you how many points you will need and what hotels are in the area. For Paris, I couldn't find any good values for my points. So I chose a bed and breakfast in the Moulin Rouge section of the city. Hotel Moulin Plaza was perfect. Booked through Booking.com 3 nights for 256.60 Euros or $302.12.  The hotel included breakfast, private bathroom, clean, secure front desk, located near a metro stop and centrally located. It was also next door to the infamous Moulin Rouge cabaret. I used Booking.com and used my Ebates.com portal to get cash back. Woohoo! 

So what to do with a teenager in Paris? First stop, crepes. 

We feasted on sweet crepes from shops like the one in the video and yummy, chicken, cheese and mushroom crepes for $6 from a stand. There must have been 4 crepe shops within a block of our hotel. Next stop, pick up our Paris Museum Pass from the Tourism Office. We bought it online before we arrived, but not early enough for it to be mailed before the trip. I highly recommend you order it early and have it shipped to your home. The line at the Tourism Office was long. The pass is about $45 per person. 

The benefits to the pass are FREE admission to the museums. Kids and students are FREE anyway. But you get to cut to the front of the line at all the museums. This is a huge benefit. The lines in Paris in the summer are unbelievably long. 

Paris Museum Pass Line at the Orsay - Yep, empty! 

Line for regular ticket holders at the Orsay - ouch!

 We limited our museums to just the Louvre, the Dali and the Orsay. Of course, there are dozens of museums to check out, but I think even with an 18 year old, you have to be choosy.

Crowds at the Mona Lisa

I'll share one of the best pieces of advice we got, skip the long line to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You will wait hours even if you buy your ticket online ahead of time, trust me. A better view is from the roof of the Gallerie Lafayette and it's FREE. Plus you get to check out the inside of this incredible building.

The center of the Gallerie Lafayette

 After walking in the heat and crowds, ice cream is always a winner. I think we ate ice cream in every city we visited and for a couple of our meals. The best ice cream in Paris is Berthillon Ice Cream. It's located behind the Notre Dame.

 One of the things I love about travelling is the unexpected. We stumbled on this wall of love near the Dali Museum in the Montemarte section  of the city.

There is a memorial ceremony every day at 6pm at the Notre Dame for the fallen soldiers. It's definitely something to see.

To navigate Paris and save money, I highly suggest using public transport and buying either a pass or a book of rides. You will save a ton of money. We ended up buying a 10 pack for 7.80 Euros. Huge savings over spending 1.80 Euros for each ride!

 And then we hopped the Eurostar from the Gare Du Nord for the next part of our trip in London. I'll write a separate post about how to buy tickets on the Eurostar and our experience.
For our 3 day stay in Paris, flights were free, hotel cost $250 and included breakfast, Museum Pass cost $45 each, transport $20 and food. We sat down for one nice lunch that set us back about $50. Other than that, we lived on crepes and sandwiches and ice cream.
That's how we do it at almost free family travel!

The Secret Thing You Can Do When Your Flight Is Cancelled

                             

Imagine our surprise as we walked off the plane in Vienna, Austria, looked at the connecting flight board and saw that our flight to Los Angeles was cancelled.
For a moment, we were stunned. Then we moved to action. Where should we go and how was the airline going to rebook 500 passengers? And after 3 weeks in Europe and 3 kids who were ready to go home, how were we going to convince them that this was just another part of the adventure?
"To the service center," the customer service representative told us and off we went with dozens of other passengers.
We took a number at the service center and sat down to wait. The lone customer service representative at the service counter called out a number. We could see this was going to take awhile. So we called Austrian Airlines customer service using Skype.  Skype allows you to make calls to any landline, cell or Skype for pennies anywhere in the world. I always leave a few bucks on my Skype account just in case. This is the secret!
The customer service representative on the phone was able to make a new reservation for us on the same flight the next day. He told us we still had to wait for our number to be called so we could get vouchers for the hotel, food and taxi and to retrieve our luggage and to get new boarding passes, but we had a confirmed reservation.
Success!
About an hour later, our number was called. The customer service representative told us immediately that there no flights available until the following afternoon. Then she looked up our tickets and smiled.
She said "Actually I see you are already booked on the 7am flight. Good job!"
She handed us vouchers for our hotel, food and taxi and directed us to baggage claim. "Enjoy Vienna," she told us.

