Like a lot of you Cindy and I really like to travel frequently. I just discovered a few things that may save you a lot of money. I have been getting email from a lot of travel companies (Vacations to Go, Travelocity, etc) for a long time. I get about 25-50 emails a day from them, most of which I just scan quickly or ignore. One of the recent additions is a site called mattsflights.com . They send out info about very cheap air flights (and airline errors) including how much the flight is from most cities. They also have a premium pay service but I never tried it. But the main thing is that they taught me how to search flights to get the best price. They use Google flights which if you click on the date it takes you to a calendar so you can see which days have the cheapest flights. Very handy if you are free to travel anytime. Another not surprising thing that I recently discovered is that if you sign up for individual company emails you may get some surprising offers not available at the reseller sites. Cindy and I took a Gate 1 tour of eastern Europe a few years ago and didn't have a single complaint with the two week tour. Since we were looking at tours of France or Italy I signed up for Gate 1's email and a few weeks ago I got one with a surprising offer. It was buy one tour and get another at half off. Most of the time you only see 5% off tours so this was a great deal. I signed us up for the 2 week tour of France and saved enough to pay for the difference in our premium economy seats over "cattle class". Another thing I have always heard is that it is better to make your own plane reservations but I have found that the tour companies seem to get better rates these days, especially if you want to book far enough ahead to be able to pick out the best seats. Premium economy is expensive for what you get (Cindy insists on it for international travel) but if you do pay for it do you want to be right by the bathrooms that are being used continuously on your trip? On the trip I just booked I paid an extra $30 each just so I didn't have to take an Air France flight which charges extra to let you pick your seats. Also remember that most companies give you "free" transportation to the hotel or cruise ship if you book the air with them. That is normally $100 saved plus the convenience. Speaking of seats do you know about a neat website called seatguru.com? You put in the dates and flights you may take and it shows which are the preferred and bad seats on that exact plane, has reviews of certain seats and even tells you how wide the seats are, how much leg room and sometimes how far they recline. Very handy for those long international flights. On our last trip it kept me away from Delta whose seats were narrower and reclined less and had 3" less leg room than the American Air flight I booked. If you are paying $500 extra for Premium seats you might as well get the best available.

Now that I have booked our trip I just have to map out all of the casinos, flea markets and antique stores in all of the cites on our tour but I have until next May to do it. So now you have a good idea why I say that many times I spend more time planning our trips than what the trip actually takes.