January Travel, CES, Affiliate Summit, Izea Insider Fun Stuff

December 11th, 2008

CES 2009

This evening I’ve been working on booking my travel arrangements headed out to Las Vegas in January. I’m going to be attending CES two thousand and nine as well as affiliate Summit West two thousand nine. These are back to back tradeshow conferences and I’m very excited to have out and see both of them. This’ll be my fourth year covering CES, and I’ve had my press pass for several weeks now.

Affiliate Summit West 2009

This will be my first time covering Affiliate Summit, and I just confirmed my press pass for Affiliate Summit today. I’ll be covering Affiliate Summit on Top10Tech.com and several other sites.

Secret Event in Vegas

I am also working on trying to get coverage for another event that happens in between these two trade shows. I’ll have more on that one later if the pass comes through.

Big Dummy Can’t Book Trips

So anyway I made a bit of a travel booking snafu tonight. I was looking at travel rates on Expedia, and saw a hotel offer for the Wynn Las Vegas. As a special rate for the hotel, and it appeared to be a rate that would essentially allow me to stay at the Wynn for six hundred dollars from January 6 through the thirteenth. That seemed downright amazing.

Little did I realize, until it was too late and I told everybody in the world I found this amazing rate for the Wynn, that Expedia had temporarily change my travel profile from one person to two people. So this great rate that was looking at was actually the price per person for two people to stay at the Wynn.

That’s right, it would actually cost twelve hundred dollars. That’s still a pretty good rate for the Wynn, but way above the travel budget that I feel comfortable with. Hey what can I say I’m pretty cheap when it comes to traveling. I’ve stayed in some of the nicest hotels of the world and I stay in some of the crappiest hotels in the world. Hell I even lived in a tent city in the desert, and for that matter slipped in the desert with no attempt at all. At the end of the day I can sleep about the same anywhere as long as it’s warm. Paying an extra eight hundred dollars doesn’t necessarily make me sleep any better.

So I’m still in for the final hotel booking, I will be booking my flight using frequent flier miles(Update ended up getting round trip flight for 25k miles).

This is going to be a big travel year for me, and I kind of want to use up my frequent flyer miles before they maybe disappear or something if the economy gets worse.

Since I am going to CES so early, the press events start two days before the actual CES, I’m actually eligible to use frequent flyer miles for the first time. Typically, it’s not possible to use frequent flyer miles when you go to CES, as there are so many people trying to fly to Vegas for that conference.

In the meantime, I’m expecting a very cool FedEx to arrive tomorrow from Izea. I’ll have more on that as soon as it comes, but the Izea Insider program seems to be getting started just a little bit early! That is cool by me. We’ve been doing a lot of organization behind the scenes so far, and I am definitely ready to do some fun stuff.

With that in mind, some of that fun stuff starts tomorrow!