My wife and I are planning a trip to Chicago. We have been saving up our vacation time and now can afford to spend a good 45-60 days exploring the city and their great food. We started doing our research. We bought our airfare from Southwest Airlines. They were having a special so we decided it was a good time to book.
The next part of our process in booking this extended stay trip was where we were going to sleep? We wanted a place to come home to each night that wouldn’t feel like a hotel. We priced out some hotels and did some serious comparison shopping and even with the specials they were having it was going to cost quite a bit. A friend of ours who travels for extended periods of time recommended to us to look into an extended stay apartment. At first we didn’t know what he was talking about as we didn’t want to rent an apartment and wouldn’t be in the city long enough for a short term lease. It turns out that there are fully furnished apartments that include everything you need to take up residence in just about every major city. We started to do research and came across Marriott ExecuStay, a division of Marriott that offers stays for 30 days or longer. They offer some other perks that won us over including reward points that we could use later. After spending some time on their website and dong some competitive shopping we decided to book our Chicago Extended Stay accommodations. We will have a full kitchen so we can also make our own meals, and even though we are planning on experiencing some great local food, we won’t have to eat out each meal.
As a result, by us using ExecuStay instead of a normal hotel we are going to save nearly half on lodging. We are excited for our upcoming trip. When we get back I will write a post on the whole experience.
