Let me just say that it has not been easy trying to book this vacation for the past 2 weeks. I like a good deal, and although we could afford to spend a good chunk of money I wanted to pay as little as possible for as much as possible. All of the vacation websites change their prices daily which never seemed to give me enough time to research the resorts/beaches/food etc. before the price got bumped up which caused me to move on to another resort or destination. I went from Jamaica to the Dominican Republic to Mexico back to Jamaica and finally settled on the DR once the price for my first choice resort dropped pretty dramatically! Just in case you were thinking about planning a trip in the near future, these are the main sites that I used:
Cheap Caribbean
Apple Vacations
Be prepared to check rates daily and be ready to jump when the price is good.....cause the price can get bad quickly! One of the resorts I really liked jumped up $1000 in 24 hours, and still hasn't gone back down! The closer you get to the dates you want to go on vacation the cheaper the prices get....they call it "last minute deals," which doesn't really work for us since we have to arrange flights for our child care but is significantly less expensive if you're a fly by the seat of your pants kinda person! Another great tool that I used was:
Tripadvisor
Just type in the name of the resort you are thinking of going to, and you can read reviews from other travelers who have stayed there. They have their personal vacation pictures posted, it gives you a recommended % based on the reviews. All of the reviews are broken up into categories; Excellent, Very good, Average, Poor and Terrible which you can either choose to read by date of post all mixed together, or broken up by category. But, I must say that everything you read needs to be taken with a grain of salt because people ALWAYS have something to complain about. I think that the success of vacations and traveling in general depends mostly on the state of mind. Dan and I could stay in a dump and we would still have a great time! I tried to mostly read the Very good and Average reviews because I felt it gave the healthiest perspective. Not an over the top fantastic review, and not a nit picky, everything sucked review! Just the good with the bad that helped me to decide where I wanted to stay.
Now all I need is a passport.....gonna look into that tomorrow, and some books about the Dominican Republic and basic Spanish......it's been a loooong time since high school Spanish and it's not nice to go to another country without learning any of their language. So, check out the site and book a getaway, we ALL need one every once in a while! Maybe we'll see you there.
P.S. The pictures below were stolen, ahem.....borrowed from different users on Tripadvisor. None of the photos were harmed in the making of this blog. To those of you who unwittingly loaned these pictures to me, I am thankful! :)
What could be better than a boat full of fruit on a beach?!?
1 comment:
That looks BEAUTIFUL and amazing! I am jealous! And yes you've totally earned it!! 2 weeks sounds heavenly! We love Tripadvisor, we found it when we lived in England and it helped us a lot when we traveled. We always made sure we looked at American's reviews as the Europeans standards are way different than ours. :) Have fun on your vacation and I can't wait to see YOUR pictures!!!
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