What process do you use when choosing an international travel destination? Baby E is almost three months old, and she finally has a passport! I even ordered her the version with extra pages even though it will only be valid for five years. Wishful thinking, no doubt. At any rate, it’s time to start getting some stamps in that sucker!
Last month we took her on a short trial trip to Puerto Rico. There were two main reasons why we chose that destination – we could reach it on Southwest Airlines, and we could visit without passports. Now that she has her travel docs, we are dealing with a significantly longer list of potential destinations. In this post I’ll explain the process that I went through to eventually select Curaçao for our baby’s first international trip.
Criteria when Choosing an International Destination:
While we could technically go almost anywhere in the world, certain criteria came into play when narrowing down baby E’s first international destination.
Limited Flight Time
Aside from getting stranded in Orlando on our way home, everything about our Puerto Rico trip went pretty well. In fact, Baby E was an absolute angel on her first round of flights. Still, we don’t want to get too ambitious. One of my big worries is that she’ll have a meltdown on a plane, and we’ll end up ruining the travel experience of everyone around us. I know that it’s bound to happen one day, but for now I’m sticking with individual flights of under four hours to reduce everyone’s exposure. Based on that criteria, I was geographically limited to destinations in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. Technically Canada also meets this criteria, but we only looked south.
One-Stop Itineraries
Because we fly out of Nashville, we are pretty limited in terms of international destinations that can be reached without a layover. Sarah and I once subjected ourselves to a 35 hour journey involving five stops on four planes in order to get home from Pohnpei, Micronesia. It was hell. Since we’re traveling with an infant we decided to limit ourselves to one-stop itineraries. That scratched several out of the way destinations off my list.
Add to the Country Count
I have a bit of an obsession with visiting new countries. It has been nearly half a year since I’ve been somewhere new, since Sarah (sensibly) didn’t want to leave the country in her last couple months of pregnancy. Naturally, by this point I am itching to check something off the list.
The problem is that I have already visited a lot of the easily accessible destinations out there. That includes Mexico (several times) and every country in Central America besides El Salvador (which doesn’t sound like the best place to take an infant at the moment.) That effectively limited my search to Caribbean islands when choosing an international destination for this trip.
Award Flight Availability
This is a big one. You see, Sarah and I, quite understandably, do not like to pay money for our flights. Over the years I have been using credit cards to amass a healthy balance of frequent flyer miles and convertible bank points. This has allowed us to save tens of thousands of dollars on our vacations and we aren’t about to stop now just because we have a baby. There are a lot of different options when it comes to booking an award flight out of Nashville, but for the Caribbean the two front runners in terms of routes, ease of booking, and our stockpile of points are Southwest and American.
Affordable Accommodation
The plane ticket is only a part of the overall cost of a vacation. A lot of Caribbean destinations can wreck a budget due to high accommodation and restaurant prices. As a rule of thumb, we try to avoid spending more than $100 per night on accommodation and select places with their own kitchens whenever possible in order to cut our dining expenses. These extra costs are important to consider when choosing an international travel destination.
Working through the Options
With those criteria in mind, it was time to figure out the optimal destination for baby E’s first international trip. It should come as no surprise that I started this process back in December, before E was even born.
Destinations Served by Southwest Airlines
I began my search with Southwest because they don’t charge cancelation fees. I didn’t know what to expect when it came to parenting an infant, nor did I know what my job might throw at me five months down the line so flexibility was key. As an added bonus, we have a Southwest Companion Pass so our flights are effectively buy one, get one free when flying Southwest.
Unfortunately, Southwest only serves 13 international destinations. I have already been to many of them, but the Turks and Caicos, Aruba and Los Cabos all stuck out as contenders. My analysis was as follows:
- Turks and Caicos looks beautiful and has a laid back tourist vibe. However, I decided to scratch it from the list due to accommodation prices. Even four months in advance, almost everything was over $250 a night, and they all had strict cancelation policies.
- Aruba has more budget accommodation availability, but try as I might, I just couldn’t get excited about it. Sure, there are nice beaches, but I have absolutely no interest in high rise resorts, Hard Rock Cafes, butterfly farms, casinos or outlet malls.
