Our family raves about Costco vacations.

I hadn’t thought about it before, so I decided to check it out.

At first I considered popular US destinations like Disneyworld, then thought “no, let’s choose somewhere we love – Paris!”

“You and Paris again!”

“Pardon'”….

The Costco vacations for Paris were really geared toward first-time visitors-4 star hotels, centrally located.

We know that seeing Paris is all about staying on the outskirts in a 3 star hotel, because you don’t go to Paris to hang out in your hotel. It’s all about “stash and crash”; just having a place to stash your stuff and having a bed to crash. You take the Metro everywhere, walk everywhere, and hang out at cafes.

I loved the ease of booking with Costco: in a matter of seconds, you could easily find a package.

The Orbitz app also was fairly straight forward once I got away from my WiFi.

Criteria:
*Nonstop flight
*Three star hotel
*2 weeks

Comparible cost:
Costco:$5320.63
Orbitz:$5114.53

Now, what if we cobbled together what we would normally use (Orbitz) plus a place we knew about (Latin Quarter)?

Air France Direct Economy for 2
$3611.92
$1950 Euros= $2119.15
$5731.07

Yeesh. Much higher!

The winner in this case is Orbitz.

What about booking via Ebates and Orbitz?
$3868.88
minus 8% cash back

$3559.36 for 2, nonstop flight and hotel.
BAM!

Costco via Ebates was not available.

This is is just a single example.

Perhaps there ARE great packages on costcotravel.com.

Have you found one? I would love to hear about it 🙂