Mystery shopping is something that many people do to get some groceries, gas or to put a little bit of money in their pockets. My wife and I have been secret shoppers for quite some time and we do it on a regular basis. It not only gives us some pocket money, it helps us to go out to the movies and eat for free on a regular basis. We do things like bowling or miniature golf and don't pay a penny. To us, doing this is just a way to be able to get out for an evening without having to hit the bank account. As it turns out, our desire to get out turned into something really nice for us when we decided to take a mystery shopping vacation.



We are members of several mystery shopping networks and we decided to see if we could pull off the ultimate secret shop trip. It took some planning in advance, and several hours of research and phone calls to our mystery shop representatives but we were able to lay out a plan that would get us away on a vacation for practically nothing.

First, I should mention that it was a working vacation. Even though we find secret shopping to be enjoyable, it does involve some work and you do need to fill out some evaluation forms. That being said, it is something that we enjoy doing, and we have been doing it long enough that it is really old hat to us. It's natural to be nervous when you first start secret shopping, but we were well beyond that nervousness by this point.

With the help of our representatives, and the online network we were able to map out a route that included gas station shops at fairly regular intervals. Now, gas station shops are notoriously cheap, but we were able to put a little over 3 gallons of gas in our tank at every stop. SInce we were traveling for about 300 miles, we needed to stop 4 times on the way out and 4 on the way back. The total time involved was 2 hours, including the evaluation forms.

Once we were in the area, we had a series of shops lined up to provide us with some spending money and food. Most of our food came in the form of donut shops in the morning, grocery shops at lunch and then a restaurant in the evening. We ended up eating at 2 nice establishments while we were there, which was a nice bonus.

The best part of the trip was when we found out that there were 2 hotel shops available in the area. Even though we were staying for 5 days, we got to stay for 2 days free. The best part was that these were very nice hotels, and we probably would not have stayed in as nice of a hotel if it weren't for the secret shop. We had a blast, secret shopping on vacation and enjoying ourselves the whole time.