MSU Extension 4-H Adulting 101

Welcome, everyone to our Oh! it's June! June Adulting 101. Today, we have Traveling on a Budget with Andy Northrop. This is a brand new session, so we're super excited. You decided to join us. I am going to turn it over to Andy. But before I do, I also want to introduce Mandalynn, who is our ASL interpreter. If you are in need of this service, you can just put her screen right in front so you can see the language, and then I'll turn it over to Andy. Thank you, Mandalynn for being here today. All right, great. Thanks, Kathy. Presume everything is in Everything Everything's correct. Presentation mode. So thanks for being here everybody tonight. This is as Kathy said, first time we're offering this. Program as part of the Adulting 101 series, Traveling on a Budget. I'm Andy Northrop. I do work for MSU Extension. If you're not familiar with Michigan State University Extension, our mission there is to help people improve their lives. through an educational process that applies knowledge to critical issues, needs and opportunities. So I presume you all are either having a critical challenge with budgeting for travel or you're needed to budget or you have an opportunity or all of the three. So good program here tonight, just to let everybody know that our programs are open to all we're federally funded through the United States Department of Agriculture, and we are an equal opportunity employer affirmative action. So I work with MSU Extension. I do a lot of work in tourism, mostly with communities and local units of government, but also in my personal life have spent more than two decades traveling in and out of the country and living almost 12 of those last 20 years or so, 25 years in other countries. So this is personal as well as a professional topic for me. I guess we need to know a little bit about you and if you're over the age of 18, please scan the QR code on the right, and if you're under the age of 17 and under, please scan the QR code on the right, me on the 18 plus on the left. This is for us to collect demographic information, and I believe Kathy's going to put those hyper links on the chat so we can move forward. Might take people a few minutes to get their phones out to scan those. You can put those in the chat, right Kathy? Yeah, I'm trying to, and it's acting up. So I'm trying to do that. Let me try again. Maybe do one at a time. I give it another second here. We're going to use the full hour tonight. Lots to cover when traveling on a budget. I'm going to press ahead here so we can stick with the time. We're going to talk a little bit about trends and statistics. Don't let that bore you. Then we're going to dive specifically into budgets, planning, location, transportation, accommodation, and things to do. We're going to talk a little bit at the end about sustainable travel, which is becoming more and more important for a lot of different generations, including mine and younger. Then we're going to talk a bit about behavioral decision making very briefly and then a couple of tips that I have for traveling on a budget. So lots of ground to cover. You have to forgive me. I'm coming down with or I have come down with a pretty nasty cold, so I will have to unmute and mute on and off to clear my throat. I'm also going to turn my camera off too to save some bandwidth now that you know what I look like, but Mandalynn will keep hers on. Just a real big picture here of how important the travel industry and traveling is for the United States. Tonight's webinar is really in an American context. We're not going to cover international travel. That's a whole another budgeting process. Clearly most likely more expensive, although perhaps going to Canada, maybe not, but leaving the continent would increase that and add a whole new layer of things to consider. But the general theme tonight is just traveling and that will apply in an international context, should you be planning to go abroad for any reason in the near future. But as you can see in 2023, travel supported more than 15 million American workers and directly employed 8 million. As of early 2024, there's still more than 1 million job openings. That probably hasn't shifted that much. If you're into the travel and tourism industry, there may be a career path for you there. This is big business for the country, for states, for counties, for local units of government, I'm happy that a lot of you are here tonight to learn about how to budget for it and be prepared. First, we're going to cover budgets and costs of travel. Having looked at some national statistics, we're going to look at some average costs and unexpected costs. But before we dive into those exactly, I'm just curious and I won't be able to review everybody's response here. But something for you to think about and for me to know a little bit more is, what are you currently budgeting for when it comes to travel? If you're about to take your first trip or your hundredth trip, and you're trying to figure out exactly what to budget. What are you thinking you have to work with given at the moment? I see some folks have more than 1,000 1,000 plus, 500 to 1,000. 