How We Saved $700+ on Hotel Rooms

Hello Fellow Trekkers!

Breada and I have now been living in Hoi An, Vietnam for a little over 3 months. We love it here and decided this is where we want to settle down when we fly back to Vietnam later this year. There’s good food, good people, good weather (usually), and a calm atmosphere you just can’t get in the big cities. We’re also just 30 minutes away from Da Nang, so if there is something we can’t find in town we can always get it there.

We have just two weeks left in Hoi An before we spend two months in Hanoi teaching English, but honestly I’m looking past that and on to our next big adventure : Europe. We have one month planned in Eastern Europe before going home for the summer. The best part about it? 17 out of the 28 nights we have booked are paid for using points and miles!! 

“How did you get enough points for all those nights!?”

Here’s an example of a deal Breada and I did to help offset the costs of our adventure. Last year, Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) teamed up with MasterCard on a promotion called Priceless Surprises. There were two ways of entering the promotion: staying at an IHG property, or mailing in a handwritten index card with all of your basic information on it. Each person was allowed 94 entries and each had to be mailed in individually. Seeing this for the golden opportunity it was, I hopped on immediately. As I said before, I’m a deal junkie and didn’t even want to spend full price on envelopes and stamps so I did what any deal junkie does : scoured the internet for cheaper options. I ended up finding a seller on eBay who sold envelopes pre-stamped with vintage stamps for cheaper than the going rate at the post office. I bought all of my envelopes from him, saving me about 20% compared to going to the post office and buying stamps and envelopes separately. Plus, they were already stamped saving me time, and time is money!

I didn’t stop there. 94 entries each for Breada and myself wasn’t enough, so we filled out the index cards for my parents as well. Though this whole process gave me a terrible hand cramp and a burning desire to never write anything again, we earned almost 200,000 IHG points.

Now, a year later we, are finally getting around to using those points. Using just the points we earned from the promotion we booked : 

• Two Nights at the Intercontinental Vienna ($210/night average)
• Two Nights at the Holiday Inn Vienna ($110/night average)
• One Night at the Holiday Inn Budapest ($90/night average)

Total Saved : $730! Plus we still have some points left! 

Deals like this come and go, but when they do you need to jump on them fast!

Have you done anything ridiculous to save some money on travel? Tell us here!

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