Scott Keyes

Covid-19 changed travel for a lot of us, and Take More Vacations was a great mental break from the “rona effect” and self-imposed moratorium on travel for the time being. In non-pandemic life, I’m totally the hyper-planner who has a short-list of all the vacations I want to take for the next five years–okay, who am I kidding? I’m still that person, pandemic or not! So, I loved how the book got my creative travel-planning juices flowing again. I could live vicariously through the show more book examples until my life gets back to full vacation-planning mode.

The book primarily focuses on best practices to stretch your dollar and, indeed, take more vacations. It busts myths about when to buy airfare, provides an overview/history of aviation and how flights (and pricing) have changed over time, and challenges the reader to think outside the box as they plan vacation. I’ll also say, yeah, as Scott is the founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights–yeah, there’s a fair bit of website name-dropping, and real-life examples of peeps who used his site/tactics to score deals. But hey, I mean … the success speaks for itself, and there’s nothing like a) stories, and b) true stories at that, to illustrate the point.

I was frankly surprised that Take More Vacations barely addressed the pandemic. On the one hand, that was really nice, almost like I could forget about it for a while. On the same token, it read as though the pandemic really hadn’t changed anything, when it certainly has in the short term–at least temporary moratoriums (moratoria? IDK, and yet, I’ve also used the word twice in this blog post, soooo there’s that) on change fees (some airlines have even eliminated them permanently, or so they say now, and I love it). We’ll see how “permanent” some of these changes are–and maybe that’s why Keyes wrote as though they didn’t exist.

Keyes does spend a chapter exploring overtourism and emissions. While he and I may not see eye to eye on climate, etc., I still appreciate his insight, particularly his examination of how effective (or not) airlines’s offers of emissions offsets actually are.

I received an eARC of the book from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. show less

An information book that explains strategies to find low priced airfare. The author makes a good case for taking more frequent vacations (E.g. if you have 3 weeks of vacation time, then research suggests it is better for happiness to take 3 x 1 week vacations instead one big one). I also liked the explanation regarding why airlines are able to consistently offer low priced plane tickets (e.g. competition, alternative revenue sources etc).

Two limitations to keep in mind with this book. show more First, the book focuses on airplane tickets above all so do not expect much of a discussion about planning other aspects of travel like hotels. This omission is understandable given the author's experience but I found it was a bit misleading (plane tickets are often not the largest cost component of an international trip). Second, the book strongly focuses on American travelers and their situation. So if you are outside of the US, certain aspects of this book will be less directly useful.

That all said, this is one of the most immediately useful travel books I've ever read. In particular, the idea of taking a "plane ticket first" approach to finding cheap plane tickets is quite creative! For example, if you happen across a cheap air fare to Italy or Croatia, why not go there even if you were initially planning to go somewhere else? show less

I thought this book would be tips for cheaper travel through flights, car rentals and hotels. Nope just flights and I had to stop reading it because it was just repeating itself over and over.

For the rest of the review, visit my Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/BnlM3NhrXzI

Enjoy!