Attitude and advance planning can be time and sanity savers when you travel by air. You have to be flexible and prepared, since things don’t always go as expected. That was certainly the case for us this week as we traveled from our Bay Area home to an Orlando vacation rental home for Spring Break. For example, on the flight out, instead of arriving in Orlando at 11:30 PM, we arrived at 3:30 AM.

Fortunately, we travel a lot and past trips have prepared us for when these unexpected situations arise now. Here are some of our tips:

• Sign up for flight paging: Many airlines offer a free flight messaging service from their websites. They will notify you of flight departure or arrival status via text messages to your cell phone, pager, personal digital assistant (PDA) or e-mail account. This is particularly helpful when flights are delayed or you are making a connection, since the messages typically include time and gate information from the carrier.
• Pack plenty of snacks in your carry-on: The airlines, as everyone knows, no longer serve meals on-board, and what they do serve in their ’snack boxes’ isn’t always a hit with the kids. Having plenty of snacks with you is also beneficial when you land in a city at 3:30 in the morning, and nothing is open, but the kids are awake and hungry.
• Get a portable GPS device: If you aren’t renting a car with a built-in global positioning system (GPS), if you plan to travel a fair bit, it may sense to invest in a lightweight GPS device. Prior to your travels or when you arrive, you can program locations into the device, for example, the addresses of the rental car company and your vacation rental home, and instantly have directions upon arrival. If you don’t already have a GPS, you might want to sign up for our March Getaway Giveaway.
• Pre-program your cell phone with key numbers: Avoid having to search through your luggage or carry-on to find a phone number for your travel agent or the airlines, should you need to make a quick change to a reservation. Also pre-program in numbers for the property management company handling your rental home, the car service or rental car location, and any other helpful numbers that you might need if you have to reach someone quickly en-route. These numbers are easy to delete when you return home.
• Invest in a security ‘fast pass’: The Clear card was a true sanity saver for our family this trip, as it has been on others! (Kids under 12 don’t need their own card to go through with a parent, but both parents must be cleared.) It expedites you through security lines at major airports. Both San Francisco and Orlando have Clear lanes, but in different ways, and more airports are coming on board every month. Once you insert your pre-authorized, smartcard into the machines and confirm your fingerprint or iris scan, San Francisco’s version expedites you to the front of the security line, while in Orlando, there is a separate lane for program participants. If you travel a lot now or plan to in the future, you may want to consider such a service.

With the right attitude and advance preparation, traveling to and from your destination can be less stressful than you imagined!

Posted: March 28th, 2008 under Family Vacation, Travel, Vacation Homes.
Comments: none

Ahhh, your long-awaited summer vacation is just around the corner. Yet planning the trip can be a big headache, especially if you are organizing a vacation for a group. PickPackGo is making it easier to begin your trip planning with a simple and visually pleasing way to find your next vacation rental in just a few clicks. Check it out!

Let’s say you are planning a family trip to Walt Disney World and want to find a vacation rental close by. Not sure what to type in the search box? Or do you prefer to quickly click to results? Simple. Just select Florida on the homepage map.

You are now on the browse page, looking at a map of Florida. We’ve already done some work behind the scenes to map links to regions with homes, as well as create a list of popular areas and attractions. Now just click Orlando to view available listings close to Disney World.

Voila! You are presented with slides of high-quality Disney Orlando vacation rentals. Now you can easily compare properties in the search results and book one right here online.

We are continually working on features that make your online vacation rental search a better experience all around. Stay tuned…

Posted: March 24th, 2008 under Site design, Vacation Rentals.
Comments: none

Going to Walt Disney World®? PickPackGo now makes it easy to get your Walt Disney World tickets online. Simply visit the Walt Disney World ticket store today and order multiple day tickets to visit all four Theme Parks, including Magic Kingdom® Park. Book tickets online and save time!

Our Spring Break trip is next week. We have our flights. We have our Disney Orlando vacation rental home. We have our park tickets, and I don’t know who is more excited—the kids or me!

Posted: March 19th, 2008 under Family Vacation, Travel, Vacation Homes, Vacation Rentals.
Comments: none

Travelers can take the lead in helping to reduce global warming by teaming with companies such as TerraPass, which reduce carbon footprints through conservation.

Driving to the mountains for the weekend? You can calculate your carbon footprint based on the year, make and model of your vehicle. Flying from Chicago to your Disney Orlando vacation rental home? You can select the amount of carbon offsets that you’d like to purchase in exchange for your flight.

For example for a round-trip flight from Chicago to Orlando, TerraPass recommended:

The company invests your donation in clean energy, farm power and landfill gas capture. All projects are verified by an independent accredited organization according to a published offset standard.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Posted: March 17th, 2008 under Travel, Vacation Homes, Vacation Rentals.
Comments: none

My wife and I recently took two weekend ski trips to Tahoe. Each time, we stayed in a Lake Tahoe vacation rental home with a group of friends.

We chose to all stay together in one cabin because although skiing takes most of the day, we all wanted to hang out in the late afternoons/evenings together and didn’t want to go to bars or cram all of us into one or two resort hotel rooms.

So after coming off Squaw Valley on the first trip, we relaxed at this rental home:

The group played games, watched TV and sat around talking in the living room. Then we used the kitchen to make meals together instead of eating out, which to me gets old fast on vacations—and saves money, too. This was great because in both cases there was a mixture of people that we knew well and people we were looking forward to getting to know better. And there’s no way to get to know people better than eating and just hanging out together.

