My last post talked about how we decide where we are going to travel. Actually, it talked more about the lack of thought that goes into any of our trips. But the husband reminded me of another great resource we use when we wrote about our trip to Ecuador in the blog that he maintains (insert shameless plug for Odd Travels!! ) so I thought I would expand more, especially because we get this question a lot:

Do you do where you want to go or do you follow the deals?

The answer is both, although, to be honest, we mostly follow the deals. As I mentioned in my last post, there aren’t many places we won’t visit so the options are pretty limitless. So, what happens when we have vacation time but haven’t found a deal that works? Well, that’s when we turn to Google Flights. If you aren’t familiar with Google Flights yet, I could not be more excited to make the introduction!

If you have a destination in mind, you can use this site to search for flights. But where Google Flights REALLY shines is when you have no idea where you want to go. It basically opens up the whole world, which I think is pretty dang cool.

So how does it work? You put in your starting point, you add your dates (or you can choose a more flexible period of time to search), and then, the BEST PART: YOU PUT IN YOUR PRICE RANGE. See, I get excited just thinking about it. If you are dying to get out of town but have limited funds, give this tool a try!

Let’s try a real life example. Just for fun, let’s see where our family can go over Thanksgiving. I mean, we have 2.5 free days of vacation and an extended family that loves to travel.

Oh look!

We can go to Barcelona over Thanksgiving for $345 per person. I think that you now know where you will find us eating our Thanksgiving meal.

Google flights is amazing for those times where the travel deals just don’t line up with the dates you want to escape your traditional life. It’s even fun to play around with when you need to daydream for a bit.