The lesson I learned today

Today I realized that I had not added the girls to our reservation for our upcoming trip to the Dominican Republic. Bill and I both have Southwest airlines companion passes so the girls fly free with us on any flight we fly. This is a great benefit and i will talk about how to get this in later posts. I have never worried too much about adding the girls to the reservation as they can be added up to the very last seat on the plane. I bet you can guess what happened today when I went to book, yep our flight from Punta Cana to Detroit was sold out. As I figured I had 3 options at this point.

1) Cancel- since i was booked on southwest airlines we can cancel and get our points back, but Leah would be very upset that she would not be able to sit by the pool and drink virgin Pina coladas.

2) Wait- if I waited people may have canceled their flights and I could get those seats for the girls

3) Reschedule- there was another flight that day, it was not quite as good but it did have seats for all 4 of us.

I went with option 3. It cost me 14K miles to reschedule since the flights were more expensive now but there was  no stress of wondering whether we would have to cancel our trip. Lesson learned. This trip still only cost us 55K southwest miles which is a great price and we are all looking forward to getting out of the cold for a few days.

Who are we?

I have had a lot of people recently interested in all the travels my family and i are doing and how we are doing it, so i decided to start this blog to share this information with anyone that may be interested. I will talk about where we are traveling(reviews and trip reports), how we get our miles/points(credit cards and manufactured spend methods I use) and share my love of planning travel.

So first off all who are we. my name is Clarissa and I am married to a wonderful man(Bill) who supports my crazy travel planning obsession. We have 2 6 year old girls(Emma and Leah) who love to travel and at this point have already been on 24 trips. As the girls are getting older our vacations are getting more interesting. The girls would be upset if i did not include our 2 Dogs, Athena and Chewie in our family introduction. although of course they do not travel with us.

I have always loved to travel but did not always have the means to travel often. Once i got married we started traveling some, but since i have discovered using miles and points we have the ability to travel to much more far flung and interesting places. Now vacation time is our biggest issue.