Yet another great thing about New York is JFK—not when you’re standing in the TSA line at Thanksgiving but when you’re booking a trip and flash-sale travel sites like LivingSocial Escapes that offer some remarkable deals from JFK.
A few Decembers ago, my husband and our then-8-year-old son took an eight-day LivingSocial tour to China. Per person cost for Neil and Andy: $1,199 (vs. the non-sale price of $2,199) plus $384 for visa, handling fee, and associated charges with ChinaTour. Included in the rock-bottom price were flights to and from China, domestic airfare, top-notch hotels in Beijing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, tour bus, English-speaking guide, entrance fee to the Great Wall, and other attractions as well as 14 meals spread over breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
A seat-of-his pants traveler, my husband Neil is dubious of any tour. But he couldn’t argue with $200 per day for a place he had wanted to see since waking up for 8:30am Mandarin classes in college.
We also reasoned that the trip might help something stick for our junior linguist. Despite five years of Mandarin lessons, Andy was still getting “hello” and “thank you” mixed up (maybe it was our inconsistency in class attendance and homework completion—or the fact that his tutor wasn’t technically a teacher and thought it was more fun to teach a 6-year-old to say: “Your feet are stinky” in Chinese than to count).
Before we booked the trip, Neil asked if perhaps he and I should take our first adult-only trip in five years. I, however, volunteered to watch our younger asthmatic son while Dad and Andy did recon on the smog and cigarette situation (besides, no way I was sitting on a plane for 26+ hours for fewer than two weeks in country).
So with permission from Andy’s school for him to miss a week (and the idea that he would gave a 30-minute presentation to his fellow third graders, complete with souvenirs, coins, and pictures of squat toilets and iffy food when he returned), Andy and Neil departed.
They found the hotels surprisingly good—4- and 5- stars, as judged by our third-grade travel consultant. With a couple of wonderful exceptions, the meals were the Chinese equivalent of Denny’s and easily could’ve been upgraded for a few bucks more. And, as with many tours, the time allotted for each site was minimal (apparently the guide specialized in “Hurry Up” and “What taking you so long?”). Still the trip was a great survey for so huge a country as China.
As promised, trips to the Great Wall, Forbidden City, 2,600-year-old gardens in Suzhou and downtown Shanghai were accompanied by visits to factories where jade, silk, and pearls were sold in conveniently located nearby gift shops. Since the factories had helped underwrite the trip, travelers were not expected to buy anything but were asked to please listen politely. Despite his almost anaphylactic reaction to shopping, Neil found the presentations sufficiently interesting to fill his suitcase with a silk duvet, two silk scarves, a few jade carvings, and three freshwater pearl bracelets.
Though China was our only flash-sale trip, the experience was good enough for Neil and me to consider a nine-day Morocco trip ($1,929 LivingSocial price vs. $3,083) and an eight-day trip to Singapore and Angkor Wat ($1,999 each per LivingSocial vs. $3868). But work intervened.
Alas, while the China trip didn’t foster a love of Mandarin for Andy, it was helpful in another aspect. When they returned from China, we spiked Mandarin lessons once and for all—allowing us to budget that money for our next trip.
Hillary Chura blogs about money-saving tips for our Le$$er Parenting column. She lives on the Upper East Side with her husband and their two sons. For money-saving tips, follow her on Twitter @hillarychura.
