I revealed in part two of the hotel-booking posts that I had eliminated Milan from our itinerary. Today, I want to explain why I made that change in order to highlight why flexibility is important to ensuring that you get the best experience from your valuable travel time.

Off the Rails ends by suggesting that it's not a travel book, but that it's a book about travels. This really captures the spirit of Beppe Severgnini’s writing. I picked it up one day in Barnes & Noble when I stumbled across it on the main display table. After all, it is about rail travel, and because I love train travel, especially in Europe, this looked like a perfect book for me. I was not disappointed.

Today’s article will resume the discussion of booking the initial hotel stays for our 2019 Euro Trip. I will address the value of points and miles and why I prefer award nights for this trip. I use Milan as a detailed example and will close with the hotels selected for each city on our itinerary.

In the previous installments in this series, I wrote about having a blank slate for this year’s journey and selecting our transatlantic flights. I then discussed how I decided where we would actually go once we arrived in Europe. Today’s article is the first of two which will cover booking our initial hotel stays. I will describe my general strategy for making lodging reservations, along with the short-list of properties that I am considering and why they made the list. I will use Milan, Italy for this detailed discussion though I employed this approach for all bookings for this trip.

This is the time of year as I plan travels in the coming months that my thoughts turn toward Europe and strolls along the Seine or dining at a sidewalk café in a charming Italian town. Thanks to points and miles (and a good day job!), my wife and I have been blessed to take an annual trip to Europe, something we plan to continue in 2019. Today’s installment in my series about planning this trip focuses on where we should go once in Europe.

Yesterday, I posted my latest travel video featuring the Trenitalia trains we took between Venice and La Spezia, Italy during our Italian Adventure vacation in 2017.

This is the time of year, when it’s cold and gray, that my thoughts turn toward Europe and warm strolls along the Seine or dining at a sidewalk café in a charming Italian town. Thanks to points and miles, my wife and I have been blessed to take an annual trip to Europe, something we plan to continue in 2019. I have written previously about my approach to travel planning, but this year’s trip is different in a few ways which makes the planning process different as well. However, the first step was booking our transatlantic flights.

Last week I spent a lot of time researching and eventually booking flights for this year’s trip to Europe. This will be our first visit outside the peak summer travel season I expected to have my pick of plentiful award flight and hotel options. I was partially right: there were far more choices than I typically find during the summer. I was miserably wrong, however, when I searched American Airlines in hopes of using my stash of American AAdvantage miles. But I found no saver-level business class space for the days we are traveling. For me, this was the last straw.

I have been actively collecting points and miles via new credit card signup bonuses for four years. In that time, I have opened and closed nearly two dozen accounts. That may not sound like many compared to other bloggers, but I never open cards when I can’t meet the spending requirement for the bonus with my normal purchases. However, I have reached the point where I currently hold or have recently closed most of the cards that interest me. The solution: begin applying for cards in my wife’s name! And, this week, I have an “opportunity” to earn the signup bonus on her latest card with a single purchase!

Last year, my family and I went to Orlando for Fall Break. My wife did the same trip with the kids the year before and enjoyed it so much, that she wanted to repeat it. So, we loaded up the minivan and road-tripped, Griswold-style, to the real-life Wally World. We stayed at the Wyndham Bonnet Creek Resort and, today, I review the resort’s amenities.

Recently, I have spent a lot of time posting vlogs on my non-travel YouTube channels. I was a little shy at first about appearing in videos, but I have found that I enjoy turning on the camera and offering my unscripted thoughts. In that vein, I have recorded a new welcome video for the Debrian Travels YouTube channel.

Last year, my family and I went to Orlando for Fall Break. My wife did the same trip with the kids the year before and enjoyed it so much that she wanted to do it again. So, we loaded up the minivan and road-tripped, Griswold-style, to the real-life Wally World. We stayed at the Wyndham Bonnet Creek Resort and, today, I review the condo where we stayed during our visit.