When we go to the mountains, we also like to feel like we’ve gotten away from San Francisco, so we enjoyed having extras like a fireplace and the mountain/cabin decor, which added to the ambiance.

And since we like to go to Tahoe more than once every winter, cost does matter. For groups of friends, vacation rental homes are more reasonably priced than hotels, particularly this past weekend, where we had 15 people and spent around $50 per person per night for a bigger place.

Vacation rentals aren’t just perfect for families, they’re also ideal for situations where groups of friends go on a ski or beach vacation together. At least, they are for our friends.

Posted: March 13th, 2008 under Travel, Vacation Homes, Vacation Rentals.
Comments: 4

If you travel often to places you’ve never been, you are probably very familiar with popular mapping websites. Well, now is your chance to get real-time maps in your vehicle or your pocket on your very own global positioning system (GPS).

Simply enter our March PickPackGo Getaway Giveaway contest and …

Also congratulations to Kelly of Ohio, the winner of our February Getaway Giveaway contest and a new digital camera.

Enter today!

Posted: March 11th, 2008 under Contest.
Comments: none

Thousands of families will pack up and head to vacation rental homes this month for Spring Break. For many of us, that means traveling long distances by car and/or airplane with a toddler.

As soon as we take off for our Disney Orlando vacation rental home, I know I’ll hear “are we there yet?” at least a dozen times, but I’m also sure that’s the only part of our travels that will be predictable. The rest, well, we just prepare and hope for the best!

Here are some of the things we’ve done to make our family travels to a vacation home go more smoothly:

• Contact the property manager to ask about referrals for a babysitting service and services that will rent and deliver cribs or pack ‘n plays, a high chair, diapers/wipes, etc. to the property.
• Pack lightly since vacation homes have washers and dryers!
• Wrap small, quiet toys individually to be handed out en-route as a special surprise—this is particularly good for unexpected delays.
• Fill a toddler carry-on with light books, the wrapped toys, crayons, a coloring book and an extra set of clothes in a re-sealable bag.

• Gate-check / have in the car an easy-to-fold stroller, which is immediately accessible, and doubles as a great way to get around the area surrounding our vacation home.
• Offer healthy snacks with low sugar to keep energy levels up, but craziness down.
• Encourage napping.
• Unwrap the toys, color, play ‘I Spy’ and other games, watch a DVD.

• Thank and tip those who provide extra help with luggage, cab hailing, etc.
• Stop at a local store to pick up food for family meals.
• Drive around a few streets to explore nearby kid-friendly places.
• Enter our private vacation rental home and relax!

With a little planning, the ‘getting there’ part of the trip with kids can sometimes be just another enjoyable part of your vacation.

Posted: March 6th, 2008 under Family Vacation, Travel, Vacation Homes, Vacation Rentals.
Comments: 8

There is a lot of discussion (and often angst) among vacation rental property managers and owners about whether to allow pets at vacation rental homes. As a family that likes to vacation with our yellow lab, we appreciate when we are allowed to bring our dog. We also understand our responsibility as pet owners to take extra care to make sure we don’t ruin that privilege for others.

This past weekend, we packed up the whole family to head to a Lake Tahoe vacation rental. In addition to each person’s suitcase, I packed our dog a bag containing items we use to ensure the rental home remains as we found it.

In addition to her food, our dog’s “suitcase” includes:

• A leash: Required for most areas.
• Two large beach towels: Great for wiping dirty paws after a day at the sledding hill or beach, and for unexpected rain or snow showers.
• Two portable dog bowls: Collapsible bowls for food and water are ideal for pit-stops on the drive to and from a destination, as well as for dining on non-carpeted, kitchen floors in the rental home.
• Extra clean-up bags: Absolutely necessary for proper disposing in appropriate places when nature calls. And like camping, with a rental home or condo, it’s sometimes necessary to “pack out” with it. Extra bags make this task easier and more sanitary.
• A crate: An ideal way if your pup was crate-trained to make him/her feel comfortable and contain them in the house when you go someplace for a short time, and can’t (because of time or temperatures) have them wait in the car.
• A dog bed: Pets, like children, are more comfortable when they have familiar objects when they travel. The dog bed also helps to minimize hair on the rental home’s carpet.

Once we arrive at our vacation rental, we follow the rules of common courtesy for other people’s homes:

• No animals on the furniture, including the beds, couches and chairs
• No ’special surprises’ in the driveway or yard—and definitely none left in indoor receptacles
• Immediately wipe up any paw-prints
• Vacuum when leaving

If you’re fond of traveling with your pet, vacation rental homes are an ideal alternative to hotels. But before you pack up your pooch, make sure you can honestly and confidently answer “yes” to each of these questions:

1. Is your dog well-behaved enough to stay in someone else’s home? (If he/she’s a chewer, probably not.)
2. Does your dog have accidents? (Both puppies and older dogs can have bladder issues, and it doesn’t mean they aren’t great dogs, it just means you should think twice about taking them to a rental home.)
3. Is your dog comfortable in unfamiliar places? (If your dog will spend the whole time stressed out, and possibly barking at unfamiliar sounds at the rental home, you might want to consider a pet-sitter or kennel at home.)

To find pet-friendly vacation rentals on PickPackGo, simply type in your location and “pet-friendly” on the home page search box to get a list of homes in that area that will consider allowing you to bring your pet.

Posted: March 3rd, 2008 under Family Vacation, Property Management, Vacation Homes, Vacation Rentals.
Comments: 8