Amazon launches Prime Day Travel Deals — here’s how you can save – The Points Guy

At TPG, we are super excited about Amazon Prime Day, which will take place from July 16-17. But this time around, Amazon is trying something new: This year, it will feature an entire page dedicated to travel deals. Enter Amazon Prime Day Travel Deals.

Some of the best and most exciting deals we found include the opportunity to purchase Carnival Cruise Line cruises at a 40% discount and an offer from Southwest Airlines that lets you buy Rapid Rewards points for 50% off — that’s pretty compelling.

Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon’s Prime Day Travel Deals, some of which are already available.

Viator: Save 10% on travel experiences like tours

You can get 10% off Viator bookings by using this link. Viator offers access to 300,000 travel experiences worldwide, including tours of the Eiffel Tower, Vatican and Sagrada Familia in Europe.

Most Viator bookings are fully refundable up to 24 hours ahead of the reservation.

I’ve used Viator in Italy and Guyana (among other countries), and I’ve had great experiences. However, you can probably find bigger discounts by scouring the internet for deals. Shop around and consider using an airline shopping portal where you can sometimes find huge sales or earn extra miles (or both) on Viator purchases.

For example, right now you can earn 7 American Airlines miles for every dollar you spend on Viator via AAdvantage eShopping.

Carnival: Up to 40% off cruises

Save up to 40% on Carnival cruises using this link. While the landing page is not currently working perfectly (try refreshing the page after it loads the first time), I was able to select a three-day cruise from Miami to the Bahamas in July for just $169 per person for an interior cabin. Prices starting at $159 per person were also available.

Our team will take a look closer to Prime Day to see if the website is working properly and if there might be more deals worth booking.

Southwest: 50% off Rapid Rewards points

Southwest Rapid Rewards members can use this link (and log in) to get a 50% discount on points packages ranging from 2,000 to 60,000 points. Prices for the points bundles start at $30, which is a huge discount from their normal price of $60. I got an offer to buy 60,000 Rapid Rewards points for just $900 — that would normally cost $1,800, which is a 50% savings. If you have an upcoming Southwest trip to book, it’s not a bad idea to stock up on points via this sale.

Avis: Up to 30% off car rentals, plus 10% back

Book an Avis car rental and get 30% off your booking plus a 10% gift card using this link.

While this is supposed to be a great deal, I actually did a test booking via the Amazon link and also directly on avis.com, and I found it was actually quite a bit cheaper to book directly with Avis with no promotional code added. In my case, a weekend booking from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in July was $323.55 via Amazon (it also included an Amazon gift card back for $22.68). The same rental was just $205.93 when booking directly on avis.com. So booking via Amazon would actually cost you an extra $94.94. No deal there.

But if you shop around, you may have better luck than I did.

Sixt: Up to 15% off car rentals

Save up to 15% off Sixt luxury car rentals across the United States, Canada, Italy, Great Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg using this link.

Reservation must be booked by Aug. 22 for travel by Dec. 20.

Don’t forget about vacation packages outside of Amazon

There are plenty of other ways to save on travel. Don’t sleep on Costco Travel, where you can find discounts on cruises, vacation packages and rental cars. One of my favorite deal hacks is to book vacation packages via airlines; you can save up to 40% when you reserve airfare, hotels, rental cars and even activities via vacation sites like aavacations.com and deltavacations.com.

Related: Up to 40% off: Everything you need to know about saving money with airline vacation packages

And, of course, sign up for deal alerts from sites like The Points Guy.

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