500 or less, probably going to be all across the board. Looks like quite a few thousands. Travel is not cheap, but there's ways to do it cheap. As Katie Cook says, depends on location, we're going to cover that right away. So you have, the more you can do. Then the less you have pushes people to be all the more creative in what they do typically. So a next question, what do you think is the average cost for an individual three day vacation? And this includes flight, accommodation, car rental, and meals. What do you think is the average cost for an individual three day vacation? I'm seeing C,C,C, A,C,C, overs. It looks like we have some folks familiar with the cost of travel here. The correct response is $1389 for a three day vacation, and of course, there's going to be ways to reduce that, and of course, there's ways that you can exceed that too. But since we're here to talk about traveling on a budget, we're going to talk about ways to stay within that range or less. I'm going to use these figures for the evening tonight. These are from Forbes advisor. They are 2023 numbers, and we're halfway through the year for 2024, so they may have shifted slightly, but this is a good framework to work from. You can see a domestic round trip is roughly $427, five nights at mid range hotel, $500 3 day car rental, upwards of 150, three days of restaurant meals, which is almost $315. So we're going to work with those numbers tonight. And we're going to talk about just those average costs and how to work around them and how to navigate some of the expenses and ways to cut corners, but also ways to be certain that that's what you have to work with. Without flight, though, this is important because not everybody's going to get on an airplane for their next vacation. We've got people from all over the country probably hailing from a lot of beautiful different locations or with intentions to go to locations without having to fly. Reducing that domestic economy flight. Again, domestic is the keyword. Excuse me( brief pause) $320 per day without a domestic flight. So planning, when to go and where. This is pretty important information. We have high seasons and low seasons, and then between those seasons are what's considered shoulder seasons. High seasons are typically June to August. Right now we're going to be entering high season here typically around June 15, which is ultimately when schools get out, Elementary schools, high schools, and so forth. Colleges are already out by May. Some of the high season has already started. Holidays, spring break are also part of high season. During this time of year, there's higher rates. The weather is fairly consistent. Of course depends where you go, but there's also more crowds, and of course that depends on where you go. Spring break and December, Christmas time typically is going to be when things are quite crowded, especially at spring break. The summertime, high season, that'll vary by location. Low season, May and September have traditionally been better times of years, the less expensive times to travel, if you're fortunate enough to be able to do that during those months. Lower rates exist. The weather is still good. Again, speaking just in the United States. By May, it's spring everywhere and by September, it's still pretty warm just about all over the country, and if it's not warm, then it's going to be super hot. Further south you get. But as mentioned earlier by one of the participants, where to go can ultimately impact when you go and both determine how much you spend. That sounds like a no brainer, but when you think about it, it does make a lot of sense. The where and the when ultimately dictates the how much. I want to share a little bit of information here at a national level. This is trends and travel coming from the World Travel and Tourism Council. If you look at the top graphs, the green graphs, relative importance of factors when deciding where to travel. These are results from Sky Scanner Survey, asking travelers to rank factors from most important to least important. So you can see at the top and you can read all the way to the bottom as well. What comes out on top for most important, the green graph going to the right is value for money, good value for money. The second is combined flight and hotel prices, weather at the destination, things to do at the destination, and then further down you go. You've got cheapest dates finding cheapest flights. Reviews of destinations, I'm surprised are towards the bottom there. But the least important, going all the way down to the bottom is trending destinations, bank holidays, how much of the carbon allowance someone has left, so that's a carbon footprint topic. These are things that are driving people's decisions where to travel. Value for moneys, ultimately, what we're here to discuss, budgets, costs. My question to the 67 people currently here tonight. Using these top four identified in this graph. I just cherry pick the top four. Put them here in a multiple choice answer A B C and D. What is the most important factor for you when deciding where to travel? Using those top four. I'm really interested in hearing what's going to drive folks here tonight. I'm seeing a lot of D but A's as well. Things to do. As, a couple of Bs. Some all of them. Right, Rachelle, I saw that one A, C, D and B. In that order, interesting. A, C, D, and B. Yeah. If I had to answer, Kathy, feel free to answer for me, it's ultimately, I think, at this point in my life, my 40s, letter D, things to do. And weather is obviously playing an important part. Ultimately, things cost money, no matter where you go. You have to eat, you have to stay and you have to have some form of transportation. How about you, Kathy? You know, A and D are important because I like a good deal always. You know, I'm just very frugal with my money. It's the American way. But D, because I can have fun no matter where I go. I just want to get the heck out of the cold when I go. