I WON A TRIP!

April Fools.

If I fooled you, you haven't been paying close attention. It's too early for me to have won a trip. I only started this sweeps extravaganza less than four weeks ago.

Friends (and they know who they are) have been asking:

Where do you find these contests?

I have been telling them:

Google, Google, Google.

After experimenting with general key words like “travel contests” and “travel sweepstakes,” I found that I find the most sweeps when I get destination or category specific. So far, “Win a Trip to [INSERT DESTINATION/CATEGORY] 2006” has yielded the best finds. I include the year to try and weed out sweeps of years past, some of which languish in cyberspace like stale pastry. Finding a swell sweeps that has already closed can disappoint, as did this one, a trip to Venice,: www.powells.com/contest_venice.html (sniff, sniff). They can also entertain, like one to see gospel singer Bobby Jones perform at the Umbria Jazz Festival.

There are a few places online that aggregate travel sweeps. I find them through Google. About.com’s Susan Breslow Sardone posts sweeps ostensibly for the nuptially inclined at http://honeymoons.about.com/. In March, none of the sweeps specified that entrants had to use their prize for their honeymoon. Bizarrely, one of the sweeps she posted last month was for a trip for an ice fishing trip to Alaska, for THREE, sponsored by Chivas Regal: www.thisisthelife.com/alaska/?tag=home.) I could see how going ice fishing in Alaska might appeal to a sliver of honeymooners, but with a friend along? It’s open through April 30 if anyone’s interested – but please promise that you won’t enter if this will be your honeymoon, unless the third wheel is a factotum schooled in ice fishing.

Julie Register serves up spa sweeps on her Discover Spas website, at www.discoverspas.com/spacontests.shtml.

Then there’s FlyerTalk, an online community of frequent flyer obsessives founded by self-described frequent flyer guru Randy Peterson. I’d poked around the site several years ago, but never ventured into any of the discussions, which range from specific airlines’ programs to chats about destinations until recently. Frankly, on my first visits, the site felt cumbersome and befuddling. Plus, the participants post in their own lexicon of abbreviations and obscure (to me) travel acronyms, another offputting attribute. These are the types who know all the major airport codes by heart. (For more on that topic, here’s an article on the genesis of airport codes. www.skygod.com/asstd/abc.html.)

To give you a sense of the breadth of FlyerTalk discussions, check out the index at www.flyertalk.com/forum/archive/index/php. For a revealing take on the obsessive culture of the FlyerTalk set, I highly recommend this series that ran in Slate in 2004: www.slate.com/id/2102698/entry/2102715/ The writer, Marisa Bowe, no hardcore FlyerTalk participant she, accompanies a group of diehard FlyerTalkers who managed to score $61 roundtrip tickets to Ireland due to a computer mistake. It’s one of the funniest pieces of travel writing I’ve ever read.

So, I’d forgotten about FlyerTalk until, two weeks ago, when I Google-stumbled on an archived index from the site’s Free Travel Contests and Sweepstakes forum. (I’d Googled “travel contests.”) True to type, there is a forum for sweeps geeks. (The URL is www.flytertalk.com/forum.forumdisplay.php?f=223. Registration is required. Go to the home page if you can’t access the forum through this URL.) It didn’t take more than few clicks to notice that two posters in particular, “outoftown” and “SkiAdcock,” are in the sweeps loop bigtime. They post details of travel sweeps with unfathomable frequency. FYI: FlyerTalk participants tend to post incognito, ergo the code names.

Sometimes, I’ve already unearthed sweeps posted on the FlyerTalk forum, other times I have not. Of those that are new to me, a fair number don’t interest me. Some don't include airfare. Some are to destinations that are not high on my travel wish list. Some are to faraway destinations that I hope to visit one day, but the prize is not for enough time to make the trip worthwhile. Some are just not my thing.

For instance, there was a post earlier this week for a trip for two to L.A., with a visit to the Playboy Mansion, a promotion for Basic Instinct II. I have no interest in flying cross country to see Hugh Hefner’s version of utopia and watch Sharon Stone perform in a role that strikes me as a major miscalculation as far as aging with grace and dignity goes, a role that launched a thousand "does she still have it" comparisons. (Okay, for those of you who might want to enter the L.A./ Playboy Mansion sweeps, here you go: www.playboy.com/basicinstincts2/sweeps.)
Of course, the FlyerTalk sweeps forum does turn me on to the occasional new-to-me travel sweeps that I end up entering.

If you check out the FlyerTalk forum, take care to read the comments, which often enlarge the fine print. Folks post basics from the official guidelines, but leave the combing to others. Of course, this is understandable, considering the number of sweeps these folks post.

Okay, enough process.

Go for it.