Hipster hotel in Vienna, Austria

Within an hour, we were sitting in a hipster hotel in Vienna enjoying our lunch courtesy of Austrian Airlines.

Is Amazon Fresh Worth It?

This past week, I finally gave in and tried Amazon Fresh. Recently, I have begun streamlining my trips to the store so I can spend more time on my income producing activities and with my family. I stopped going to Target and Walmart and now shop exclusively online from the largest online wellness store in North America. Better products, more affordable and more efficient.
I have been looking for an equally affordable way to get my groceries.
Since we were in Europe and would rather not stop at the store on the way home from the airport, I decided now was a good time to try Amazon Fresh. We are Prime members.
I signed up for a 1 month free trial. The regular monthly price is $14.99, this is in addition to your $99 Prime membership.
Then unless you spend at least $40 on your order, Amazon Fresh will charge you $9.99 for shipping.
So, of course, I set out to spend $40.

You can see the prices vary. Some are a "good deal" others are overprices compared to what I could spend at Trader Joes or Sprouts.
And I struggled to spend $40. The 5 pound box of spinach that I usually buy was unavailable so I had to buy spinach in .99 bunches. My preferred milk was actually $1.00 cheaper than at the brick and mortar store. The 18 pack of eggs was not available so I settled on a 2-12 packs.
I ended up throwing in a couple boxes of cereal to increase the total to $40. Set my delivery time for 6pm-9pm (that was the latest delivery available) and we wait.
When we arrived home from the airport, two Amazon Fresh coolers were sitting on our front porch.
Nice!

We unpacked them and everything was cold, but we our bananas were missing. Huge bummer since we were looking forward to enjoying our fresh juice in the morning and the bananas were a key ingredient.
I called Amazon Fresh and they immediately offered a $1.58 refund for the missing bananas which didn't really help the situation, but I suppose it was the least they could do.
Next time, I logged into my Amazon account, I noticed a $5.00 credit also so I guess that was their way of apologizing.
So the bottom line, the service served its purpose. I might use it again in the future, but for right now I'm going to cancel my free trial.

Wyndham Promotion - Earn Extra Nights!

Here's a super easy way to earn a free night at a 5 star Wyndham hotel! It's called the Wyndham Masterpass promotion. 

Here's how it works:
1. Create a Masterpass account
2. Book 2 nights and stay at any Wyndham Hotel by October 31st 2017. You have to book the hotel through the app or hotel web site (not the rewards site) and pay with Masterpass. Masterpass is similar to Visa Checkout or Chase Pay. Award nights do not count. Consecutive nights will count as one stay.
2. You will earn 7,500 points per stay. You can only earn this reward twice, but that is enough for a free night at any Wyndham hotel worldwide. Points should post in about 6 weeks.

My family and I have stayed at the Wyndham Costa Del Sol at the Lima Airport in Peru on points. We just recently stayed at the Ramada City Centre in Prague on points. Both of these stays saved us hundreds of dollars.

So if you are like me and taking your student to college in the next few weeks or visiting for family weekend or traveling for business or pleasure, book 2 stays at any Wyndham and earn another. Woohoo! That's what almost free family travel is all about.

Why you might want to book travel through Expedia.com

For most of my flights, I use miles. It is, by far, the best value for hard earned miles. But sometimes, it just doesn't make sense to use miles and instead you need to pay cash. For example, my daughter who is headed to college in the fall wanted to come home for Thanksgiving break. Even though it was May when we started looking at flights, the cheap award seats were already long gone.
So I looked at buying a flight on United so she would earn miles towards a free flight to use sometime in the next four years.
Now Thanksgiving flights are expensive, but I found one for $745. Ouch! But I knew the price would just go up and we didn't have many options so I booked it through Expedia.com. 
Fast forward to this past week, my daughter decided that she no longer wanted to come home for Thanksgiving. Probably due to hanging out with us in Europe for 3 weeks. Ah, life with teens. United's cancellation and change policy is subject to a $200 penalty. Ouch, again!
I was still deciding my best course of action when I recieved this notice from Expedia.com.

