How a Trip to South Padre Island for Two /4 Nights Cost about $550.00

My husband and I just got back from a great trip to South Padre Island! It was great fun and the whole thing from start to finish cost about $550.00! That includes airfare, hotel, car rental, attractions and food. 

The airfare was $0.00. We have an airline miles card that we use for buying all throughout the year and we make sure to pay it off every month so we don't get socked with fees of any kind. It is a Capital One Venture Card. When it was time to plan a trip, I chose the destination based on the amount of airline miles we had to spend. Some places take more miles and some less and so South Padre Island fit all the criteria! It is warm! That was the most important criteria! And we had enough miles! And so, I bought the tickets. 

Second step, I bought a hotel on Priceline. I usually have a good result from Priceline. However, this time, I wished I had chosen Expedia. I asked for a 2 star hotel. We like chains and try to stay away from the Mom and Pop type hotels (even though we would like to support the local economy, they can be scary). Priceline gave me a hotel for $205.00 for four nights. Sounded pretty good until I saw that other places like Expedia had it for cheaper AND it looked like a one star hotel. I wrangled with Priceline and they refunded me $26.32 for the difference on what I could have gotten it elsewhere, but they would not change my hotel even though I insisted this definitely looked like a one star. It seems to me that in popular destinations, Expedia may be the way to go as you can choose your own hotel and they seem comparable in price to Priceline's Match My Price, where you do not get to choose your own hotel. Anyway, when it was all said and done, I paid $172.12 for the hotel. The hotel was okay, but not real nice. It did have a microwave and refrigerator which was nice. Since we had a frig and microwave, we went to Walmart and bought the food below!

Walmart was having a great markdown sale on frozen food and the breakfast Eggo's were only .75 for a box of four and the Chili's were only .50 a box. The mashed potatoes were .10! So all this above was $23.32 and then we bought a banana, some water and some yogurt later for $1.69. We ate breakfast in except for the first day and we ate some other meals in too. 

 This was the beautiful beach! We made the mistake of paying to get in ($5.00) when you didn't have to pay everywhere. We learned that after the first day, so after the first day, seeing this was free! There were plenty of beautiful things to see driving along or getting out and walking which we did every day including a drive to Brownsville TX and a walk across the Mexican Border.

Here was our first major meal. This also had a salad with it. We found a 20% off coupon for The Shrimp Haus and ordered this meal and split it. It was HUGE! We also split the huge deep fried ice cream below

. We were stuffed when we left. All told this cost $27.58 plus tips.

 We went to this Birding Center and it was really nice. They had boardwalks where you could see a lot of different birds. We also saw an alligator with babies! You can see the little baby in the photo. This was $10.00 total.

 We took a sunset cruise on a boat and saw this Pirate ship along the way! The cruise was 2 hours and cost $32.00 for two but I googled Retail Me Not for a coupon code and got $5.00 off when I signed up online.

This lighthouse was free to visit. You could only walk around outside though at this date. But it was still fun. We also walked around to a few shops.

This was another meal we ate out. It was also huge and we split it as well. I was disappointed because I thought the coconut shrimp would not be fried but it was. I tire of fried very fast and only ate some of the blackened fish. Anyway, this cost $24.36 plus tips. The fresh fish and shrimp in SPI is phenomenal!

We rented a car for this trip. It was a Nissan Note. It was a cute car and cost us $131.68 with a full tank of gas.

We paid for parking for the car we own and that was $61.92. We have a frequent parker pass that is full now and we can also sign up online for a free day so next time we park there we should get two days free.

The rest of what we spent was on a little ice cream, McDonalds and a couple local eateries where we experienced some very local Mexican food. Some good, some bad, but local.

So all told this trip was around $550.00 total for the two of us or $275.00 each. Not bad for all that!

Happy Savings!