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good. These obviously resonate with folks here tonight. And looking just back on that, some of the other ones that didn't make the top four cheapest dates, finding cheapest flights, reviews, places to go that aren't too busy, right? That's important as well. So moving forward. Location, where to go. The big question is that I always considers, do you let the location dictate your budget or your budget dictate your location? Again, it gets down to that when and how and where you go dictates when you go. You don't necessarily have to answer that question in the chat, but it's just kind of food for thought. Do you let the location dictate your budget or budget dictate your location? Depending on where you are in your life or in your career, you know, one of these is going to be more important than the other. If you're fortunate enough to have perhaps 1,000 plus money to budget with, your budget can ultimately tell you where you're allowed to go. But if you're just sold on the fact that, hey, I'm going to go to San Francisco for the week, and no matter what, I'm going to budget for it, I'm going to make it happen. So Determining your location first allows you to budget and plan accordingly to that location through planning and research. And again, as we've just mentioned, location is impacted by high and low seasons. So, looking at these numbers that I shared earlier from Forbes, as I said, we're going to continually revisit these as a baseline figure to work from. This will vary. Right? These are averages, domestic averages, but these will vary by location. Of course, they'll vary by accommodation, even if you rent a car or of course, where and how often and what you eat. All of this factors into it. So we're going to focus on transportation here, and I'm highlighting these two boxes to emphasize that transportation using this figure is $574.71. It's 41% of this budget, almost half. Which is surprising, but at the same time not surprising because in order to travel, travel involves motion and getting from A to B and back, of course. Unless you're walking to your destination, which some people might have the luxury of doing, you're ultimately going to have some significant costs around transportation. My question to the audience tonight, what might these figures relative to car rental and domestic round trip flights not include? What do you not see here. Even though it may be factored in, but I guess I'm asking you in general, what is it that this might not include relative to transportation? So we got some gas and tolls, baggage, insurance, luggage costs. Right. Nailed it! gas, tolls, insurance, baggage for sure. Now, that might be factored into these figures. I wasn't able to determine that, but I think for the sake of tonight's exercise, let's just assume that they're not factored in. The point of me presenting a slide to you is to get you to think beyond what those numbers say. Parking was another one mentioned. Yeah. So I put just to get the conversation going, I forgot to click the forward button, but parking, gas, right? So at the airport, could be parking at the hotel where you're staying. Could be parking at the downtown baseball stadium, could be parking at the farmers market. So there's highly doubted that parking is included in any car rental or domestic round trip flight. So point well made and looks like most of you picked up on that relatively quickly. Good job. Obviously, transportation is significant traveling costs. Right? We have driving. Let's just say driving to the airport, parking at the airport, flying, destination taxi or ride sharing service, Uber, Lift, those types of services or traditional taxi, parking fees. Then of course, driving home once you return. Just some ideas to reduce these costs and by no means are we limited to car pooling and hotel shuttles. But these are options that people explore and have to be quite creative with car pooling, takes a little bit more organizing hotel shuttles. If you do fly into airports, domestic airports, chances are your hotel will have a shuttle to it. But in years of experience of travel myself, sometimes when I was younger, it was easy to forget that this was something that I probably could have had access to for free. And hotels, in my opinion, don't do a super great job of letting you know that they have a free hotel shuttle. So be cognizant of that if you are new to traveling and you're staying somewhere relatively close to the airport if you fly in or you're flying out. Other strategies to reduce these costs. Anybody have a We did have a comment about public transportation can help. Yeah. Good job, Josephine. We're going to cover that a little bit later, but yeah, public transportation. Some cities have really exceptional public transportation and others not so much. Detroit is a city that lacks that from airport to city, I think that's changing this year, if not already. Be there's other options. We're going to get into some of those in a minute. But I want to explore rental versus personal car. Renting cars can be quite expensive, and of course, using your own can have the upside of reducing costs, and also that puts wear and tear on your car though, if you are using it for longer distances. Came across this website AAA has a free service. They allow the calculation of national average gas prices. These are roughly six weeks old. This figure was taken from April 24, but we're roughly around these numbers still, I think, maybe ten or $0.20 lower in Michigan. I was in California a month ago for a conference on Lake Tahoe and gas was 5.90. And then I drove into Northern California up to the mountains, and it was over $6.50 in Truckee, California, which is northwest of Lake Tahoe. So the folks on the west side of the country have it a lot different than the folks in the Midwest. Except Illinois for some reason. Yeah, Illinois. So I'm sharing this though as an exercise. Kathy's going to stick in the chat, this AAA gas cost calculator. I want everybody to explore this. Just take a minute. Click on that link, go to that website. Pick a domestic destination you want to visit by car. Your car, or any car. Let's say you plan to buy this car next month, you could calculate the cost that it is to use it. I'm just looking for an example or two. It could be anything. You driving from Chicago to Tampa, Detroit, to Traverse City, Duluth, Minnesota, to Phoenix, Arizona. This is a great tool for people to really break down exactly how much they're going to spend on gasoline, transportation, either renting or using their own automobile. (waiting) Brandon, I'm not sure how to answer your question. