Points, not paychecks
We fly the family on transferable points: the right cards, the right transfer partners, and the sweet-spot redemptions most people never find.
Not travel agents · Just obsessed
We're a little obsessed with the family trip.
A family travel journal out of Fort Worth. We plan the trips we wished someone had planned for us, then hand you the whole plan: where we stayed, what we'd skip, and the photography to make you want to go.
Hi, we're the Ices
We plan our whole year around the next trip .
Jamey does the obsessive research and carries the camera. Melissa makes a real itinerary survivable with a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old in tow. We've been at this for eighteen years: Santa Fe weekends, nine weeks across Italy, and a lot of boarding passes in between.
Ice Travels is where we write the trips down: scored, photographed, and honest. So yours doesn't start from a blank page.
Meet the family →
The Ices, est. 2008
What you'll find here
Everything we wish we'd had before our first big trip.
No. 01
Field Reports
Every place, scored the same way every time. Where we stayed, the non-negotiable, and the part most guides leave out: what we'd skip.
Read the reports →No. 02
The Guides
Deep-dive PDFs: the real day-by-day plans, where we stayed and ate, the kid logistics. Some are free for an email; the best ones we charge for.
Browse the guides → Start hereNo. 03
Travel Hacking
How we fly the family in lie-flat seats and sleep in suites for a fraction of the price. The whole system is in one guide: the cards, the sweet spots, and the upgrade email that's gotten us a suite almost every time.
Get the guide →- 26
- Field reports, one rubric
- 9
- Guides on the shelf
- 18
- Years on the road
- Hundreds
- Trips home to Santa Fe
Why we don't wait
The kids are this age once.
Eighteen summers with them under our roof, and we're already past half.
Why we don't wait
Three reasons we stopped waiting.
Why we quit saying someday.
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It's the one thing we buy that we never regret.
Not because of the photos. Because of the kid who orders in Italian and the dinner we still talk about years later. That stuff outlasts anything else we've spent money on.
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“When they're older” is a trap.
There's no perfect age. Little kids travel better than anyone warns you; they just need a parent who planned for the meltdown before it happened.
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The window is shorter than it looks.
We stopped waiting for more money and a better time. We go now and figure out the rest, and so far the rest has worked out.
The Ice Travels standard
Every place we go gets the same honest read.
A field report, scored the same way every time, so you know exactly what you're getting before you book. Where we stayed. The one thing you can't skip. And the part most guides won't tell you: what we'd skip.
Field Report · No. 01
35.6870° N, 105.9378° W
Santa Fe New Mexico, USA
Worth the flight- Where we stayed
- Our own two places: Casa de Ice, a 6-bedroom 1950s adobe estate on 17 acres, and Casa de Camino, a design-forward home that sleeps 14.
- The non-negotiable
- A private hot tub at Ten Thousand Waves after a hike, then tori no karaage at Izanami. Plus a slow morning on the Plaza and a walk up Canyon Road, window-shopping the galleries.
- What we'd skip
- Nothing in town is a trap. But the Loretto Chapel staircase is a 15-minute stop, not an afternoon.
The map so far
Where we've been.
All 26 are live now, Santa Fe to Rome to the Mexican Caribbean. We're already back out shooting the next batch.
Santa Fe
Worth the flightNew Mexico, USA
Florence
Worth the flightTuscany, Italy
The Dolomites
Worth the flightSouth Tyrol, Italy
Paris
Worth the flightFrance
New Orleans
Worth the flightLouisiana, USA
St. Croix
Worth the detourU.S. Virgin Islands
New York City
Worth the flightNew York, USA
30A
Worth the detourFlorida, USA
Jackson Hole
Worth the flightWyoming, USA
Aspen
Worth the flightColorado, USA
Maui
Worth the flightHawaii, USA
Lake Garda
Worth the detourNorthern Italy
Provence
Worth the flightProvence, France
Rome
Worth the detourLazio, Italy
Tuscany
Worth the flightCortona, Italy
Sestri Levante
Worth the flightLiguria, Italy
Gaeta & Sperlonga
Worth the detourLazio Coast, Italy
Napa
Worth knowing aboutCalifornia, USA
Cabo
Worth knowing aboutBaja California Sur, Mexico
Zihuatanejo
Worth the flightGuerrero, Mexico
Pagosa Springs
Worth knowing aboutColorado, USA
Akumal & Tulum
Worth the flightRiviera Maya, Mexico
Port Aransas
Worth knowing aboutTexas, USA
Fort Lauderdale
Worth knowing aboutFlorida, USA
Mineral Wells
Worth knowing aboutTexas, USA
Delhi
Worth knowing aboutIndia
Santa Fe · New Mexico
Stay with us · Santa Fe
In Santa Fe, we're the hosts.
It's our favorite city on earth: Jamey's grandparents lived there thirty years, and we keep finding our way back. Casa de Ice and Casa de Camino are ours: some of the highest-ranked Airbnbs in the area, huge gorgeous estates ten to fifteen minutes from the Plaza, with the mountains for a backyard. It's the same eye we bring to the reports, pointed at where you sleep.
See the housesHow we afford it
We mostly fly free. Here's how.
Credit-card points are the closest thing to a cheat code we've found, and most people leave them on the table. We wrote the whole system down in one guide: the cards in order, the sweet spots, and the email that's gotten us a suite almost every time.
The Playbook
Trade homes, skip hotels
Home Exchange and ThirdHome turn an empty week into a free villa. We've stayed in places we could never have booked, for the cost of cleaning.
Kids change the math
Lap infants, free-night certificates, family suites that sleep four on points. Kids don't make points travel harder; they're the reason we got this good at it.
Hotels, brands & tourism boards
We make the content people actually want to publish.
Pro-grade photography and real family footage, with full usage rights, edited to your property's look. Host us, and leave with a library you can use, not just a tagged post.
See what we offer
Follow along
Watch the next trip happen.
The reports go deep after the fact. The day-to-day — the wrong turns, the meal worth flying for, the kids melting down and then lighting up — we post as it happens. Come along.
No itinerary for this part
We're not getting this time back.
So we book the trip, take the photo, and let the laundry wait. The list is free. Come do the same.
Start with a field reportFree to download
Get every field report in your inbox.
New field reports the day we publish them, plus the living version of our points playbook: the cards and sweet spots we're running right now. No spam; we're too busy traveling.