Good Dealfeatured

I guess lots of people are coming here and looking at my pictures (welcome!) and Photobucket decided to make my pictures unviewable unless I upgraded to a Pro account.

Photobucket Pro is $40 a year. Kind of insane. But, if you complete one of several available “deals,” you get a one year account for free. I looked through the deals to look for the best possible one that would cost less than $40 and would benefit me in some way.

I came across an offer from Entertainment Books, where if you buy a 2009 book, you’ll fulfill the deal and get upgraded to Pro for a year for free.

Now, we already have our Chicago book and it gets good use when we can remember where we left it. We usually use it for airline discounts, but they also have car rental, hotel and sometimes even cruise discounts. The food discounts are just an added bonus.

But I got to thinking: we’re going to New York for our cruise next month, and I bet we could use some of those food discounts (and maybe even some of the entertainment and touring ones). And, we’re pretty far into 2009, so those books HAVE to be discounted.

$15.

I fork over $15 for a NYC Entertainment book, and I get one year of Photobucket Pro for free. An easy savings of $25. And I’m sure we’ll get at least that out of the book, so we’ll break even at the very least.

I never thought about getting Entertainment books for cities other than the one I live in, but it makes sense. Around March, they usually give significant discounts on these books and we always travel in May. And some of the discounts are good at places like Target and at online retailers, so we can get use of them from here in Chicago, even though they’re from a New York book.

I don’t know how much mileage we’d get from a Florida book (it depends on how long our pre- and post-cruise stays are), but in large city homeports like New York or Los Angeles, it’s worth a look into. If you can grab a book while it’s at a discount, it can feature great deals on hotels, rental cars, groceries (if you shop for beverages to bring onboard or consumables for your pre- or post-cruise stay), restaurants and even tours and admission to museums and such.

But back to the original point of this post: the pictures won’t disappear again…promise 🙂

And I just want to thank everyone who has left me such nice feedback of this blog on Cruise Critic. It makes me SO glad to know that people appreciate my writing and have found this blog helpful. It really inspires me to write an even better review of our next cruise.