When Bargain Hunting Goes Bad

So I won a $50 travel credit for expedia (At Oportos of all places). Thinking great now I can save $50 on my flight from Vienna to Berlin. Wrong, cause the voucher is only valid for hotels. So I think...fine, I'll cancel my booking in Las Vegas and rebook through expedia, since they are having a 10% sale also I'll get at least I'll get $60-70 off which is like 2 nights for the price of one. Cool I thought.

So 3 days of emailing back and fro I get my original reservation canceled by the insanely nice people at the hotel and then I go and make the booking through Expedia. I get to the last section of the booking form then BANG!!! "Your voucher has already been used"...I curse my stupidity, cause I typed in the code to try it out 2 days ago but I thought it wouldn't count if I didn't go through with the booking. HA, I was so wrong. So back to square one, no voucher. When I made the original booking with the hotel the Aussie dollar was at 0.94, today it's back to 0.86, so I've saved about $10 for all the effort I put through. Added onto that I need to wait 7-10 days until the money is refunded and by that time the Aussie dollar might have gone up again.

I also took out travel insurance with Medibank Private on tuesday, thinking that since my family are members the 10% discount would give me a good value for 3 months of cover at $460. I came back home and checked that I could get the exact same cover for $355 online. So I cancelled that and now have to wait another 5-10 days to get my money back.

So here I am, watching my bank balance go lower and lower whilst all my money has been taken hostage by financial institutions. I never seem to learn my lesson. Research before you buy and once you buy don't change your decision. It's like the detour option in the Amazing Race, I'm the perennial detour switcher and although it might stop me from coming last, I might have had the same result if I just stuck it out with one task.

Only positives currently are that I booked most of my US tickets/ebay purchases etc before the dollar crashed below 0.91. Ahahha I can't believe I think 0.86 is low. Only seemed a few years ago that we were hovering around 0.55/0.6. But I guess I didn't care then cause I wasn't travelling and ebaying.

A lesson for those who read this blog...bargain hunting is sometimes really not worth it.

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Currently I've booked everything that I need to book. Some show/event tickets I will book once I get to LA and hopefully the dollar goes up a bit. I've done most of my shopping, so for the next week or so, it's packing and researching and hopefully cleaning my room.