No this is not an anti-wellness or PTO post. It is the opposite. Sometimes vacations don’t sit well and stress you out. Why spend the money and PTO time to go on a vacation that is going to stress you out? That seems silly, unproductive and a colossal waste of money.

We Love Paris but Not This Time

We were originally planning on vacationing in Paris December 2021. This was meant to be our first post-vaccination overseas trip. In the meantime, we booked a last-minute vacation to Barcelona in October 2021 and decided to postpone Paris as a result to October 2022. However, we then decided to build a house in Maine.

I am currently about to head over to the airport with my lovely husband to vacation to Italy. We then return and immediately close on our house in Maine and move into it in mid-September. France would only be a month away at that point. That would be a lot….and we also are about to go to Italy.

We are very excited to move into our dream house in our dream state. While Paris is wonderful, we were worried it would be too much for us, our babies, and our wallet! We woke up this morning to work out of our hotel in Portsmouth, NH and both came to the same conclusion, won’t we feel better if we just cancel Paris

Wait Didn’t You Lose All Of Your Money

One of the benefits of booking on points/miles (other than it’s free) is it’s much easier to cancel. I already have received my Marriott and American Airlines point/miles returned to my account. The only real hiccup was our flight to Paris on TAP Portugal. They do have a cancellation fee of 250 dollars. Now, truthfully, we would have just eaten that as one day in Paris will easily cost that much in wine/food. However, we lucked out in that TAP will reimburse the entire amount into a voucher we can use again.

TAP is an excellent option for business class flights to Europe using Lisbon to transit as their fares are usually much cheaper than their competitors. However, we literally just booked a summer 2023 trip to Portugal and will absolutely use our vouchers for that. By canceling one trip we just paid for another!

Lessons Learned

Matt and I both feel so much better now that the trip was canceled. We now can move into our house in a few weeks and have a few months getting used to our new home with our babies. We literally just paid for our summer flights and now we can also save PTO for a later date as Paris is just a month from now and we won’t mentally need it yet as we are now about to take two weeks off for Italy.

The point I am making with this post is I know others who have booked vacations they were stressed about for either personal, professional, or financial reasons and they still went! What is the point of spending thousands of dollars while utilizing PTO to be stressed out? I can do that for free every day, it’s called work! Cancel those stressful trips baby!

Book on points, spend a few dollars more to book refundable tickets, get travel insurance, etc. but always give yourself an out as if you book vacations months in advance things can change. Our house was supposed to be built in June, but here we are!

Bon Voyage (well Bon Stay Home)

Andrew