By the time you read this, Amanda and I will be on our way to Cape Cod. Of course, we’ve already scoured the web to find the free and cheap things to do while we’re there, but we also used another strategy that’s going to save us a significant amount of money.
Our dream was to be able to travel to Glacier National Park for vacation, but we were subject to the availability of a free room since we’re using Amanda’s employee benefits for our accommodations. We’re still in the busy season of travel and there’s limited inventory near Glacier, so we weren’t able to get anything near the park. We’re putting it on the top of our list to hopefully visit in the near future. While not getting Glacier was a bummer, we’re extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to travel to Cape Cod and can’t complain one bit.
Since it’s busy season, we didn’t know where there was an available room until 11 days before our stay began. There were a couple of options available to us and we decided to choose Cape Cod since the short-term notice made flying west extremely expensive.
Saving by Renting a Car
Airfare to the east coast was expensive as well, but not nearly as expensive as flying to San Francisco or or Lethbridge. Rather than pay for airfare, we decided to rent a car and road trip to Cape Cod. Not only will this save us a lot of money, but it will also provide us with much more flexibility to explore along the way as well. We’re planning on making a stop in New Haven on the way there, taking a day on the way back to explore Boston, and potentially exploring another city on our way back.
We would have rented a car anyways in Cape Cod, so we essentially saved the cost of airfare for each of us minus the difference that it takes us to drive to the east coast from home than what it would have cost to drive from Logan International Airport in Boston to Cape Cod. When I checked, it would have cost $352 per person to fly to Boston, $408 per person to fly to Providence, and $674 per person to fly directly into Cape Cod. All of those figures are before taxes and fees.
The average of 3 online “cost to drive” calculators that I used shows that it will cost $197.35 to drive to Cape Cod from Indy (round-trip) in the 2017 Toyota Camry that we rented and would cost $16.33 to drive to Cape Cod from Logan International (round-trip), which means that we’re spending $181.02 more by driving from Indy. However, we’re saving $704 by not flying.
Overall, that means that we’re saving $522.98 by driving rather than flying. Although I’m sure most people would go ahead and pay the extra money to fly, the savings are worth it to me, even when considering the inconvenience factor.
Saving When Booking the Rental Car
As a side note, I used a discount travel site to book the rental car (Priceline), got additional cash back through the Ebates browser plugin, and booked the reservation with my travel credit card which accumulates miles and provides rental car insurance in addition to my personal auto insurance coverage. That’s three levels of savings compared to going directly to the first rental car company that you can think of and booking directly through them.
If we were smart, we’d not spend the money that we saved by driving rather than flying on something else. Although, a trip to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket is likely in store while we’re in Cape Cod.
