THE BUDGET QUEEN IS BACK!
by Amanda Stuart-Heaney
Welcome back to "Room for Improvement", my series of
articles on budget interior design for your home! I hope you had a great summer and got
some sun - most likely in another country. Thats what my article this week is all
about - as I had a very budget holiday and did some very budget shopping in Florida, and I
wanted to share my money saving experiences with my readers.
It all started with a cruise - my husband and I decided to spoil
ourselves and take a Caribbean cruise. We went to a local travel agent and got a price of
£2200 per person for one week, with airfare an additional £500.
Well, after I recovered from the heart attack, I went on to the
Internet. I located the Alta Vista Search Engine, typed in discount cruises, and found
"Abigail Best", a cruise specialist based in Long Island, New York.
For a price of £700 (she listed it as $1,000), she offered the
exact same cruise - same dates, category of cabin - everything. Of course, the air fare
was extra, but even with the airfare, we paid £1,200 per person, not £2,700 if we had
purchased it in Ireland. We saved - per person - £1,500 each - not bad
for just punching in a few words onto the Net.
If you are interested in taking a cruise, the website address for
Abigail Best is http://www.abigailbest.com. What you
will see is a listing of cruise lines. You simply select one in which you are interested,
click your mouse, and a listing will come up of special prices for particular ships, dates
and itineraries. What you can do, before you click on to Abigail Best, is to look up the
home pages of all the cruise lines, select the one for you and then go to Abigail to find
the best price. We took the Celebrity Century for one week to the Western Caribbean. You
really learn about what good service is supposed to be, which might spoil you for when you
return to Ireland and try to get waited on in a local restaurant!
Published on Sept. 10th in the Connacht
Tribune, distributed in Co. Galway, Ireland
and the newspaper has the largest circulation of all regional papers in
Ireland.
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