I’m headed to the Dominican Republic with my girlfriend in a few weeks and I thought I’d share some of my experiences about planning a cheap vacation there.
Later on when we get back I hope to have some pictures for you.
Planning a cheap vacation, or ANY trip for that matter…
It’s important to have to have some guidelines…and to ask some questions…
- Do you really want an All inclusive package deal?
- Do you really want a rental car for a week, or at all?
- What’s best flight time for you, do you want to sacrifice cost savings for time savings by getting a shorter flight?
- Hotel rooms, do you really need seaside ocean views, or do you want to save $15-20 /night with a room with a lesser view?
If you have your traveling accommodations dictated to you vis a vis an all inclusive package deal, then you should expect to have less control over some things that might be important to you…
If you really want to explore your destination vacation place, then the more you go out, the better, right?
Therefore, taking advantage of the free meals at your hotel as part of your all inclusive package might limit your dining experiences, know what I mean?
Also, if you want to just explore locally and do more relaxing than exploring and touring, then a rental car might not be the best thing for you.
An example of fine-tuning your vacation plans to save some money on unnecessary/unwanted expenses.
My girlfriend and I are staying in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, but she has some real estate business she has to attend to while we are there.
This means we will definitely need a rental car, at least for 2 days… so the next question is… do we need a rental for the whole week, or just for those 2 days of business-like travel?
If you want to save money on a vacation, it helps to really pin down exactly what your needs and desires are, and spend minimally.
Since Santo Domingo is her hometown, and since The Dominican Republic is her home country, she’s looking for more of a relaxing time there, whereas I am always looking to be more of an explorer-type traveler.
The best compromise for both of us was to spend 2 days doing the business travel and 5 days doing relaxation stuff. If I want to explore and see the sights, I can do that in Santo Domingo in between our days at the beach, the spas and the clubs and stuff like that.
Instead of getting a rental car for a week, we decided to get one for just 2 days, thereby saving us 5 days of rental car expenses. Part of this decision was based on the fact the the hotel we are staying at would provide us with a ride to/from the airport, so we wouldn’t have to pay for a taxi to/form the airport.
OK, the point here is, know your schedule ahead of time, and try to piecemeal a vacation package that is going to be suitable for getting maximum enjoyment out of your trip.
As mentioned earlier in this article, deciding on rental car accommodations also tied in with the hotel accommodations… If the hotel didn’t provide pickup for us at the airport then we probably would have just rented a car or the week.
Choosing your lodging, resort, hotel, motel etc….
We decided in the beginning that we wanted an economical vacation, because she had to go there on business, and since Santo Domingo and the Dominican Republic in general isn’t new to her like it is for me, that where we stayed didn’t have to be anythin fancy like a honeymoon suite, or an executive suite type of room.
This decision/guideline also saved us money because it reduced in price the type of room we got.
We saved about $20.00/night by picking a “lesser” room to stay in, although I would have preferred waking up with a seaside ocean view every morning 
We shopped around, and we found some good rate by doing manual search son some travel websites, and we started our quests by going to kayak.com first, which lead us to the usual places like cheap caribbean.com and other places.
Planning a trip can be exhausting, and if you do it online you will end up with tons of pages on the internet open and you’ll be doing all sorts of mixing and matching trying to find the perfect fit for your needs and guidelines.
So, we got our lodgings and rental car situations wrapped up, so to speak, but the MOST important aspect to a trip is really the flight.
Decisions involved in planning your flight and finding the best deals for your flight to your destination.
My girlfriend had been the the Dominican many times and her parents have come here to the US several times and she’s always planned their flights for them and arranged their flight times. One thing she knows from experience is that when coming from the DR to the US or going from the US to the Dominican Republic, that layovers in Miami tend to be a bit unpredictable.
The flights there frequently have a lot of delays, whether it be due to weather condition in hurricane stricken areas causing the delays or just some other reasons, I’m not really sure, but she knows from experience that layovers in Miami tend to add to the overall flight times.
So, when deciding on flight times there’s got to be a give and take here between convenience and cost savings…
1- you only get 7 days of vacation time for example
2- you will probably spend 1 day total just in traveling to and from your locations, giving a half day of travel each way.
3- If you add a few hours to your flight each way, it deducts from your total true vacation time.
So, with all these things taken into consideration, we looked for no-stop, and 1-stop flights…
The difference between no-stop direct flights, and 1-stp direct flights was about 3-4 hours, meaning that overall, the difference between the direct flights and the 1-stop flights was about 6-8 hours of travel time.
Since we were saving money on the hotel accommodations and on 5 days less of rental car fees, we tried to get a direct flight, but the times were few and far between and didn’t jive well with our itinerary.
So, our guidelines and preferences for our travels sort of cornered us, left us no choice but to get a 1-stop flight. Anything longer than that was definitely unsuitable for us because the 2-stop flights to the Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo) from Boston were just way too long with some of the cheapest 2-stop and 3-stop flights taking a total of 12-16 hours each way, which was just ridiculous.
Did we look for all inclusive vacation packages to the Dominican Republic as the first step in our vacation planning?
Yes, we did, but we found out that if you really try to control and cut down some unnecessary expenses that come with these packages, that there’s really not much savings, because there’s some padding that goes into these packages.
The hotels cost a few more dollars a night
The rental cars cost a few more dollars a day, and you have to get the cars for the whole week
And while you might think that having food expenses paid for as part of the all inclusive package is a good idea, it didn’t fit in well with what our overall plan was, which was to remain local to Santo Domingo during the non-business part of our trip, to drive around as little as possible, and since I still wanted to see some of the local sights, we could kill two birds with one stone by getting our grub on by going out to Santo Domingo and eating and seeing new things (at least for me it would be new).
How I found good travel deals and arrangements, Step by Step
1- Started off looking for all inclusive packages for the DR via Kayak.com
2- Looked for the flights times, rental car situations, hotel accommodations
3- Saw that the all inclusive packages didn’t really give us the freedom to plan our vacationth eway we wanted
4- Opted out of the search for all inclusive packages
5- Started searching for deals on rental cars, hotels, and flight times separately…individually, then tried to patch together a vacation that way.
** This is where we started to save money on everything listed above****
6- Using the same portal website Kayak.com we found better deals on rental cars, flights, flight TIMES!, and hotels
Yes, I might have spent about 6 hours trying to put together a cheap vacation, but mor eimportantly, what she and I ended up with was a comfortable suitable flight, hotel and minimal travel, which is what we both wanted.
- No red-eye flights
- No cramped tiny rental car for 7 days, for which we would use it for only 5
- And more control over our hotel rooms
It took a lot of work and a lot of time, but looking back on it all, I realize that we could have saved ourselves a lot of internet searching time by knowing our prerequisites, our preferences, our gudelines prior to mapping out a vacation package and plan.
So, I have to stress this point again clearly…
Don’t just order a week of this and a week of that, and then have your vacation dictated to YOU.
YOU are the one going on vacation
This is YOUR time, YOUR vacation, YOUR money…
Before you look for flights, cars, and hotels, ask friends and family and co-workers who have visited your destination vacation, ask them what they did, where they stayed, and what would be a good way to get a good experience from it all.
Know all of this ahead of time and you will have not just a tailor made vacation plan, but hopefully an organized and enjoyable trip, too
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