Strange Sights in Other Buildings and Booking a Nice Hotel in Downtown Vancouver for an Effective Cost of $100 Per Night

When booking travel as a business, keeping your head on a swivel for amazing deals is an absolute must.

Greetings from back home after the longest road trip of the season!

Getting a chance to go to other NHL buildings gives you a chance to see how different clubs handle their game operations. One of my favourite things to do on the road is give you a peak as to what goes on during the television timeouts or other happenings in and around the building outside of the barrel of a broadcast camera lens.

On Thursday, the Maple Leafs were visiting the Dallas Stars at American Airlines Center. I was in front of my laptop screen when I began to hear collecting groaning around the building. I look up and see that the Stars have a ‘Snackwards Cam’. A creation of theirs, the Stars game operations films fans in attendance eating concession food and plays it backward, making for some odd visuals.

@davidalter35At the #Leafs, #stars game, they feature the Snackwards cam they watch people eat their #food backwards and people are grossed out. #foodtiktok #hockey #nhl #foryou #foryoupage

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

American Airlines Center is one of my favourite places to visit as far as events go. Last season, myself and another reporter on the beat attended a Mavs game. During one of the television timeouts, there was a entire sing-along karaoke of Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’.

@davidalter35The Mavs do a full on Backstreet Boys singalong during one of their TV timeouts. This was a lot of fun.

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

When arriving in Dallas, Toronto Star reporter Kevin McGran recommended a great barbecue spot called Texas Black’s BBQ. They are known for their brisket and it did not disappoint

.

Nashville is always a great time. Typically, a lot of the sportswriters would go to Tootsies and other fun spots on Broadway. For me, however, I was so exhausted from how long this road trip was, that I was pretty lame and hung back in the hotel to catch up on some work.

Finding time to see some friends is also difficult. In our group chat, we talked about meeting up for brunch on Sunday. So I moved my flight up to get back leave Nashville at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. CT. It is worth it though.

---

In addition to doing my regular work, I spend a lot of time booking my travel for the upcoming season. I have two goals in mind when booking my travel. 1) Travel well. 2) Travel cheap. Looking to leverage deals and points is crucial.

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed one deal in particular has helped me save a ton when booking my hotels in Vancouver.

There is a promotion from Stay Vancouver Hotels that runs a promotion where they offset a two-night stay with a massive prepaid Mastercard of us to $250. So, for my trip coming up to Vancouver, I booked a two-night stay at the Residence Inn in downtown Vancouver. It was $400 but comes with a $200 Mastercard for an effective cost of $200 for a two-night weekend stay.

I can decide to put that card directly to the stay or use it for something else. What’s also great, is that you can also apply your Marriott Bonvoy number in the notes section and get the full value of a $400 stay with your Marriott. You could also stack this deal even further by using a Bonvoy-based credit from American Express or Chase in the United States for even more value.

My trip to Sweden is coming up. In my next post, I’m going to detail how I booked the entire six-day trip with flight and hotel for just $600.