Costco Travel Executive Membership all-inclusive vacations

When our long-planned June international fishing trip was canceled for reasons beyond our control, Hanna and I decided to make alternate plans – a non-fishing vacation in a Caribbean locale.

For reasons I’ve explained previously, mostly budget-related, we pretty quickly narrowed the options down to the Mayan Riviera of Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. We’d been to the first two previously and quickly settled on the DR primarily because there were numerous daily non-stop flights from our local airport (IAD) and also because it was generally the cheapest. We set out to get the most bang for our buck. It didn’t have to be super-swank, but we wanted decent food and amenities.

Since I hadn’t done this in about a decade, I went back to my usual online haunts like Kayak.com and CheapCaribbean.com. They all had decent search interfaces and roughly the same prices, along with seemingly endless upgrades. Then two of my colleagues suggested I try Costco Travel. One, still in her late twenties, booked a dream trip to Fiji through them last year, and the other who seemingly visits the local warehouse every week also had positive experiences.

So I checked them out. They might not have had quite as many options as some other sites, but there were plenty across a wide range of prices, and they consistently came in lower than anyone else.

Eventually we settled on Sanctuary Cap Cana in the DR at a price for two (nonstop economy flights, lodging, transfers to/from the Punta Cana airport, and all food and drink) of just over $4,600 for a Saturday-to-Saturday itinerary. The best I could do on that same package elsewhere was over $5,500, so right off the bat we saved $900.

Of course, we had to go and get a Costco membership first, since we’d let ours lapse a long time ago. That cost over a hundred bucks, but the membership gave us 2% back on this travel purchase, over $90. On top of that, the trip came with a $287 online Costco gift card, thus further reducing the price (as long as we can keep those purchases to things we otherwise would have bought).

From a purely financial perspective it was a no-brainer. How was it in terms of service? Excellent there, too.

We got a warning from Costco before pressing the purchase button that the DR’s beaches had an unusually high level of sargassum this year. We’re pool people, not beach people, so that didn’t matter. We got another email with links to the immigration forms necessary to enter the country. We were told where to meet our driver – after getting through customs we walked a short distance to the desk, they assigned us a private van, and 20 minutes later we were checking in. There was an agent at the resort several days out of the week to set up return travel. Once again, the driver was waiting for us when we got there to go home.

I don’t know how they could have made it a much better experience, especially since they were over 20% less than anyone else – we didn’t feel like that came with any decrease in service.

I don’t know how they’d be on less-traveled itineraries, or if they’re just as strong on flight-only or hotel-only searches, but I’d start with them in the future. Obviously, most of our travel is to dedicated fishing locations that they won’t fully serve, but any time I can save some hassle and a few bucks (or more) on any part of our travel agenda it helps me fish more and buy more tackle.