My family is headed to Squaw Valley for a ski vacation in March, and I've been looking for discounted lift ticket options.  I recently discovered the following website, which describes discounted lift ticket deals at numerous ski areas in California, Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon.  To qualify for the discount, it just requires purchasing 10 gallons of Shell fuel, and requesting a voucher.

There are some date restrictions, depending on the ski area.  This deal offers 2 for 1 lift tickets. Please check out the link below for all the details:

http://www.skifreedeals.com/ski-resorts-all.html

Some of the resorts participating in this promotion include the following:

- Alpine Meadows

- Kirkwood

- Squaw Valley

- Copper Mountain

- Loveland

- Crested Butte

- Winter Park

- Hoodoo

- Mt. Hood Meadows

- Timberline

I live in Bend, Oregon - a town of about 80,000 people in the center of Oregon.  I don't know exactly what the criteria is for deal websites, but Bend is currently not a city on most of the deal sites.

Bend does have Zing Dealz (http://www.zingdealz.com/) and Do Local Deals (http://dolocaldeals.com/) but until now, it has not attracted any of the larger, more well-known deal sites (Groupon, etc.).

That, however, is changing.  Living Social has hired a local Bendite to establish Bend as a city in its deal choices.  I have heard the launch will be happening soon and will keep you posted!

This post may be a bit too late for Christmas shopping, but it can be something to keep in mind going forward.  If you plan to purchase anything online, be sure to link to the website that you are going to purchase from through an incentive site.  

Here is what I mean:

This year I went to www.mileageplanshopping.com prior to purchasing any online gifts.  Many retail websites (such as rei.com, macys.com, etc.) can be accessed through that website, and I earned Alaska Airlines frequent flier miles just by linking to the sites this way.  It's an easy thing to do, and allows you to get additional credit for making online purchases that you would make anyway.

Check out the shopping link at your favorite airline frequent flier site to do this.  Or, some banks and credit card companies offer similar incentives to link to online retailers through their sites (usually by allowing you to accrue additional points, or even cash back, if you use their debit or credit cards).

One online retailer that never seems to linked through these incentive sites is www.amazon.com.  

If you are motivated to take an extra step to save additional money, I recommend checking out www.retailmenot.com or www.dealcatcher.com to obtain discount codes which you may be able to use when making an online purchase.