If you are budget travelers like us, you might want to have Groupon as your "travel buddy" too. With the US dollar at an all time high ($1 USD ~ $1.40 AUD/SGD), we knew it would be too expensive for us to have meals in restaurants on our 3½ weeks trip in the US. So what did we do? We started searching for deals online!
Groupon immediately popped into mind as we often use it back home. This was our first time using it overseas though. It's a little tricky but not impossible. We bought some of the deals weeks in advance and planned it into our itinerary, but we also bought a couple more just hours before redeeming them. They worked out well and we were able to have several nice meals at half the price.
In case you're wondering.. no, Groupon is not paying us to post this, we just thought we'd share our experience.
If you're not yet a member, sign up here @ Groupon USA! By signing up through this link and if you make your first purchase within 72 hours, you will give us a referral credit of $10 groupon bucks. You will also get a welcome $10 off your first deal for orders over $25. You can also go to Groupon website directly, we don't mind.
Do note that even though you are a member of Groupon in another country, you would need to sign up a new account for the US version. They seem to be separate entities. If you want to sign up for Groupon Australia or Groupon Singapore. You can do that through these links too!
Here are the deals that we purchased for/during the trip..
San Francisco
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$30 value for two people for $15
Sakesan Sushi & Bistro
626 Clement St, SF 94118 |
Japanese food! Our favourite! This place has a nice ambience and was pretty busy. We waited for slightly over half an hour before we got our seats by the bar.
It doesn't look like much for the value of $30, but hey, we only paid $15 (not including tax & tips of course). The portion of the salmon on the Salmon Don was decent and the rest were fresh and tasty too. We enjoyed our Japanese treat so much we decided to try another the next night at Hanami Brasserie.
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$30 value for two people for $15
Hanami Brasserie
1220 9th Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94122
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Here we ordered a Chirashi Don and a Salmon Don. It wasn't bad but we preferred the food at Sakesan. To be fair, their specialty is ramen noodles so perhaps we should've ordered that instead. Nevertheless, we're always happy after Japanese food.
Las Vegas
We really enjoyed our Fat Burgers in Los Angeles. So we were super physced they had a deal in Vegas. Sadly, the burgers at this joint was not as good as what we had in LA.
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$16 value for $9
Fat Burger Green Valley
Henderson, 2300 Paseo Verde Parkway, 89052 |
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$20 value for $10
Café Mayakovsky
1775 East Tropicana Ave, Suite 30, 89119
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We were surprised the Russian food here was authentic (authenticated by Alex of course) and we really enjoyed it! We ordered (from top left clockwise) Red Caviar served with butter & crepes (10.95), Herring garnished with dill and served with boiled potatoes (6.95), Blinchiki - Crepes stuffed with ground beef (6.95) and Pelmeni - Homemade meat ravioli served with sour cream (7.95). Wouldn't mind coming back if we're in Vegas again.
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$48 value for two for $ 30
Gene Woods Racing (Go Kart)
121 E Sunset Rd, 8911 |
Yes! We bought a deal for Go-Karting! It was fun, the go-karts are well maintained and fast! We had 2 races of 15 laps on the circuit. As usual, Alex was the speedster and I was trailing at the back of the pack.
We also purchased another deal at Café 6 at Palms Place a $20 value for $13 but we were unable to redeem it due to the time constraints of our visit. So we contacted Groupon to explain our situation and requested for a refund. We are glad to report that Groupon was very understanding and refunded us the $13 in groupon bucks. We hope we'll be back to use it.
Chicago
Pinkys unfortunately was a letdown even though they had decent reviews. Just glad it was a $5 deal.
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$10 value for $5
Pinkys
100 W. Randolph Ave. Suite C03
Chicago, IL 60601
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$30 value for two people for $15
Polk Street Pub
548 W Polk St.
Chicago, IL 60607 |
Polk Street Pub is located at the city fringe, felt like it was in the middle
of nowhere in a really quiet neighborhood. We were pleasantly surprised
that it served really good burger, spinach salad and Philly cheese steak
sandwich! Even the mashed potatoes were on point. I wish we had discovered it sooner so that we could've gone back again.
New York
Beast of Bourbon was a little out of the way. We had to take a couple of buses to get here. It was a nice sports bar/restaurant but the food was nothing to shout about.
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$40 value for $20
Beast of Bourbon
Bedford-Stuyvesant, 710 Myrtle Ave, Brooklyn 11205 |
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All you can eat sushi lunch for two at $25
Mika Japanese Cuisine & Bar
150 Centre Street, NY 10013 |
We read some mixed reviews about Mika especially about its service. But $25 all you can eat sushi for two? Who could resist!? We couldn't!
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| One of the many plates we ordered |
We also bought a deal to replace our iPhone 5 battery.
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$39 discounted $31.20
KB Network (iPhone Battery Replacement)
38 West 32nd St, Ste 1605, between Broadway & 5th Ave, 10001
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Well, that's all the deals we got for this trip. Can't say that we will do this for all our travels, but if we could, we definitely would because it saved us some and we found some nice places to eat because of it. :)
If you liked this post, do check out Groupon and purchase through the links on our site so that we can earn a little something to keep us going. Most importantly, it doesn't cost you anything extra. We thank you for your support.
