Over the last few weeks we've been researching information for our extended family to attend a family reunion in Florida.  In the past, we have often hosted the bi-annual event in South Carolina; however, this year our family in Florida wanted to do the honors.  There's only been a few times that we have massively travelled together as a group and with only a few months to prepare, it has proven to be challenging to find affordable transportation and lodging.  This is not to say it can not be done. What has proven difficult is planning for persons with different financial means and family sizes.  With just the two of us, no husbands or kids in tow, it's easy to plan.  We look at time versus costs, and depending on which is priority, that's the route we went with.  Sometimes we paid costly because we didn't have the time; and other times we slowed the pace, and paid inexpensively.  Other times, we planned accordingly, and was able to find a way to travel inexpensively and have a lot of free time.  One thing that has helped us both have been maintaining a travel account.  We both deposit into our seperate accounts monthly, and sometimes twice a month. This is even more important this year of 2017 when we have not only one, but two family reunions to attend, as well as a Las Vegas getaway with our parents and other family members. Traveling with family was the start of love affair with travel, and continues to be an adventurous time that we look forward to year after year.

How do you handle family travel?

As the New Year would have it, we experienced a first...we flew standby.  I often thought of standby when a person uses a buddy pass.  It can also be used when you want to catch an earlier flight to the same destination or even upgrade to a higher seat class.  We had an unfortunate experience of a cancelled flight with an airline.  They had  no departing flights for another two days. Umm....we have work in the morning.  So we had to bite the bullet and fly not only out of another airport in another city (and the expense to get there...Thank you Uber), but dealing with another airline.  Not the most inexpensive option but neither of us wanted to drive back home (or call out another day of work).  So we paid the price, and the upcharge of standby to get home earlier because the flight was super late.  All we could think about was that we had no food at home or lunch to eat for the week.  We were blessed to get onto the flight for the first standby, but had to endure a string of missed standby's during our layover because they only had room for one of us.  Once we were under way all was well, but we had a mad rush to a nearby WalMart to grab a few items before they locked the doors.  I think we got in at 11:55pm, and they closed the doors at midnight. Whew....all is right in the world.

Have you ever flown standby?