About two weeks before every big trip, our movie nights change. Whatever we were watching gets bumped, and we watch something set wherever we’re going. The girls used to roll their eyes at it, but then my oldest spent an afternoon at the Acropolis narrating Greek mythology to the rest of us because of a […]

Travel Keeper Pro is $39 a year and it adds fourteen things to an app that already does the whole job for free. Screenshot import, calendar view, spending breakdowns, sync across your devices, planning together with your partner, packing list templates, PDF export, and more. Everything free today stays free forever. Pro only ever adds. […]

Custom trip planning comes in two forms. Full trip planning means I research, design, and book your trip. Award trip planning means I map out how to use your points and hand you exact instructions on how, where, when to book, so you can do the booking inside your own accounts. Fees start at $250 […]

Set up sync on the device that already has your trips first. That device creates your 12-word recovery phrase. Then go to your second device, sign in with the same email, and enter those same 12 words. This is a Travel Keeper Pro feature and you will have to subscribe to Pro to activate it. […]

Last updated: September 2026. Competitor features and pricing change often, so I’ll keep this post current to the best of my knowledge. The short version TripIt is really good at organizing plans you’ve already booked. Forward it a confirmation and it builds you a clean, reliable itinerary. It’s been around forever and it does that job […]

My kids are out of school for four windows a year. Presidents week in February. A week around Easter. New Year’s. And July and August. Every one of those is a peak cruise week. Every single one. So I stopped trying to find a cheap week, because there isn’t one on my calendar. Here’s what […]

Pick one place, put everything in it, and make sure the other people on the trip can see it. That’s my entire trip planning strategy in one sentence. I ran our family’s travel out of a spreadsheet and a Google Doc for over a decade. It worked, but it wasn’t very organized and didn’t do […]

These are the questions that come into my DMs and inbox over and over. I’ve split them into two parts: how cruise pricing and booking actually work, and how working with me specifically works. If your question isn’t here, send it to me and I’ll add it. Part 1: How Disney cruise pricing works What’s […]

You pay the same fare whether you book a cruise yourself or book it through a travel advisor. The cruise line pays the advisor a commission out of that fare either way. If you book direct, the cruise line simply keeps that portion. So the question isn’t whether an advisor costs you money. It’s whether […]

We built our 17-day route around one thing that had nothing to do with logistics: which kid needed which Disney castle. That sounds ridiculous for an international itinerary, but it produced the smoothest long trip we’ve ever taken with our three kids. Singapore first, then Hong Kong, then Shanghai, then Beijing. Fun at the front, […]