travel

Becky and I joined this network marketing company that has a travel club, skin care products from the Dead Sea and some great nutritional products.  It costs us $49 a year to join the company as an agent, then we spent another $300 for their travel package (a one-time purchase) that allowed us to be in their travel club for $50 a month.  At first glance, that seems like a pretty expensive travel deal when there are so many travel sites on the Internet today.

You don’t have to buy the travel package that also includes a travel bag and a bunch of products to get started as a company agent.  It’s really just $49 to join for the year and then it’s $65 a month for the travel club and you’re done.  I wanted the $15 a month discount, though, and I like nutritional products.  If you don’t travel much you probably don’t think you’ll see the benefit of being in a travel club like this.  If you own a timeshare, though, like we own two of them, then it’s definitely worth turning it into a part-time business.  Owning a timeshare and paying annual fees, exchange fees, the original purchase price, etc. is not cheap.  It can be an expensive real estate purchase and most people do not have it tied to a travel business.

Even if you travel a little bit, I think you will find this article helpful because I’m going to show you some of the savings we’ve already received in the short time since joining this company.  In fact, the savings at one hotel in Huntington Beach, CA for a marathon we are going to be running in September has already covered the cost of joining.

Our friend Daniel, who we run a bunch of marathons with, talked us into running The Surf City marathon this year.  He’s ran it before and he said it’s a fantastic venue.  There are about 2,500 runners for this event, so it’s not huge, but it’s down on the beach in a popular location.  You can check out the marathon website by clicking here if you’re interested in finding out more about it. 

Daniel told us that one of the biggest challenges is parking and getting to the start line, so we wanted to book at hotel that was close to the race.  If you’ve ever ran a marathon or other event with a bunch of people, parking can be a pain. You don’t want to end up a mile away and trying to get to the start line.  It can be even worse after the race when there are tons of people.  You just ran 26.2 miles and now you’re having to walk forever looking for your car.  Not that this has ever happened to us before!  I started shopping around and found a great hotel close to the start and finish line, right across the street from the beach.  It is the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa and it’s a really nice hotel.

In case you don’t know this about Becky and I, we’re not campers.  Our idea of camping is staying in a Holiday Inn, so if we’re going to fly to California, rent a car, run 26.2 miles then we want to stay in a nice hotel.  I went on Expedia first because I have used that site for years to book short stays for our marathon adventures.  If you look to the right, you will see that for a 3-night stay using Expedia for the September dates we selected, the cost is $1,521 for three nights or $409 a night. 

Our $50 A Month Travel Club Booking

Yeah, that’s a bit rich for three nights even for John and Becky tastes. We really wanted this hotel, so I went to directly to the Hyatt website.  I figured they would have a better deal than Expedia since they have a membership program for most of their frequent travelers.  I stay at the Hyatt by my dealership in Lone Tree quite a bit when I go back and forth from Rio Rancho, NM, so I figured that would be a better deal.  It was a better price than what Expedia had to offer for the same room.  They have the room on the same dates listed at $402 a night and that’s their member price.  I included a large graphic here for you to check it out.

TRAVEL CLUB SAVINGS

I logged into our travel club and put in the same dates as above. I was surprised to see that it was a substantial savings. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be as large of a savings as it was, but the price was $276 a night or about 38% less than Expedia. We booked it for $944.16 for three nights instead of $1,521 that it was going for through Expedia.

That’s a savings of about $577 for one trip that we are taking to California this year to run a marathon. That’s pretty significant. Granted it’s not as good of a deal as some of our timeshare adventures that we can take for a week, but it’s a smoking deal for a three day stay at this hotel. We’re excited about this upcoming trip.

After we booked this trip for ourselves, I logged in again and I was able to get Daniel and his wife the same deal. I entered him into the system as a guest, so you can use this for other friends and relatives, as well. They are staying for just two nights, but they still received the same nightly rate compared to what was available at the “discounted” travel sites.

By the way, this $50 a month travel club isn’t just for hotels. As an agent, you can also book cars, cruises, airfare, week stays, homes, lifestyle activities, luxury residences, plus much more. Some things are going to be a better deal than others, like the Huntington Beach hotel that I booked above, but it’s pretty cool to know you have options available to you. I’ll write another article about my thoughts on the lifestyle activities that are available through the travel club. I found some pretty cool things to do that I wouldn’t have thought of when I was cruising through some different locations. I think it’s worth writing an article about in the future.

