As illustrated in a previous post, you have options for accessing discounted travel venues, but each carries a cost for access, even the “free” hotel search engines. I mention hotels for two reasons:

1. Most travelers think of hotel accommodations, and
2. Online Booking Engines (OBEs) such as Hotels dot com, Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire,  Priceline, and others specialize in discounted hotel stays as well as discounted transportation, not resort rental savings.

Hotels are great for certain kinds and groups of travel:

• Business or other travel alone
• People who have no problem sharing a small hotel bathroom and vanity
• Travel to areas with no resorts available, and
• Overnight layovers

When it comes to best travel value for couples, teams, groups of women or families, however, hotels are not a good first choice. Why? Because they are:

• Crowded — usually one closet or rack nook, which is simply not enough room for two or more people’s luggage and other “stuff,” and one small bathroom and vanity area
• Expensive per person pricing
• Noisy neighbors, next to, above and below you — or your family/group is the noisy neighbor!
• Not as private as you might think! I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to know my hotel neighbor’s personal grooming or amorous habits. And yes, you can hear that!

Don’t get me wrong! I’d much rather stay in a noisy, crowded, expensive hotel room than camp out in my car (and I have done that — once!). But when you have the option, resort stays are much roomier, easier on your nerves, offer great activities, and are way more private!

But if you’re not careful in selecting the right source for your resort stay, you could wind up paying more than you have to! Let’s take a look at some examples. Because my purpose here is to neither promote nor bash any of the OBEs, I have selected only four, identified by numbers 1-4. You are encouraged to do your own comparisons.

The point here is to demonstrate the advantage behind paid vacation memberships versus your “free” online booking engines. Each venue is selected in September 2009 for either a Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday visit. The trick to getting the best discounted resort rates is to wait as long as you can before booking your stay.

Rule of thumb: the closer to the date you want to visit, the better the rate offered.

However, for these holiday visits, your best airline deals are booked early, not late. So unless you’re planning on driving to your destination, and because of the last minute scheduling that can disrupt family gatherings, I don’t recommend you wait for potential hot weeks. Besides, during my research, I discovered the rooms for these specific holiday weeks were already disappearing fast!

Here’s what you’re getting instead of a hotel.

Research your price comparisons on the OBEs:

1. Refer to the resort venue as a hotel. Pretend you’re looking for a room that accommodates only two adults. It’s OK. All room options will come up, and listed resort options are generally the same price for four people as for one. That’s one of the cost saving advantages of resort vacations!
2. Next, type in as little of the name of the “hotel” (resort) as you can. For the Samoset venue, I typed in Samoset. For the following Christmas comparison, I simply typed in Welk.
3. You may discover that resort bookings are not always available on the OBEs, even when you find them there. That makes it hard to shop price, so change your week around a little, as I did.

Now let’s take a look at a Christmas week booking example. Keep in mind that this is a particularly high demand week, so you’ll need to be a little flexible, and you’ll need to start booking as soon as possible!

Again, here’s what you get instead of a hotel.

Get Creative With Flexible Planning:

With flexible planning, the Christmas vacation week shown above can open some creative possibilities. For example, you can stay in one of the U.S.’s most popular family resorts, invite your extended local friends or family to join in any of the numerous available and memorable activities, experience Christmas Eve and/or Christmas morning with your loved ones, and then head back home Christmas Day to celebrate your own traditions with your kids. You get a great visit without wearing out your welcome, and for seven days you have peace on earth, good will toward everyone.

And these are just two examples showing you the value of selecting the right travel source.

The Resort Cost Factor

There are three ways you can gain access to resort vacations. Two of them are expensive. One of them is cost saving:

1. Hotel Bookings — We’ve covered that above.
2. Vacation Club or Timeshare Ownership — These memberships cost 10s of thousands of dollars with annual maintenance fees.
3. Vacation Program Membership — You pay a fee up front to gain rental access to condo resort units. We’ve covered samples of the pricing above, and that was for peak, high demand weeks. This membership fee is usually several thousand dollars less than the cost of ownership. If not, keep shopping! I’ll focus on this option in a separate post.

Here’s a sneak peek into the vacation program membership option: depending on the program, you could save the entire cost of membership after only one or two vacations!

Happy Traveling!

On March 12, 2000 — just after Spring break in our neck of the woods — my daughter’s and my lives changed forever. I got “the call” and rushed down to Galveston, Texas.

She was in a coma from a traumatic brain injury. Clinically, she had already died. Twice. In fact, she was the first survivor of the type and intensity of injury in the history of John Sealy Hospital, the teaching hospital for the University of Texas Medical Branch.

With nothing but faith for a compass, we were in for the long haul, and I was needed for something every day. Home was 600 miles north.

God provided and people were kind. We were not financially able to support both our five acres in North Texas and a month’s residency in Galveston at the same time. Donations of various ways and means helped make it possible for me to stay in Galveston for an entire month (not cheap at any time, but particularly not during the 6-week Spring Break season).

I wound up staying at a motel that allowed monthly residency. Torn rubber curtains and all. Not exactly a comforting environment during this crises.

Ironically I was a timeshare holder. And there was a lovely sister timeshare property in Galveston. But I couldn’t use it. Not my week. Certainly not my month!

If I had had the travel programs featured here, I could have stayed in Galveston for close to the same price as the motel. And at my very own timeshare property, by the way! At least part of the time.

In fact, given that several folks were also coming to Galveston for their own vacations during that time, I could have offered to share my resort condo with them. They would have saved hundreds of dollars, retained their privacy (about the same as adjoining hotel rooms), and I would have had part of my month’s stay covered.

Depending on the program, the venue might have changed each week, but there are plenty resorts in Galveston, so I would have had continuous nice accommodations the entire time. Again, for about the same as what I paid for the motel. Which was $600.

But I didn’t. So I stayed in a motel room with a funny smell, lumpy pillows, and torn rubber curtains. It did have a small refrigerator and a microwave oven (they called it a kitchenette). But for about the same price I could have stayed in a cheerful 2-3 bedroom resort condo with full kitchen, laundry facilities, and fresh linens.

So now I do have. I don’t expect to have to use these programs for emergencies in the future. But then again, I didn’t expect the first one, either. Who does?