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I'm not sure what you're referring to when you ask that cover maintenance or just gasoline. But if you're talking about the gasoline calculator, this is just the price of gasoline. Certainly maintenance is ... Shawn tried Baltimore to Boston in the calculator with my car in one way is just under 40 bucks on 11.16 gallons. Does that sound about right, Shawn? AAA is pretty good. I want to challenge their tool here. It seems like it's pretty worth while to log that website reference it for the future. I know I will. I'll look for one more example. (unclear) Orlando, 131 74. That's a hike. Yeah. It's probably nine hour drive, maybe. Detroit to St. Louis, 107., Detroit to New Orleans, Kathy Jamieson, 287 bucks. This gets down to the pennies. That's right. Oh, round trip. What are you driving, Kathy? A Dodge Charger. Right might help to put in the type of car too. But anyway, people can fiddle around with this website. It's pretty useful. I thought it was quite good. Another benefit of this is, you know, if you're planning to buy a car and just for work and play and personal life, and you know that you're going to be using it for long distance driving, whether for work or play or whatnot. You can really factor and project how much you might be spending on an annual basis. With gasoline, although gasoline shifts in price, sometimes day to day, month to month, year to year. So that'll vary. Detroit to Grand Canyon was 463. All right. Okay. That's one tool you guys can log in your Firefox favorite websites, whatever. Let's move on forward to more transportation. This was mentioned earlier. Ride sharing services obviously are a popular thing and have been for a long time now, more in urban settings than in the rural settings, very convenient in cities. Urban locations, challenging in rural locations, limited to no access. In my experience, Lift used to have a strong footprint in rural areas, but that has changed for whatever reason. But it is easy to get from an urban location to a rural location using ride sharing services, but to get back from a rural location to the urban, which is where your airports are going to be or your car rental or whatever is pretty challenging. Be cognizant of that. Some rural areas, of course, you're going to have more services than others. But Michigan, for example, it's pretty limited outside of the urban areas. Mentioned earlier by one of our participants, public transportation, bus, rail, train, great ways to see destinations, very immersive, inexpensive, authentic, You get the feel of what it's like. Certainly take some planning and being aware of schedules and the frequency of buses and rail and train, sometimes those are late, and sometimes they're very late. Take that into account. But with a rental car or your own car, you may pay more, but you have full access to when you leave and when you go and come and so forth. That certainly has a value to it that we can often overlook. But irregular hours, longer distances, I'm sure there's other pros and cons to public transportation. Walking, of course, once you're at the location, the destination, it's going to be your cheapest form of transportation, probably your healthiest form. Again, immersive, and by walking, you're engaging in a slow travel allows you to acknowledge your surroundings more and perhaps explore some of the urban and rural environments on foot, local businesses and things like that, versus being in an automobile, you get in the car and you go from A to B and you miss a lot that you would normally get on foot. But lengthy, time consuming, for sure, challenging with really long distances, anything over a few miles. Some people would balk at even if we're walking a mile. Some people can put in 10 miles a day. Just depends on where you are in your personal health and your interests and trucking across cities and the time you have, and of course, the amount of money that you have. I see the costs are still coming in. So take these things into account here. I'm going to move to air transportation because we're already halfway through tonight. Air transportation, the prices differ by days, as we all know. Third party providers can have reduced rates. I often buy my tickets on cheap tickets. com, just an easy platform. It pays to be flexible. And what I mean by that is if you can wait a day or wait a week or go on a Monday and come back on a Friday versus Saturday to Saturday, you can save quite a bit of money. But then again, your trip is shortened, and you have to weigh the, the cost benefits of that. Spend a couple of extra $100 more and get to stay a little bit longer. Or not. Looking at the same figures, we're going to move on to accommodation. And according to these figures, 36% of your budget will go to accommodation. Of course, there's cheaper places to stay. And of course, there is 1,000,001 other more ways to spend more than that. So we're going to explore accommodation. But again, like transportation, it is a little bit more than a third of your budget. Unless, of course, you're staying with friends or family or you're camping. All of these types of things will factor into it. But sticking with hotels for now, budget hotels average around $93 mid range around $170, luxury, $400 plus. Prices will, of course vary by location, by city. By season, the time of year, and the level of luxury that you seek, the amenities that you prefer. I know in my 20s, I traveled all over the world and