- Los Cabos stands out as the most appealing destination. Not Los Cabos itself, mind you, but the greater province of Baja California Sur. The only issue is that, while we haven’t been to Baja California before, we have been to Mexico many times. So it’s not a new country to check off the list.
Because of their generous cancelation policy, I decided to book a cheap flight to Los Cabos at the end of April and another to Aruba the next week. I knew I would cancel at least one of those trips, maybe both. For the time being they would be placeholders while I looked for a more exciting option.
Destinations Served by American Airlines
American Airlines is really the top dog in terms of the number of Caribbean destinations that they serve from the US. The downside is that many of American’s cheaper “Saver” award itineraries require staying overnight in Miami. It’s stupid. They also charge non-elite status flyers to cancel or change a flight. With that said, we are sitting on a lot of AAdvantage miles at the moment due to a credit card signup bonus that I got last summer.
In my initial search of American destinations, several appealing islands stood out including Barbados, Curaçao, Grenada and Trinidad. Each and every one was more appealing than the Southwest options, but because of the cancelation fees, I wanted to wait until after our Puerto Rico trip to book anything. The reason I waited was both because I wanted to do the trial trip with baby E and because there was a potential work event scheduled around the time of our trip.
By the time I received confirmation of the date of my work event, only Curaçao and Grenada remained viable options with convenient saver level availability on the dates we wanted. The other destinations either required sky high point expenditures or an overnight stay in Miami. I did further research and decided on Grenada, but I held off on booking. I wanted to get approval to take off work before committing. I also love to procrastinate. The next day the Grenada return flight fell off the table. If we were flying American, then it had to be Curaçao.
Deciding on Destination Curaçao
The great news is that Curaçao looks like an amazing destination. It is located right off the coast of Venezuela and forms part of the Dutch “ABC Islands” along with Aruba and Bonaire. Willemstad, the nearly 400-year-old capital, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was historically the most important city in the Dutch Caribbean. In addition to its lengthy history, Curaçao also has dozens of beautiful beaches and very few resorts. Perhaps because it is the shoulder season, rental car rates are low and entire apartments are available on AirBnB for under $50 a night.
Since it is a Constituent Country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, I also feel comfortable adding it to my country count. Compared to Aruba, which could also go toward the country count, it is less expensive, has prettier landscapes, boasts a more robust culture and seems to be less marred by mass tourism. The tickets were still available on the eve of our Puerto Rico flight for only 27,500 AAdvantage miles each. It looks like Curaçao for the win!
Booking the Trip with American Airlines
I had two pleasant surprises when booking the award trip with American Airlines. The first was that American will hold your reservation for up to five days for free. That allowed me to lock in the tickets at their low saver price before our Puerto Rico trip, get my vacation request approved at work the next day, and then commit to the flight the night we returned from our mini-vacation. This is a great feature!
The second surprise came when I called to add baby E as a lap infant to our reservation. While it’s free to add lap infants on domestic flights, the official line with American and most other airlines is that you need to pay taxes, fees, and 10% of the current adult fare to add a lap infant to an international flight. I expected to be charged around $120 to add the kid. When I called, though, I was informed that the charge would only be $16.73. I did a little googling, and it seems that American only charges taxes to add lap infants for some Caribbean destinations. I couldn’t find a list of which destinations fall under this policy, but I’m happy to report that Curaçao appears to be one of them. Hurrah!
Final Thoughts
Overall, I had a lot of fun choosing an international destination and planning the logistics for our first trip outside of the US with baby E. I enjoy planning trips, even if I don’t end up taking them right away. For this project I basically got to plan seven different trips, to varying degrees of complexity. By locking in a couple refundable Southwest itineraries early on, I removed some stress while allowing the flexibility to remain open to better options. If none of the American Airlines destinations worked out, we had two decent fallbacks.
As soon as the Curaçao flights were put on hold, I reserved an inexpensive rental car. Sarah got to work booking accommodation five days later when we pulled the trigger and ordered the tickets. This time around we went with non-refundable reservations because they were priced at a lower rate, and we were close enough to the departure date to feel pretty confident that the trip would happen. At some point in the past couple weeks, we also canceled our Southwest trips and got those points refunded.
We are going to split our time over the next week between a hotel in the center of Willemstad and a cottage in the countryside. Be on the lookout for a series of trip reports in the coming days.