Make Your Next Vacation Your Best Vacation!®

What are the reasons to buy travel protection?  We use Allianz Insurance a lot so we trust what they have to say.  Here's what Kimberly Seay, Allianz director of assistance lists as her top reasons.  She's the one that answers the phone when something goes wrong - so she knows!

I just want to share my 10 seconds of fame.   While it's not quite the Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame", it's still pretty exciting!  During the noon newscast on Feb 9th, 2018 on CBS, between 100 and 150 million people saw a version of the following video:

Recently I was reminded of a few hidden travel agent services that I routinely provide.  These will not make the top 10 list or even mentioned in our previous post on the travel agent services.  Both occurred in the past few days from current clients.  And both made the travel process so much less stressful for my clients - and even saved them money.

This time of year many investors hear the words "past performance can not be used to predict future returns".  In fact today I received a note from Vanguard discussing this very phenomena.  They called it past performance bias.  Here's the premise:  in many areas of life, performance from one time period to another is consistent.  For example, if you had a really good experience eating at a restaurant, chances are good that you'll enjoy your next meal at the same restaurant.   But in investing (ie: stocks and bonds) this is not necessarily true.  Vanguard suggests that there are three factors to making better decisions about investing:  Education, Discipline and Focusing on what you can control.  I thought it would be interesting to see if these also apply to vacation planning.

It's wave season and that means great travel deals are plentiful.  In my last post, I talked about what wave season means and how to make sure you're getting a great deal. There's even a little case study.  This post gives some current examples.

Chances are you've either gotten an email or seen an advertisement with the words "Exclusive Wave Season sale" promoting great cruise deals for the new year.  We just responded to an email from a customer already booked on a cruise who received such an email.  Her question - is this a better deal?

Where are the 2018 travel trends ?  American Express recently surveyed travelers in the US and the results were somewhat surprising.  Here's the Amex source document in case you want to read the report.