slept in bamboo huts and places a lot of people would cringe at as somebody just traveling with a backpack and so forth. Now as in my 40s, I prefer a mid range hotel that I'm going to have consistency and know what to expect. Accommodations, they're going to have security and front desks support Usually good amenities, certainly at the mid range plus. Mid range would be like a Holiday Inn or maybe a Best Western or maybe a Marriott. And those often have really good breakfastes. So you can save one meal by eating at the hotel or eating late or grabbing a few extra apples in the bowl, there bananas or nut bars, and maybe even skipping lunch and saving out, paying for meals in a restaurant if you're looking to be quite frugal, and you don't care so much about what you eat. But breakfast or other snacks, often included, you know, mid range plus check the reservations though, because you shouldn't assume that all of that stuff in particular breakfast is provided. Been burned a couple of times, probably like Kathy and others on this call, thinking that it's provided and it's not, but just read the fine print. Point systems to, you stay at the mid range or luxury hotels. They have point systems, and if you do a lot of traveling, these can accrue and really become quite beneficial after a couple of years or a few years depending on how often you travel. We were fortunate enough to have four nights free stay at a resort in Southern Thailand earlier this winter and with the Holiday Inn over collecting points for about seven years. It pays off, if your patient, I do want to walk through, something that I call "wait a minute" charges. Take a minute and look at this receipt. This is from Harvey's Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino. It's from a stay. I had, for myself. I was there in early May, May 5, 6, 7, and a couple of extra other nights for a conference. I'm sharing this because it has something, as I said, I call "wait a minute" charges. Sometimes these can be a surprise. In particular, county tax, There's always state taxes usually on hotels, but sometimes people are hit with a county tax. Usually, those are pretty common and more stronger tourism destinations. In this particular receipt, there was also a resort fee of $22.80. Certainly not complaining here. I'm just pointing out that a hotel charge may say one thing, and when you get your bill or you begin inquiring or probing a bit further, you may find out that there's additional taxes. And you may even get hit with a parking fee as well if you have your own car or rental car. Be wary of these, these hidden fees, if you will. "Wait a minute" charges. They may vary from state to state. Short term rentals. Such as Air Bnb or VRBO verbos. Obviously, these have swept the world in terms of interest and popularity for goodness, almost two decades now. 15 years or so. They've really taken off and as a result, they've created some contention as well around the world, but they're here to stay, and they offer a whole new type of experience. Just in a nutshell, they might offer what I would say, more bang for your buck. You essentially get a house or an apartment, you have access to kitchens, people's homes, cooking pans, therefore, you can make your own meals. This can reduce costs, help maintain certain diets if people are on them. The location of these facilities. Again, these are if you're not familiar with these, these are homes, apartments, studio apartments, condos, mansions, and various locations, and oftentimes these can be even more convenient locations than your traditional hotel. There's privacy unique. They're quite authentic experiences. You get to live essentially and an accommodation for X number of days. For the communities that are prepared for these, you have the option of supporting communities that have an occupancy tax. I'll talk about that in a moment. Bad side to some of these is that there's sometimes a minimum night day policy, especially in the peak season. Sometimes two nights. Sometimes the bigger accommodations, homes or mansions and coastal houses and stuff may require five nights. Sometimes back in the day, I used to use a lot of AirBNB. I don't so much anymore. The cancellation policies, if you don't read those before booking can be quite challenging or problematic. There are various cancellation policies where typically in a hotel, the hotel will just have they need a 24 hour cancellation policy or 48 hours before check in, and that's pretty standard, although you want to review those too. But sometimes these cancellation policies or short term rentals, there can be four or five different policies. Everything from the moment you book it, you have 24 hours to cancel it for a full refund, which if you book it six months in advance, plans can change four months before you leave and you could very well lose your deposit. Another downside to these in my opinion is they lack security and support. There's no front desk, essentially. If you forget your razor, there's nobody to call. If you run out of coffee, there's nobody to call. If you have a security issue, you're pretty much on your own, although I suppose the police would be fill that void. There are cleaning fees, hidden fees, occupancy taxes here. I'm going to walk through a demonstration I'm just going to briefly walk through a reservation using one of the short term rental platforms. So if you click on, you'll see in the video, AirBnB service fee. They do a good job of breaking these down. This helps AirBNB run the platform and offer services like 24/7 support. I'm not sure what that support is other than may not having maybe enough towels or something. I don't know. The recording here then goes on to show the taxes that are collected. So taxes on accommodation, such as occupancy tax, vat tax, which is a tourism tax or