Comments on: 4 Less Obvious Things You Should Do Before Your Vacation

By: Sheila

Sheila — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:42:06 +0000

@ Andy – great additions.

@ Lissete – That stinks that your interisland flight was cancelled without notification. Ugg! I’m glad you were able to catch the earlier flight and not have to spend 5 unnecessary hours sitting at the airport.

@ Dave – Hahaha! I might add to make sure to purchase snake repellent to ward off all the Hawaiian snakes. What’s sad but true is that I see people asking those very questions about passports, money, etc pretty often.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:12:21 +0000

Here are a few of the more obvious things that you will need to do:

Get vaccinated. You will need to get vaccinated for a range of diseases to protect the local Hawaii population. There are about 50 shots in all which are administered in stomach and kidney areas of the body. The process takes about four hours and is extremely painful. (Bring something to bite on)

Don’t forget your passport. If you don’t have your passport you will, not be allowed to board the aircraft.

You should go to your bank to exchange your money for Hawaiian currency before you arrive, not after. You won’t be able to buy anything until you do this so you should just get it out of the way. Current exchange rate is about 3 Puka Shells to 1 US dollar.

Just kidding… Don’t worry about that stuff.

By: Lissete

Lissete — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:42:24 +0000

Great tips Sheila! I thought that I was on the ball since I did do everything on this list. I checked my flights religiously. Our Miami-LAX flight changed 4x in 7 months, but each time, I received notice from Spirit. . Even with my diligent planning, I neglected to check our interisland flights. Our Maui-Kona flight was scheduled for noon and when I checked online to see if they had online chck-in, I see that they had changed it to 5PM! Way too late for us. So we called to see if we could be changed and they told us that our only option was a 9AM flight. It was past 7AM. We had to quickly pack, return condo keys, fuel up & return car and hightail it to the airport. We made it. But it ticks me off that (I later found out) they had not been flying the noon flight for over a month. How hard can it be to send out a quick form letter to everyone. Even Spirit does that. We would have been stuck at the airport from noon to 5! Not very fun in my opinion.

By: Andy Beal

Andy Beal — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:53:43 +0000

Great list! Some minor ones to add:

Get your newspaper and mail held.

If you have a managed alarm system, you can let them know where to reach you–in case your alarm goes off.

Make sure you have plenty of prescription medications with you.