The Incentive Program from you know where!!!

As you can see from my last post, Josh and I are going on a cruise. This cruise will be our first and only vacation before we start a family hopefully sometime this next year.

The cruise is part of an incentive program that my place of business has been offering to our customers. The cruise fare, which includes the accommodations, entertainment, and food is free with this incentive voucher. However, they make up for that with other fees, etc. It will really only be a savings of about $200-$300. Now don't get me wrong, I am glad to save any money, but it is not as much of a discount as I was hoping for.

This process which for us began June 5 has been a long, drawn out one. We are still waiting to hear from the actual travel company to make the reservations, and they have already cashed our check for the fees. I am not very happy with that, since first off, they have my money and I have nothing to show for it. Second, the longer it takes them to get our reservations made the closer we get to the travel date, which can make the other items for our vacation more expensive (IE. hotel, airfare, etc.). So, I am giving this travel company the rest of today to call me before I will be calling them again.

I was told by the reservation agent, Melissa on Thursday of last week that I should be hearing from them the following day. Obviously that did not happen and now we are two more days passed that.

So, please pray that this lady calls me today before I have to get grumpy with them.

Another tidbit about the vacation; I realized just last week that my passport is in my maiden name, since I got it just 5 months before Josh and I were married. I needed it to go on a mission trip to Guatemala the month before our wedding! Talk about crazy timing. Anyways, I am trying to get all my necessary paperwork together for a renewal of my passport. One thing I need is a certified copy of our marriage certificate, which I have had to acquire from the county we were married in Ohio. This was an easy and inexpensive process, just timely with the postal services and processing time needed.

All this in mind, means we will have to push back the date of the cruise vacation. Not a big deal really since we haven't scheduled it yet. I think I am going to see if we can go September 29 - October 3 since that would be the week of our anniversary.

I will keep you posted with the details once we have an actual departure date.