GST could include tourism fees, sales use, tax use. They break it down for you here and allow you to learn more as you make your reservation. Interesting thing about short term rentals. You can pay everything up front now, or as you see in the second box below, you can pay part now or part later. But again, check the cancellation policies because it varies from home owner to home owner. It's up to them to establish their own cancellation policy. But of course, there's budget accommodation, so there's camping, which should not be overlooked. I'm sure there's a lot of people on the call today that camp. There's hostels. Hostels are more found in larger cities, Chicago, New York, San Francisco. These are typically dorm style. Cater to a younger audience, people that are bouncing around from country to country. But there are shared kitchen spaces there. So you can cook your own meals. Welcome other ideas that people have. Couch surfing used to be a budget accommodation. I don't hear much about couch surfing anymore. That where people could offered up a couch space or an extra room for travelers coming through to stay essentially for free. Then there's saving coupon booklets, which sounds ancient, that sounds like 1970 or 1980, but these things do exist. I don't really use them myself, but they're often found at rest areas or you can find discounts online. Then there's third party sites that offer great deals at the last minute as well. Expedia, is the one that comes to mind. If you are taking a trip at the last minute, you can get some really good deals at hotels are just trying to sell their rooms at cost so they don't lose out. I suggest that. Try that out if you're flexible. Cabins, Kathy says, right? Here's our chart again. So getting towards the end here of our session tonight, I hope. We've got about 20 minutes left. I've got quite a few more information. But what might these three days not include? What might be missing? Again, those are the numbers from Forbes that we're using as a baseline for tonight's discussion. What might this budget not have taken into account? Anybody have a guess? So we have activities, gas. Tours, tickets, shopping, snacks, tourist attractions, gratuities, amenities. Happiness. Guys are smart. Guys are on it. Yeah. Very good. That's how I want you to be thinking about this. When you budget, there's more to just what the big figure is, travel is going to exceed that if you are within those ranges. But, I put a few on your recreation and retail, so there's parks, museums, events, shopping. National parks have free visit days. I don't know how often they are anymore. They might only be once or twice a year. State parks can be just as good as national parks. Don't overlook those, and even local parks or county parks, if you are savvy enough to find those, are often free and they're worth to visit. Really cool local parks in Michigan. Along the shorelines that out of state travelers, they go right to the federal park, Sleeping Bear dunes or the state parks, and they don't stop to think that local parks have quite a bit to offer too. Museums. I'm sorry. What? As we had a question. Is it true reservations third party sites aren't guaranteed? That would just vary by third party. I use third party sites a lot, and the disclaimer does say that typically you'll get a notification that says, this tickets not guaranteed until another 24 hours until the airline company validates or approves the purchase. But in my experience, I've never had it where I thought I bought a ticket on cheap tickets.com and I never got a ticket. It's never happened and I've bought hundreds. But the disclaimer does say that your immediate payment doesn't guarantee ticketing, but usually within literally 10 minutes, you're going to get a notification that you got a ticket. Good question. State or national museums, those are worth of look, local museums, limited hours. Very difficult to find those with a convenient time. They're just lower staffed. Communities don't have the capacity to keep a lot of those going. I mean local small town museums. But worth of look, if you can schedule one. Free activities are a good way to go. Can be County fairs or fairs or art shows, festivals. These things are true authentic experiences. Local festivals and events. Check out the local Chambers of Commerce. The destination marking organizations if they do have them. Again, you guys mentioned some of this as well, tipping. I had recently seen tipping when you get your receipt in a restaurant and it's like suggested tips. We're seeing 15% come off the bill and now it's like 18 -20-22. I even saw 25%, and I don't eat at high end restaurants at all. So depending on your view of tipping and your cultural views of it, that is something that easily could eat up a lot of your budget, if you follow the suggested percentages, right? They're not required. Taxis, other forms of transportation, souvenirs that falls into shopping. Optional travel insurance. You know, this will vary by person. I don't have a lot of experience with travel insurance, other than international, we're not so much focused on international today here. There was a time during COVID where it made sense to have travel insurance. So if you do pursue that, read up on it, read the fine print, make sure it covers what you think that could happen, and anything could happen, of course. But usually get people get travel insurance with some idea on the back of their head that, Oh, my goodness, I don't know. I might break my leg or something. So I'm going to jump into a little bit of sustainable tourism. Aaron said 30%, I think that's for tips is on the options for my local coffee shop 30%. Wow. 30% out of $5 coffee though, it's like a $1.50? still a big tip. I'm going to just share a little bit about sustainable travel because that