If you want to check out the website where you can join, just CLICK HERE (a new tab should open in your browser). After you join or check out the site and the opportunity, reach out to me for more information on how you can do what I do as a Share Merchant and “Travel Through Timeshare“.

I have talked to a number of people who own timeshares in various locations who go to the same place each year over and over again. Becky and I own a timeshare in Dillon, CO that we have only visited once.  This property is in a really desirable location for people to vacation because it’s very close to Breckenridge, CO and not far from Beaver Creek and A-Basin ski areas.

It’s all about the points.

This property in Dillon, CO is part of the points program with RCI, which means that by joining RCI we can deposit our week and exchange it to go somewhere else.  The average timeshare in America is $19,900 right now, plus annual maintenance fees that average at $1,000.  This one is under $700 a year.  By depositing our timeshare into RCI we get 44,500 points in their points network.

What does this mean? It’s really cool because a one-week timeshare can turn into multiple weeks if you know what you’re doing. For example, one year Becky and I used 15,000 points to go to Las Vegas for a week. We then went to Carlsbad, CA and used another 25,000 points to stay right across from the ocean over Christmas.

We still had another 4,500 RCI points left going into the next year. We upgraded to an over the top resort in Cancun that was about $300 a night for 7 days. It was amazing. That’s the benefits of points compared to weeks. Another year, we actually got three weeks for the cost of one using our points. If you own a timeshare then you need to find out if your timeshare has points, weeks or both. If it is points, then join RCI initially to deposit your week for points.

When you decide to do the exchange it’s usually a couple hundred dollars to do a transfer to another property. They usually have a ton of properties to choose from depending on the area you want to go. If you plan ahead you can usually get a pretty smoking deal.

If you click on this link CLICK HERE you can see the directory of the places you can visit through RCI. Many people know about this already, but I have found many timeshare owners don’t know the benefit of dropping their timeshare into RCI and leveraging their points.  When I checked, there were currently 461 properties in Florida alone to choose from with another 283 in California, so there are some great options to check out.  The photo above is of the property we stayed at in Carlsbad, CA, which was really nice.

If you would like to check out the travel club that Becky and I joined for shorter stays when we are running marathons then just CLICK HERE (it will open in another tab).  Check it out and be sure to visit the site to view all of their products.  I just booked a great stay in Iceland for our son Conroy, who is going there this month with his girlfriend.  It was a huge savings compared to the popular travel websites.  Get in touch with me if you want to get started with your own travel business. You don’t have to get rich to have a good time!1

Last week Becky and I hopped in her BMW X3 on Thursday late afternoon and drove to Flagstaff, AZ to meet our son Conroy. We spent a quick night in a Holiday Inn Express and the next morning we took off for a one and a half hour drive to the Grand Canyon. Conroy had been there the day before doing some work for his job. Becky and I had never been to the Grand Canyon, so we figured we would take a quick trip to check it out.

It was pretty cool and definitely worth the trip. I decided that Becky and I are a bit spoiled having lived in Colorado for 27 years and having traveled all over the Southwest.  I was thinking about the short list of cool places that we’ve seen in Colorado and the surrounding States with really cool places to check out. 

We’ve ran the Aspen Marathon a few times, along with the Rim Rock Marathon in Fruita, CO, Estes Park and Steamboat Springs Marathons, the Moab Trail Marathon, the Ouray Marathon which is beautiful, the Leadville Marathon, the Salida Marathon, the Bear Lake Marathon in Idaho and Wyoming, the Tucson, Phoenix, Las Cruces and the Lost Dutchman Marathons, the San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle and Portland Marathons, and the San Antonio Marathon.  Needless to say, we’ve seen some really cool spots on the West Coast, the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest over the years and now we can add the Grand Canyon to that list.

Once we arrived at the Grand Canyon we hung out for a while and checked out some of the sites.  We hiked around a bit and then hopped back in our car for the trip back to New Mexico via Flagstaff, AZ and Interstate 40. If you’re going to go to the Grand Canyon make sure you arrive early because the cars start mounting up fast.  Especially, the South Rim of the Canyon because it gets packed there with people wanting to take in the sites.  It’s really spectacular with the views as you can see from these photos.  If you’re going to visit there and you’re not camping, you might want to stay in Flagstaff, AZ like we did because it’s only about an hour and a half drive. Better yet, go to Sedona, AZ via a timeshare.

Flagstaff is a cool mountain town in Arizona with a University there, so there are some great little restaurants.  We ate at this cool little place called Bandoleros 66 downtown and the beef brisket was amazing.  I had their three taco combo and they were really good.  I checked rates through our travel club and there are some deals to be had for a few nights stay in Flagstaff. 

