Axxess Card

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You may or may not have heard of Entertainment.com or the “Entertainment book” depending on where you live and whether it’s available in your area.  Well, Santa Barbara has its own version of an entertainment book called the Axxess Card.  It’s basically a card (and accompanying book) that is chock full of offers and discounts at local businesses, including restaurants, auto shops, golf clubs, salons, and a ton of others.  

You pay $30 for your membership, and it’s good from October through the following December (15 months!).  The card itself has a tiny grid of numbers that coordinate with each of the one-time deals in the book, and whenever you use up one of those deals, the business will punch a hole over the coordinating number.  Then the book has recurring offers that you can get just by showing your Axxess card so they know you have it.

Even if you’re not so good about remembering to use your Axxess card (ahem, like me), it only takes a few uses to make up for the $30 you spent to begin with.  Last year, Joe and I got discounted Disneyland and California Adventure tickets through Axxess, so we got to go for our anniversary without breaking the bank quite as hard as we would have otherwise!  That alone saved us more than the cost of the book.  

My favorite thing about the Axxess card is that it helps us to branch out and discover new places, rather than just going to the same ones over and over.  I mean, we DO still go to a lot of the same places over and over, because we love them!  But Axxess has shown us new places to love that we otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

My second favorite thing about Axxess is that they partner with schools and non-profits every year to help them raise money.  So if you buy an Axxess book through a friend’s kid, $10 of the $30 goes toward their school or whatever they’re raising money for.  

And it just so happens that my dance team (which you read about yesterday) is raising money for our HUGE trip next year to World Championships in Nashville, TN!  We are in the process of getting our 501(c) to become an official non-profit, but the lovely folks at Axxess still let us go ahead and sell books.  

So if you are a local and you haven’t already bought your 2015 Axxess card, help me help you!  I will gladly deliver a book right to your doorstep, no joke.