is not something to dismiss. I'm sure we have a variety of different age groups here today. I would say my generation, which is Gen X and younger. This is becoming more and more important. But even older generations, baby boomers and older audiences. I'm not sure what our big demographic is here tonight, but this is pretty important for all the right reasons, I think. This is a study done by Expedia Group, and it just walks through that consumers have preferences now for environmentally friendly transportation and lodging and that varies from hotel to hotel. Consumers are seeing sustainable travel, visiting lesser known destinations, supporting local communities, supporting local economies. This is probably the most interesting chart part of that study. That consumers are willing to spend more on sustainable travel, primarily food. That falls into the space of local food or organic foods or foods that directly support local economies, transportation, lodging, This will vary by vendor by industry. But where I'm leading up to is I recently came across a resource with the US Travel Association during a workshop for sustainable tourism in Michigan and came across this website, and this is called Journey to clean, and it's another recording. I started playing it obviously. I think, Kathy, if you can get the website and stick it in the chat. I don't know if I gave it to you or not, but you all could just Google "Journey to Clean" and this breaks down the travel industry by by industry, by sector within the industry. Planning and booking, traveling, lodging, in particular, this is on attractions. It lists a lot of these are big corporate operations. They're not mom and pop shops at this point. But they do cover the airline companies that are taking measures to reduce carbon offsets in some way shape or form, or they may be recycling and reusing certain things. It also dives into rental cars and what other companies are doing, and it lists them out, and it's certainly not all of them, by any means, but it is a good start. As you can see the hotels there. They're listing some of the bigger chains, the mid range, to high end resort type hotels as part of the effort towards sustainability, if that's important to you, even the National Parks is on there. Sea World, Disneyland, stuff like that. There's obviously other ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and some of that we talked about tonight. You don't have to pay top dollar to support big chains like this in order to have an impact on sustainability. You can certainly stay local and purchase local and walk and bring your own food and things like that. But it is a step in the right direction, and it's something I did want to highlight because I thought it was quite useful you're into this of thing. So a few minutes left. I do want to just talk about decisions and decisions and some decision making tools. A lot of travel is intuitive based on intuition and a lot of travel is rational thinking as well. And the state of mind that you have when you're traveling or before traveling influences your decisions. Intuitive would be fast shortcuts going with your gut feeling, if you're distracted, if you're busy, you just make quick decisions. You just do it, get it over with, suffer the consequence if there is any. Relative to travel, that would be going with the flow. You just show up somewhere and you're just going to do whatever you feel like doing, which, of course, if you do, can significantly impact your budget for better or for worse. You like what you see, you act. Could be costly. Showing up in places where costs are higher than you thought or you need something that you weren't anticipating. Rational thinking is analyzing and comparing efforts. It dominates when the decisions are of high importance. You have time for concentration. You are able to analyze alternative choices. This is typically when people are able to have ample time to plan a trip using a budget, the motto of this is it pays to plan. Both have a place when traveling. There are people out there that plan every single little thing they're going to do by the hour, that's their idea of fun. Then there's folks that will plan just day one, day two, day three, and then they just let the intuitive process take over and that's their idea of fun. I'm going to just share a scenario and get people thinking about this. While traveling, you're walking down the street and your favorite musician is playing to a sold out crowd. On a whim, you decide to pay street value for a ticket exceeding your budget by $250. Is that intuitive or rational thinking? We're getting lots of intuitive. I bet somebody could argue that it would be rational. But it is. The answer is intuitive. I had another scenario there, but I must have not done it. Another example would be like walking down the street of I don't know, Chicago or Miami or Raleigh or something. You're a first time visitor there and you see a lot of people in one restaurant, but you were planning to go to another restaurant and there's nobody in that restaurant. You change your decision based on the number of people in the other restaurant because if everybody's in restaurant, A, it must be a good restaurant and because there's nobody in restaurant B, it must not be so good. So you go at the flow and you change your direction and you go into the other restaurant with all the people and the food is twice as much. But there's some rationale to that kind of scenario. People can rationalize, Well, everybody must be enjoying the food in one restaurant and not in the other. I'm going to go there. It has a place for travel and tourism for sure and being cognizant of that will help you. I want to share two little tools that I think are important as in the last few minutes here and I'm sure there's going to be