Spontaneous Trip to NYC

I still cannot believe that we were able to see Hamilton! I am sure everyone in a 500 mile radius is tired of hearing me talk about it, so if you need something fun/spontaneous/ridiculous, this is it. It’s about to come to Chicago and ticket go on sale June 21st!

Hamilton rant done. Also, I apologize for all the iPhone photos.

We decided to take our trip to NYC on Sunday night at around 11:30pm (5 days in advance). Reason #12908, I should start going to bed earlier. Why did we decide to go? Great question. We knew Lin Manuel Miranda was leaving and well, apparently we cannot stand to have a weekend not on a plane.

Since we had a short timeline (and I think we did it pretty successfully), I thought I would share a few tips I learned along the way:

Hi Eloise!

Tuesday Airline Tickets. I’m sure you have heard this a million times, but it really does work. Buy your tickets Tuesday afternoon. We waited until then, prices dropped around $100 and the best times were made cheaper.

Use Hotel Points. Hotel points are usually a flat amount and do not depend on the going price of the room. We knew it was Tony’s weekend in NYC, so we didn’t bother trying to find “a deal.” Just used our points to book at room at the St. Regis NYC.

Go early to the airport to get on standby. Our flight out on Friday was later than we wanted (we weren’t scheduled to land in NYC until 11:30pm), so we decided to head to the airport at 3pm to see if we could hop on the earlier flight. We figured worse comes to worse, we can camp out at the airport bar. However, it worked perfectly. We hopped on the 5pm flight and were in NYC by 8:30pm. Disclaimer: Standby tickets can cost an extra fee, but if you have status or have the airline credit card, the fee is usually waved (or if your original flight is oversold).

Use the concierge for reservations. Seeing as this was a last minute trip, and we were entering the city at prime time on Friday, when it came time to make a reservation, everything was booked! However, thanks to our wonderful concierge (thank you McKinley!!) he was able to get us squeezed into a restaurant within 15 minutes.