Portugal: The Hotels

Looking for hotels can be a really fun or really frustrating part of a trip. For our Portugal trip, it was fun! There were a ton of options, so it took a bit of time and research to make sure we were ending up somewhere decent, but within budget. Our budgets were low for Portugal (we were shooting for $800 for the 8 nights), and we had no trouble sticking to our budget! We spent more in Lisbon, but were able to make up for the pricier Lisbon hotels with cheaper Lagos, Sintra and Porto hotels. Here's where we stayed and what we thought of each place!

Our room with a balcony at the Hotel Florida in Lisbon!

Santorini, Greece: Blue Angel Villa and TravelKeys Vacation Rentals Stay & Post-Stay Experiences

Blue Angel Villa. The saga continues! I recently wrote about our booking and pre-stay experience with TravelKeys for the Blue Angel Villa in Santorini, and here I'll continue with a review of our stay and some post-stay drama. Quick recap: Shorty fell in love with the villa, which we then booked for 7 guests for 4 nights at $3,170.

Panoramic view from the rooftop of the villa - it was stunning.

Another quick disclaimer: I am not trying to nitpick the details of the villa in this review - I am just trying to give an honest review of what we were expecting from our booking process and what we ended up with when we arrived. The bottom line for us was that we were expecting something much different based on what had been presented to us, and when the reality didn't quite match, it was disappointing.

Santorini, Greece: Blue Angel Villa and TravelKeys Vacation Rentals Booking & Pre-Stay Experiences

On our trip to Greece, the place that Shorty was the most excited about was Santorini. In fact, the whole trip was based almost entirely around her desire to wake up to the gorgeous Santorini views on her birthday. She spent a massive amount of time researching places to stay. Which town was best? Which side of Fira offered the best views? Was a villa or hotel better? And in her research, she found photos of a villa that she absolutely fell in love with: the Blue Angel Villa in Fira, Santorini.

 The view that Shorty fell in love with and weaved many daydreams out of!

Ireland & Italy: The Hotels

Over the course of our 14 day, 13 night trip to Europe last summer, we stayed in six different hotels and one villa. That's a lot of hotels!

I spent a lot of time on TripAdvisor prior to booking to research where we would stay as much as possible, and 6/7 of the places we stayed were great.

Since we were trying to keep to a pretty low budget, and our flights went about $500 over what we were expecting, we decided that we wanted to keep our total hotel budget under $1,000 per person, or around $150/room/night. With the exchange rate, this meant compromising on location or amenities in a few places.

Here's a run down of our hotels.

Ticket price puzzle: Part 4

Wow, just like that a whole month has gone by!

After the crazy holidays, I'm back in full planning mode for our trip! I can't believe it's already just 6 months away - time flies when you're trying to save money, no?

I'm changing it up a bit for this round - I'm going to use our actual dates, and I'm going to add in a few options I was thinking about today - going to Ireland before the wedding in Italy, etc.

Prices, as of 8/4/10:
- LAX-Rome, Dublin-LAX: $1332.52

Prices, as of 9/21/10:
- LAX-Rome, Dublin-LAX: $1331.62
- LAX-Rome, Venice-LAX: $1418.51

Tipping in Italy

Another day of checking travel blogs, another awesome find that's totally appropriate!

Budget Travel posted an article about tipping in six situations in Italy - and after reading it, I realized that I have been over-tipping!

The article goes into the reasoning behind tipping at a restaurant, and it's an interesting read, but here's the quick and dirty:

•Pizzeria: €1 for each person, unless you are alone, then leave €2 or €3
•Restaurant: About 5 to 10 percent
•Taxi: Round the bill up, if you're feeling generous and the taxi driver took the short route
•Hairdresser: About 5 to 10 percent
•Hotel porters: €1 to €5
•Bar: Maximum €2

I love Budget Travel.

Europe airfare: The search continues.

I recently found a pretty great article on summer airfare to Europe on farecompare.com, and they've quelled a little of my anxiety about how much our flights will cost for next year.

The article, Summer Airfare to Europe, helps answer the question I've been contemplating since we found out we were going to Italy: When to buy our tickets. The short answer? Sometime between January, at the soonest, through March of next year. But what I found most interesting about this article was the table it has - it's a graph that shows the prices of airfare for the first half of 2009 vs. the first half of 2010.

Budget (woes)

As I may have mentioned, I'm a planner. I love to plan. And one of the aspects of planning is budgeting. While watching my "money" slip away as I build a budget is never fun, I still like to play with numbers and estimate what things will cost.

So, I couldn't help but build some budgets for this amazing trip we have in the works.

Of course, I sort of pad my budgets, and I base them on budget hotels, meals, etc. Hotel rooms? $150/night, though I'll be looking for $100/night. Food? $50/day, though we'll probably end up snacking for one meal a day, or buying stuff at the market instead of a restaurant. I think I'm pretty close on transportation, but I'd much rather come in under budget, than have something come up and be ridiculously more than we'd planned.

Here's the disclaimer of how I budgeted food. Breakfast = $10/person. Lunch = $15/person. Dinner = $25/person. I looked at what days we'd need what (arriving in afternoon, no dinner the night of the wedding, etc.) and came up with the food totals.

Saving tips for a big trip

Saving for a trip can be tough, especially in this economy and with all the other expenses we have in our day to day lives. Since I have a big trip coming up, I thought I'd share three of my savings tips for travel.

A while back, I saw a commercial about that debit card that rounds up your purchases to the nearest dollar and sticks the extra change into a savings account. I thought it was a pretty neat idea, so when I was trying to find a way to save some extra cash for Italy next year, I came up with my own version of it. My "ESA," or "envelope savings account."