When I checked the United flight that I had booked, I noticed they changed not only the time of the flight, but also the connecting flights and cities.
Now when I booked this flight, I chose to have my daughter fly through Washington DC instead of Chicago due to possible weather issues.
They had rerouted her through Chicago.
Within a few hours, I received a second notice.

The representative could not have been nicer on the phone. She understood the issue and conferenced in a reprsentative from United. We went through several alternative flight combinations, but nothing would work with my daughter's schedule, preferred connection and the holidays.
Since we couldn't find a satisfactory flight, United agreed to cancel this flight and return the money with no penalty.
The only downside is that Expedia says it will take 8 weeks to see the refund back to my credit card. Seems excessive to me, but it didn't cost me $200 and the new December flight will actually cost $200 less so it's a win as long as I actually get my promised refund.
Kudos to Expedia.com! 

Back From 3 Weeks In Europe For Almost FREE!

President's Palace in Berlin, Germany

Yes, we just spent 3 weeks in Europe for almost FREE. I'll break down the trip in this post for you and show you how we did it. Then I'll write follow up posts breaking down each city, what we saw, what we did and how we saved money.
First, let's talk about the flights. Getting there is the biggest expense, headache and much more. So if you can take care of flights and hotels, you are really on your way to almost FREE family travel.
I blogged about how I secured these flights before when I did it, but here's a recap.
I had enough points collected already on United for 3 one way tickets to Europe. Course, there are 5 of us so that's hardly a drop in the bucket.
But it's a start. We opened 2 American Express Premier Credit Cards with a bonus of 40,000 points each. I transfered those points to Singapore Airlines Kris Flyer and topped it off with Starwood points. Starwood gives a bonus of 5,000 points for every 20,000 transferred to Kris Flyer.
Also Singapore Airlines which is a Star Alliance partner sells their award seats for 27,500 points instead of 30,000 points like United. Same flights, but they cost less points. Woohoo!
Now I'm able to book 5 round trip tickets and just pay taxes. We end up flying United to London and then SAS to Stockholm. For the return, we flew Lot Airlines from Warsaw to Vienna and then Austrian Airlines from Vienna to LAX. Perfect.
Great flights except Heathrow Airport is a nightmare. Because England is not in the EU, you have to go through security which takes forever and they are diligent about checking each bag. Even though we had 1.5 hours to transfer to our connecting flight, we almost did not make it.
But the flights cost approximately $450 for airline taxes. That's 5 round trip tickets to Europe from LAX for less than $500. Woohoo!
Now onto hotels, I booked 2 bed and breakfast hotels for my daughter and I in London and Paris. Both included breakfast and together were about $600 total. We booked 2 rooms at the Sheraton Berlin Grande Hotel Esplanade. One we charged to my Starwood American Express Business Card so we could take advantage of the club. The Sheraton club serves complimentary breakfast and happy hour. For a family of 5, this is a huge savings.
The other room was just $81 per night through Expedia so we chose to buy it rather than use points. I booked the room through Ebates so I get a percentage cash back. Ebates just told me I can expect a $50 check in the mail. Nice! Plus I charged this hotel to my new Barclays Arrival Plus Card and then used points to cover it. So it was FREE.
I'll review the hotel in a later post.
In Prague, we stayed at the Ramada City Centre. This is a Wyndham property so we were able to use 4 FREE nights since we both opened Wyndham credit cards with a 45,000 bonus. This hotel also included FREE breakfast.  More on this hotel in a later post.
In Krakow and Warsaw, we stayed at the Hampton Inn by Hilton. 5,000 points per night in Krakow and 10,000 points per night in Warsaw. Both included breakfast. More on these hotels in a later post.
So hotels and flights cost less than $1,500 for a family of 5 for 3 weeks in Europe. Wow!