Contest Entry Advances to the Next Round for Trip to Australia!

Now wait, I am not announcing the Grand Prize winner. This is the entry from Pearls of Travel Wisdom. First, I want to explain how it was selected.

We had a choice to select either the best tip received, our favorite tip, or simply a random drawing. As I expected, there were so many good tips that it would have been impossible to select the ‘best’ one. While I could have chosen my favorite, again there were so many that I would have fretted about this for days.

This is why I chose the random option. At the close of the contest, I assigned a number to each of the qualifying entries. There were more than 400 entries, each with its own number.

Next, my husband was given the total number of entries but not any names. I asked him to create a winning entry number using random.org’s generator. Since my husband had no names, there was no way he could know who he was selecting as our blog finalist.

My husband then sent the random generated number to our son, who matched it up with a name. Voila, we had our entry to the big drawing!

The integrity of the contest is important to me. No one in my family was allowed to enter any of the blogs and that’s why we chose to use three people to determine a winner.

Let me make this clear again: This is the entry from our blog only, not the Grand Prize winner! Our entry will be placed in a pool with nineteen other blog entries. The winner of that drawing, selected by BoardingArea, will win the trip to Australia.

Without further ado, our blog’s entry to the Big Dance comes from….

Laura S., who posted on the contest with the name ‘Mechteach’. She will now enter the final drawing, along with the other blog entries.

Laura offered two excellent tips that I want to share:

• Be flexible when it comes to dates and destinations
• Be flexible using points at all, keep an eye on hotel/airfare costs and be willing to cancel if the price is too high

If Laura wins the Grand Prize, Randy Petersen and the other fine folks at BoardingArea will give me a new iPad. Yes, BoardingArea is giving an iPad to the blogger who submitted the entry that becomes the Grand Prize winner.

I will selfishly be pulling for Laura to win because if I get the iPad, that means another contest for my readers! I will have a separate drawing for a brand new iPad in May.

Thanks again to everyone for entering and congratulations to Laura and all the other blog finalists. Very best wishes to each of you winning the trip of a lifetime!

Wow, this contest is lots of fun. Randy, can we do one of these every month?