Booking a holiday should be the fun part. Too often it's a mess of browser tabs, price anxiety and second-guessing. A recent piece from Curiocity pulls together seven practical tips for smoother trip planning, aimed at Canadian travellers but useful for anyone — and it leans on RBC's Avion Rewards travel platform to show how the ideas work in practice.
The first and biggest suggestion: consolidate. Flights, hotels, car rentals, packages and activities scattered across different sites are a headache to track, so booking everything through a single platform keeps confirmations, changes and payments in one place. Avion Rewards members — including RBC Avion Visa cardholders — can do this while paying with points, a card, or a mix of both, which means saved-up points can quietly cover a chunk of a big trip, like that group holiday to Mexico.
Flexibility comes up twice, in different forms. Before booking, shifting your dates by a day or two — or even being open about the destination — can unlock noticeably different prices. After arrival, resist the urge to schedule every hour; leaving gaps is how you stumble on a good neighbourhood restaurant or end up chatting with locals.
Then there's the timing problem: book now or wait? Rather than endlessly refreshing airline pages, the article points to two tools on the Avion platform. Price Watch sends alerts when fares drop on routes you're watching, while Price Prediction uses data trends to suggest whether a fare is likely to fall further — helping you decide with a bit more confidence than pure gut feel.
Two more tips round it out. Lock in anything scarce early: not just flights and rooms, but that in-demand restaurant, tour or concert that will sell out months ahead. Make a shortlist of non-negotiables and book those first. And stack points wherever possible — Avion is currently running a promo giving members 3X points on select hotel bookings made through the platform until 31 October when paying with an eligible RBC Avion-earning credit card. New RBC Avion Visa applicants can also pick up up to 70,000 Avion points, including 35,000 on approval, which the piece notes is roughly enough for four short-haul round-trip flights.
Why it matters: none of these tips require a travel pro's budget, just a bit of structure. Book the scarce stuff early, stay loose on dates, automate price tracking, and make your rewards program do double duty. If you hold RBC Avion points, the platform's book-everything-in-one-place model and current hotel promo are worth a look before your next booking; if you don't, the underlying advice — consolidate, stay flexible, track prices, prioritise the hard-to-get experiences — applies to any rewards program or booking site you do use.
