Tips to cut the cost while enjoying the trip

Cutting the cost doesn't have to sacrifice the quality of the trip! This San Diego/LA trip, we cut the cost and had a better quality trip than ever!

1. Hotel: I highly recommended Priceline.Com! It's such a fun website. If you got familiar with how to use it, you may get very good deal....I couldn't believe that we had stayed at a 4-star hotel with $63 one night!

I have to introduce our hotel rooms because they were unbelievably good:

7/19: Ayres Hotels & Spa Mission Viejo ($72)

2 Queen beds, 2 flat screen TV, a separate family room, and good breakfast.

A short video for the room: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru7GwBePdN0

7/20: Courtyard By Marriott Old Town ($58)

Nothing very special about this room, so I didn't take the video clip. It's just a ordinary hotel. Clean, nice, but no "high quality" surprises.

7/21: Omni San Diego ($63)

It's a 4 star hotel, and has a high class bathroom. 有video 有真相：http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNFildzzHNg

The weak points for the last 2 hotels were that they didn't have breakfast and free indoor parking. We had to find a street parking for the Courtyard hotel, and find a parking lot ($8 per night) for Omni. If we want to park indoor in their parking lot: $30 per night! Can you believe it???價格真是“高級”啊！In Omni Hotel, Stephen said that he saw people wearing formal clothes, and even 10 year old boy wore formally. 我們穿著短褲拖鞋，也照樣去享受了一晚！

2. Meals:

We didn't eat in the hotel room. our first night was in Mission Viejo, a brand new area, and even the hotel was 2 month old. There are toll stations around the area, so within few miles of distance, we paid around $5 for tolls. There's no lunch or dinner served inside the hotel, so we walked to the little mall nearby. Most of the restaurants are pizza, sandwiches..., and we didn't like them, so we went to "VONs" (Safeway in Northern CA) to get some frozen dinner. Each person could choose one or two items that they liked, and everyone was very happy and enjoyed the dinner.

Likewise, the second and third hotels didn't have free breakfast, and breakfast would cost $12 per person, so we got driving direction and bought different buns and soy drink from Ranch 99 for day 4 and bought cupcakes, muffins and milk from nearby store for day 5.

3. Admission Tickets:

Getty Center is free with $15 parking fee, but Legoland and Sea World are about $65 for adult and $55 for children over 2. I got a Legoland "buy one get one free" coupon from a friend and got a SeaWorld "Adult for kids price, kids 1/2 price" coupon from another friend. Also, I got information about discount tickets sites and Stephen's company also sells discount tickets (about $15 off). There are many ways to save money if you are willing to look for it!

Out of all the different strategies, I thought that "buy one get one free" coupon worked the best. Therefore, I went to Ebay to find more "buy one get one free" coupons for both parks. I spent $1.50 to get another buy one get one free coupon for Legoland, and we ended up paying only $120 Legoland park admission in total ($65+$55+0+0). I spent $3.50 to get "buy one adult get one kid free" code for SeaWorld online purchase, and paid $130 in total ($65+$65+0+0) for SeaWorld.

Hope our experience can help you in terms of planning for your next vacation!