I recently found my old Eastpak backpack bag from my college days, and the inside was fraid and badly damaged from my years of lugging around heavy text books. When I purchased it, I knew it carried a lifetime warranty, but I never knew exactly how good the warranty was; therefore, I decided to look into warranty repair service.

If you go to either the Eastpak or Jansport warranty repair page, it highlights the details for submitting a bag for repair. What I did not realize until after I submitted my Eastpak, was Eastpak and JanSport appear to be the same company. Several weeks after submitting my Eastpak, I received a postcard from JanSport, which stated I would be receiving my bag soon after they inspected what went wrong with the bag. Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I received my bag back in the mail.

I was not sure whether they would just send me a similar new bag or if they would just repair the bag. To my surprise, they actually took apart the entire bag and sewed in a new liner. From an environmental standpoint, I was quite happy that they fixed the bag rather than just send me a new one. In today’s disposable market, it usually cheaper for a company to replace the item with a new one rather than spend the time to repair it. I was quite happy that Eastpak/JanSport stuck to their roots and took the time to repair my bag to as good as normal.

Cost for repair? Shipping costs and a couple weeks to wait for my bag to arrive.

Columbia Jacket Warranty Experience

I also recently sent back two jackets to Columbia for warranty repair because the zippers broke. You can file a claim on the Columbia website, then send the jacket(s) back.

After sending both jackets back, I was contacted to select two new jackets, as they could no longer fix the ones I submitted.

I was about to donate them to charity and have to go out and purchase new ones, so I am glad I took the extra minute to look into the warranty, as I will be sitting in two nice warm jackets this winter.

Save Money, Travel More!

Source: InACents

2/14/11- Originally published

This week we discovered some incredible flight deals out of Cleveland to various locations in the Caribbean. Islands like Grand Cayman (GCM), Antigua (ANU), Montego Bay (MBJ), Punta Cana (PUJ), and St. Lucia (UVF) for all less than $240 RT per person. What was even better was the flights were not only available for as soon as September of this year, but into next summer.

So I began to play around with the ITA Matrix system, out of curiosity, to see what I could fine on the cheap for next summer. Hour after hour, I continually saw that Grand Cayman was coming up the cheapest out of the islands listed. On various days into June and July 2015, the system was pulling up flights for $219 all in for roundtrip flights. What was better was that there were no long layovers on our particular option, as many of the really cheap days had overnight and exceptionally long layovers.

Sample CLE-GCM Itinerary

The problem was anytime I went to any other website to try and book at CLE – GCM trip, I could not duplicate the results. This included going directly to US Airways and American Airlines websites, as well as aggregate sites such as Kayak, Expedia, etc.

I was also desperately trying to see if I could get a cheap set of tickets booked with some US Airways miles or even US Bank points we had sitting out there. However, nothing could be duplicated along the same lines.

I studied the itinerary more closely, and ITA actually requested the flight segments be pieced together by a travel agent to get them to ticket. So I called up a travel agent to see what magic she could do, and really it went no where. Since commissions paid are so low on flights, she really put no effort into trying to get the flights to work, especially considering there were specific code share codes printed directly on my ITA reservation.

However, I was determined to find out why ITA was telling me there were $219 flights available, yet no other site could piece together the ticket with the same results. So I pulled up the AA website, and started piecing together the ticket segment by segment.

CLE to CLT

CLT to GCM

GCM to CLT

CLT to CLE

Tick, tick, tick as the system searches.

All of a sudden, the pieces started to come together. Segment by segment, the AA website was able to get the flights to process, but did you take a look at the above image? AA was pricing out the tickets at under $195 per person roundtrip from Cleveland to Grand Cayman. For those bad at math, that is over $24 cheaper than the ITA Matrix was finding tickets. INCREDIBLE!

So I quickly entered in all my credit card information, and miraculously, it went through. Now to wait for an email saying I was ticketed. Sure enough, about a half hour later I received our golden tickets.

For cheaper than our family typically flies across the United States, we will now be visiting the island of Grand Cayman next summer. This was an incredible deal that was able to come together as a result of thinking outside the box and piecing the segments together as opposed to performing just a simple search from A to Z.

Have you had better luck finding flights with this method?

Save Money, Travel More!

Source: InACents