questions, but Decision making tool charts, a T chart sounds simple. It is. Pros and cons, if you don't know where you want to go, and you've got two places on the brain and the flights to them are the same and the hotels are the same. You just can't make up your mind, whip out a T chart and start identifying the pros and the cons, it's just a beautiful way to organize your thoughts because the amount of choice and the amount of decisions when traveling or doing anything in life can lead to significant paralysis. Is there any tools out there to help you get ideas on paper to make those decisions? That was one of them. Another one is something called that we use in our work, a bridge, a bridge diagram. This is a now, how and WOW. There's three boxes here. The green is the goal. That's where you want to get to. The goal is you want to go to New York City and your location, and you want to have great experience. That's your goal. You start with the WOW first, you work backwards. Then you go to the now and you determine what you have now to reach that goal. You establish motivation, your desires, you have money you have $1000 or more. You've got your plan together, you know where you're going to go, you know when you're going to go. Then the last thing you work towards is bridging the now to the WOW. How do you do that? Well, you need to determine how much to budget, how will you budget? How will you manage your budget to get to that last step, your goal. Really great tool. It's really good for long term planning. I wouldn't use it on a Saturday in New York City, trying to get to the museum, right? I would use it when you're at home and you're thinking, where do you want to go next winter to get away from Michigan's gloomy dark cold March weather. And you're uncertain as to where to go. Tips. Mentioned this earlier. Pay close attention to the fine print, research costs, could sway your expenses. Some of those we talked about tonight, a lot of them we talked about tonight. Be expecting some hidden costs. Balance that intuitive and rational thinking. At the same time, go with the flow, wander can allow you to (coughed, excuse me) Experience things that a lot of people overlook and don't leverage and can really help you discover things you might not realize were of interest to you by having some intuitive flow with your trip. Traveling is about exploring learning and putting yourself in a new environment. Hopefully this was helpful tonight. I want to end with a famous quote by Mark Twain. I think this is a good one. "Travel is fatal to prejudice bigotry and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome charitable views of men or we'll say people, this era we're living in. Things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all of one's lifetime. So get out there and travel and do it according to your budget and don't go into debt. Any questions? I just put a link in for a quick survey. Seriously, it's only two questions, so we would love if you could fill that out. Andy, this was awesome. Thank you so much for for presenting today. This was great information. I really appreciate it. There is a question from Lacy. Oh, I'm sorry. 30 so go, that's fine. But as having a travel agent, really the best bet when trying to get the bigger price things as cheap as possible. You know Lacy, I have very little experience with travel agents. I have heard very recently now that I have a daughter who's interested in Disneyland that if you're going to Disneyland, the thing to do is use a Disneyland/world travel agent and yes, you can save significant amount of money and headache. By using a travel agent for that purpose. I do think they serve a role and I hope to goodness they never go away because if you like things easy and you just say, Hey, I want to go here and you have disposable income to get you there, I'd say, go for it. But with the Internet and everything on your cell phone and your iPad and your laptop and goodness, chat GPT and AI, you could really just go to a travel agent, have them price out your trip and then go home and spend probably 2 hours and put it all together yourself and see which one's cheaper. Just depends what you want. There is a value on ease, right? I'm at a point in life where paying a little bit extra money can make life a lot easier. All right. Super good audience. Great topic. Hope to deliver this again. Hopefully that was useful. It sounds like there might be some interest in international. That was one of the questions. Is there going to be another one on international travel. What we'll do at the end of the year, We're going to be sending out a survey to get input on what topics people are interested. That'll probably come out in October. So I can get an idea of what are some additional people we need to get speakers on. I do want to thank Andy. I want to thank Mandalynn for being here today. I also want to mention we have our next one is going to be on July 10. It is all about cooking. You're going to actually watch it. We're going to be doing it right on the camera. And that's going to be July 10 at 4:00. That is a change of date from the original when I originally advertised. It was supposed to be, I think on the 16th, but it is the 10th. You will get an email from me when this recording is out, and then we'll have some additional information about next month. Mark your calendars, July 10 at 4:00. We'll be on Cooking. Thank you so much, Andy for joining us today and providing your insights and some great tools. I love that gas. I'm going to use that gas calculator for sure. That was awesome. I also put Andy's email in case you have any questions for him. Please take a moment to fill out our two questions survey. Appreciate it. Everyone, have a great evening. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good luck out there.