Most of us on here have the luxury of loving airports and travel. I grew up loving railway stations for the far off distances they represented, much like modern airports do today. So to help further that wanderlust...

Does anyone here travel on the weekends for leisure? Domestic? International? Not so much a mileage run but as a way to see a new city and place. If so, how do you fund it? CC for award miles, or stashing some of the paycheck?

I'm an engineer based in ERI (although also use CLE and BUF) so am slowly starting to accrue mostly WN, UA, US miles but want to save them for international trips. Weekend trips are a little difficult with crazy $$ puddle jumpers, but you're only young once right?!

You can check the airlines websites for discounted weekend travel. UA advertises them every week. I suspect other carriers do as well.

If it is pretty cheap, you just pay for it. I tend to hoard my miles, points, etc for the bigger trips.

I subscribe to airfarewatchdog for my city. I've found some great buys on some interesting cities. I also set up fare alerts on destinations where I'm always happy to go, for example, Charleston and Portland, Maine. Once in awhile, an affordable fare is available. Then the challenge is to overlap that with dates I can travel.

I rarely use miles for domestic travel. I'm always saving for aspirational international travel.

I plan weekend getaways ahead of time.... way ahead ot time sometimes. I try to travel over most long weekends, and I find I get the best airfares booking ahead on long weekends. I'm in NY and I've found good airfares to Florida and Puerto Rico recent (I like escaping the brutal winter). Delta had good award availability to Mexico on AM.

Look into Belize. Its a doable weekender and very affordable once you cut through the airfare cost. Its one of the more affordable exotic getaways out there and its not congested with tourist.

Back in the days when my best friend and I were single, we did some cheap weekend traveling - all paid b/c I wasn't aware of the miles game yet. It would be the 2 of us, sometimes 3, sharing a 4-star hotel room in a big city that we bid for $70 on Priceline (how I miss those days). The cost after splitting among 2-3 people was minimal. Car rental was cheap too when splitting among 2-3 ppl. It was a good way to experience new places for cheap, and of course enjoy the company of friends.

I love weekend trips, and I wanted to add to my earlier comment.

I have a lot of time to travel (20 vacation days + 13 holidays), and I tend to save my mileage balances with loyalty programs for the big trips (Brazil, Israel, Cambodia). I've a bunch of secondary program balances that I use for weekend trips (Thanks You Points, US Bank Flex Points, JetBlue, Spirit, and I'm willing to use the Skymiles Pay with Miles option since SkyPesos are so useless). If I were in your shoes, I would look into spending my WN points balance first.

I don't love sitting on airplanes that much, so unless I can't help it, I'll only fly direct on weekend trips. (I made an exception for Key West this year). I think the first step for you would be making a list of all the places you can travel to efficiently from ERI, and then start tracking those fares and checking mileage availability.

I've also found that it's easiest to organize trips to big airports. When I travel, I want to leave the office, go to the airport and maximize my time on the ground. That's easy to do if you're heading to a busy airport. It's a bit harder when I want to go to a place with less frequent service.

My recent and planned weekend trips out of NYC:
*Tampa
*Key West
*San Juan, Puerto Rico
*Western Puerto Rico (flew into BQN)
*Mexico City
*Pittsburgh and Fallingwater (loved Fallingwater! that trip to PA was one my best travel experiences of 2012)
*Los Angeles
*Washington, DC (on Amtrak)
*Philly (on Megabus)
*Lancaster, PA and Amish Country (on Amtrak)
*Newport, Rhode Island (on Amtrak)

The northeast trips (Pittsburg, DC, Philly) were all on regular weekends. The rest were on long weekends. I really hate the cold, so a lot of my travel is focused on escaping the NYC winter. Your convenient trips will be a bit different, but hopefully the list is a bit of inspiration.

When I lived in Slovakia, I flew RyanAir to Frankfurt Hahn at least once a month and spent many weekends exploring South western Germany. One trip I even went to Luxembourg. The bus connections from Frankfurt Hahn were fabulous and worked so well with my schedule. I also flew Sky Europe (when it was in business) to London and Stockholm for 3-day weekends. These flights on Sky Europe and RyanAir were around 35 Euros round trip. It was great. Now I don't live where there are many cheap flights, so I am pretty much staying put.

You could also consider megabus and Amtrak - you can buy tickets with your transportation flexible savings account. I overcontribute to my transportation FSA, and use my wage works card to buy public transportation tickets. You save around 25% on your ticket (or whatever your marginal tax rate is), and the money is already set aside, so it makes budgeting easier.

NFeldman - how would you recommend spending a long weekend in Belize? Are there direct flights there from your city? I can't find any from NYC.

Don't forget that OP is based in ERI and cab fly also from CLE and BUF. I seldom find any deals from those airports except to NYC, WAS and ORD.

When traveling on business, choose flights that have a good likelihood of getting you bumped/VDB. Save up those VDB vouchers/credits.
Travel at will.

Great responses guys! Yeah most of the airfare watchdog deals I see from my tri-state airports are for BWI. As exotic as that is... haha.

Some great insight! I lived in Nice, France for a few months and consistently took advantage of EasyJet (RyanAir was just a big TOO stingy) for cheap flights all over Europe. That was truly the way to go and every weekend my friend and I were in a different country.

I'll have to start hoarding more miles, somehow someway. Might as well take a flight on the long weekends and get out rather than just cleaning around the house and running errands.

In your case, it might make sense to track flight deals from BWI as well then.

If you get Columbus Day or Veteran's Day off, those would be good weekends to start with. Airfares are generally cheaper. Labor Day and Memorial day are doable but tougher. MLK and President's Day make for nice escapes from the winter cold, but I've found tickets to the Carribean are astronomically high.

I would also figure out accommodation options early. For me, getting a cheap fare is half the battle. There's a bunch of destinations that I've up put on hold for the moment because they don't have cheap hotels (in $ or points).

I would start monitoring the posts in the Mileage Run forum. If you see fares from several eastern or mid-western cities, you can try to add one of your home airports on to the segments and see if you get a similar fare break.

I have found several short term trips (and some longer trips) that way.