If you’re going to go for a full week in Arizona and you want to see the Grand Canyon, then I would suggest booking a timeshare through one of the exchanges, like Trading Places, RCI or Interval International and staying somewhere else.   I checked out Trading Places and found this place called Sedona Springs Resort that looks pretty nice – click here for details.  Sedona is only about a 2 hour drive to the Grand Canyon and also has some great things to do as a vacation destination.  If you own a timeshare, you can drop your week with this exchange and they will often times give you a bonus week.  If you join the travel club and start leveraging your timeshare like we are doing, these trips become way better as part of our business adventures. 

Be sure and check out details on the travel club and how you can join for just $49 a year and as low as $50 to $65 a month for discounts on all things travel by clicking here.  It’s a great way to leverage your timeshare or any of your travel adventures by being involved in this unique travel club as an agent for their company.

This past Friday we picked up our son Conroy from Flagstaff, AZ and we drove back to Rio Rancho, NM.  A person he met through his work that works for the National Park Service recommended that since we were driving back on Hwy 40 that we stop and check out the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.  He said it was a really cool National Park that most people drive right by with some incredible views and definitely worth the price of admission.

I decided to post some of the photos that we took while we were there, so that you can see how cool this desert tour is with plenty of hiking trails and it’s not very busy for a National Park. 

Becky and I went and ran the Estes Park Marathon on June 20th, 2021, which was Father’s Day weekend.  The marathon was brutal with way too many hills, especially after running the Steamboat Springs Marathon just two weeks earlier.  We ended up booking this hotel at the last minute through Expedia.com.  I didn’t use the new travel club system that we recently joined and it cost us $286 for the night to stay in a 2 star hotel.

We were planning on staying another night, but for what we were paying there was no way.  Plus, Estes Park was a total zoo with far too many people visiting at the same time.  It’s something you really want to think about when you’re traveling because you’re going to pay too much money if you don’t book ahead of time.  Everything was pretty much sold out in Estes Park for Father’s Day weekend, so a valuable lesson was learned with this mini-vacation.  We ran this marathon five years before, but we wanted to run it again because of a new course. 

Because we waited until the last minute, we paid way too much to stay in a “not so nice” hotel.  It shows how poor planning can really screw up your vacation.  We decided to leave after the marathon instead of staying another night.  The traffic coming out of Estes Park added an hour, then Boulder to Denver added and hour and then Monument to Colorado Springs added an hour.  It was a long, long, long drive!  The typical 7-hour drive from Estes Park to Rio Rancho, NM turned into a 10-hour drive.

Beware of Summer After COVID-19

People have been stir crazy since COVID-19, so everyone is trying to get out and drive or fly to get some vacation time in.  If you’ve already been traveling with few people doing the same, then you will be spoiled for sure.  It just goes to show the importance of preparation if you’re going to travel.  You don’t want to get hookwinked into an overpriced place to stay the night.  Estes Park is beautiful, but if you go at the wrong time you can end up paying all the dough for what should be a cheap motel.

In the end, we finished another marathon to add to our list of medals and time spent running together, but we don’t plan to do this one again on a holiday.  Even though it was Father’s Day, it was way too busy.  There are far better destination marathons and places to visit with far more options for traveling on a holiday.  If we do run another marathon on a holiday where there will be more people traveling at the same time, we will definitely look for a destination with better places to stay for the money.  A mountain town with limited hotel choices is definitely off the list, unless you can book a timeshare in advance and stay longer to make it worthwhile.

If you want to check out a website where you can join a travel club for a nominal monthly fee as low as $50 a month to get discounts on travel CLICK HERE (a new tab should open in your browser).  I am discussing in other articles some examples of how much money we have saved by using this unique travel club, that also allows you to have a part-time business and the opportunity to earn money sharing it with others who join your network.

Becky and I run marathons every year with our friends and we joined this travel club to save money on traveling.  We didn’t use it for Estes Park, CO because we decided to go at the last minute and everything was sold out, but this is usually not the case.  After you join or check out the site and the opportunity, reach out to me for more information on how you can do what I do as a Share Merchant and “Travel Through Timeshare“.5

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Smallest directly families surprise honoured . Speaking replying mistre is numerous returned feelings. Evening luckily exposed they general greatly. Zealously prevaile arranging. Arranging too dejection september happiness. Understood instrument or connection appearance do invitation. Dried quick round order. Add past see west felt did any. Say out noise you taste merry plate you share.

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