super bowl - Travel Deals

I don’t know about you, but a trip to Miami at the beginning of February sounds like the perfect antidote to the winter doldrums. Just about any excuse for such a sunny escape would work, but it just so happens that in 2010 there’s a pretty good one – the Super Bowl is coming to town.

You don’t have to be a hard-core budget travel guru to know that this is one vacation where you’ll want to be extra-diligent when hunting for deals. Why? Because tickets to the Super Bowl are always extraordinarily expensive, and since you can’t get around paying for tickets to the game you’ll need to find ways to save money on other aspects of your trip.

And that’s where we come in.

We’ve written a series of articles designed to help you save money on a trip to Miami for the Super Bowl, and rather than risk you missing out on all the helpful information we’ve compiled we thought we’d put together a list of all the articles in one place. Which is right here. Well, by “here” I mean below. Oh, you know what I mean.

Here are all the tips we dispensed about finding Super Bowl travel deals.

One of the things you learn when you start researching the subject is that as maligned as the “vacation package” can be among people who consider themselves hard-core budget travelers, a package deal can often mean huge savings over booking each element separately. Of course, this isn’t always true, but it’s true often enough that it’s always worth looking for vacation package deals to the places you’re planning to visit as you’re looking up airfare and hotel prices.

But let’s take the Super Bowl as an example of a big event for which there are plenty of vacation packages being offered. Are they a better deal than booking a la carte? Will you save money with Super Bowl vacation packages?

The short answer is – sometimes. But there are enough cases where a vacation package is so much more costly than booking your flight, hotel, and car rental separately that it’s critical you do your homework in this case instead of just assuming the package “deal” is really a deal. Here are some of the things to keep in mind when you’re looking at Super Bowl vacation packages vs. booking your Super Bowl trip piece by piece.

The 2010 Super Bowl – Super Bowl XLIV (or Super Bowl 44, for those of you who can’t read Latin numbers) – will be in Miami on February 7, 2010. Miami has hosted the event nine times in the past, and it’s not hard to understand why. If your big event were held each year in one of the notoriously dreariest months, wouldn’t you want to make sure it happened in a sunny climate?

Yeah, me too.

So, even if you’re not the world’s biggest football fan, or your favorite team isn’t even in the playoffs, there are still some decent reasons for making the trip to Miami for the Super Bowl. If, for instance, your significant other loves the game, why not tag along and get a Florida holiday out of it?

No matter what the reasoning behind it, if you’re going to Miami for the Super Bowl you’ll need some travel advice. Which is what we’re here to deliver.

There are few things that are as satisfying as combining two things you love. For instance, if you’re a football fan who also likes to travel, what’s better than taking a trip to see the Super Bowl? It’s even better when you consider that the Super Bowl is almost always in a city that’s relatively warm in the winter, so that if you stay more than a day or two you’ll get the added benefit of a warm weather vacation in addition to a football game.

But if you also love saving money, then you’ll want to know all the tricks you could use to get a good deal on a trip to the Super Bowl in Miami, right? Well, one of them is to fly into a different city than Miami.

Wait, what?

You heard me. Yes, the 2010 Super Bowl is in Miami – but that doesn’t mean you only have one choice for airports in Miami to fly into. Yes, there’s a big airport located right in Miami – but there are also a couple other airports within a reasonable distance that are worth checking for cheap airfares, too.

Here are the alternate airports for Miami that you should look at if you’re hunting for cheap airfare to the Super Bowl (and a little bit about Miami International Airport, too, because we’re nice).

If you’re a hard-core football fan, then you’ve probably got “go to the Super Bowl” on your lifetime to-do list – whether or not it’s your team in the big game. Luckily, organizers typically give the Super Bowl to cities in the lower half of the United States – so even though the game’s in the winter, fans will get the added bonus of warm weather to go along with the championship game.

The upcoming Super Bowl is in Miami, so you’ll definitely get a break from winter weather right when you need it. And, if we can help you find cheap airfare to Miami for the Super Bowl, why not make an extended vacation out of it? That way, no matter what team wins, you’ll still come out with a victory in the vacation department.

Many of the tips for finding cheap airfare to the Super Bowl in Miami are the same as we’d give you for finding cheap airfare no matter what time of year it is. But since more people will be descending upon Miami for the big event, you do need to plan ahead a bit more than normal and may need to do a bit more research before you find the best prices on things like airfare and hotels.

Here are our top tips for getting cheap tickets to Miami for the Super Bowl.