This rotten winter might have you hankering to take a vacation. And the less-than-robust economy means you’d probably like to travel for the least amount of money. It is time for money saving travel tips. Always look for deals and ways to save money, but you need to watch out for scams as well. If your planning a vacation check out all of the deals, take advantage of traveling in time frames that are not as popular.
Visit travel shows and pick up tips as well as coupons for discounts on various trips and places to visit.
Money Saving Travel Tips
To get an airline’s lowest airfare, try calling the carrier instead of booking online. You may think all the available inventory is on the web. Not even close. It’s only the inventory they want to put online. The same applies to hotels.
As an example, The lowest fare online: American’s $809. Calling American directly and asking if the airline had a “positioning flight” (when a carrier needs to get one plane from one city to another); netted a flight for $109.
If you searched for airfares on a site but didn’t buy a ticket, use a different browser or computer on your next visit or clear your computer’s cookies and cache. Otherwise, you may be shown a higher fare because you left cookies the first time and the site knows you’re eager to buy.
If you belong to a Frequent Flier program, check its site for fares using your number and without it. “Delta offered me a fare for $529 and then I went put in my Frequent Flier number, the fare suddenly jumped to $607,” They said there was a different class of tickets for Frequent Fliers.”
Train lovers with time on their hands should look into Amtrak’s 15-day go-anywhere deal. “You can get off and on anytime and see all of your dysfunctional relatives in one trip for $500; $250 for kids under 12.
Exploit the cruise industry’s bad publicity (the Costa Concordia and Carnival Triumph disasters) and excess capacity. “It’s a buyer’s market with rates as low as $149”.
Call a hotel directly for its best room rate rather than booking online or phoning its 800 number. “You can get more discounts from a phone call than from a website,”. Conversely, if the hotel rate is higher than usual, check the online price. Sometimes they forget to update the prices online.
When you call, ask for the manager on duty or director of sales, not “reservations,”. That’s the person who knows that a wedding just canceled and the hotel suddenly lost 30 booked rooms.
Ask value-added questions: Can my kids stay free? Can they eat free? I recently had to rent a car in San Francisco and asked the hotel if I could get free parking and I did. The parking normally costs $42 a night.
Consider alternative lodgings to hotels. “I love hotels, but they’re rarely the most interesting place to stay and they’re usually the most expensive,”. One person bragged about renting a two-bedroom apartment in Venice for $83 a night.
Scams
Watch out for “free” travel offers on Facebook. What may look like a giveaway of two free Southwest tickets from “Allison” is really a ruse to trick people into giving up personal information.
Never click through a link, even if it looks legitimate.
Don’t agree to rent out someone’s home until you speak, Skype or FaceTime with them. “Legitimate renters are happy to talk to you. Skype or FaceTime conversations are best because you can then insist on seeing the whole apartment or house.
Bargain destinations
Visit countries where few Americans vacation.
Go where the local currency has been pounded.
But perhaps the biggest bargain of all (once you get there): Bali in the South Pacific. You can almost live there on $5 a day.”
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National Geographic Adventure considers the Rafting river Rogue whitewater the best wildlife viewing of all the western rivers:
White water rafting adventure tours through the rain forest will make your Costa Rica rafting whitewater vacation truly one of a kind ! Costa rafting Rica whitewater can be a great vacation adventure.
We can all use travel tips to help us plan a successful trip. If you plan to be driving to your next destination vacation, plan your route in advance. Make sure to travel with a fully charged cell phone for emergencies. Or make sure that you have a charger in your car.
The National Do not call list is one way to reduce spam calls that we all get from time to time. But does it really work? Well the answer appears to be partially. We still get a lot of calls from people trying to sell us various things. These include the usually duct cleaning services, rug cleaning services, lawn services etc. These are not too bad except when they call at dinner time and interrupt your meal with your family. This is probably what ticks most people off. As soon as you know that it is one of these companies, most people will just hang up and that is the end of it.
Many Canadians spend their vacation in the US. Snow birds make the annual trip south every fall to escape the snow and ice in Canada. They head to Florida, Texas, Arizona and California to spend the winter. They head home once the winter is over. Canadians have enjoy warm temperatures and also a strong dollar for the past 5 years. However now the dollar is not so strong and Canadians travel cost going up means it is going to cost more.
We put together a list of travel tips that we feel are must haves for traveling while in your own country or even in other countries. This list is based on our own personal experiences and includes the items that we have found helpful. You may not need these things all of the time on every trip, but you will need some of them from time to time. Just having them will give you peace of mind and make your trip much more pleasant in many situations. Enjoy your trip and if you have one that you would like us to add to the list, just leave us a comment and we will be happy to add it to the list.
One of the things we like to do on this particular blog is to write about unique experiences and interesting topics. This particular post will be about a barbecue restaurant that we discovered in Biloxi Mississippi, actually just outside of Biloxi. This restaurant is actually a barbecue restaurant located on route 57 just north of interstate 10. It is a barbecue restaurant, called the Shed! This restaurant is actually very rustic and pieced together from corrugated tin, wooden posts and a collection of knickknacks from various locations around the state. It is situated beside the bayou. In the summertime people can eat outside on the bayou. As a result it is a very unique place to visit.
There’s a campsite nearby and also an RV park. This would be a great place to spend an evening listening to blues music and having a fantastic meal. The interior of the Shed Barbeque restaurant is just like the outside. Very rustic and down to earth literally. Patrons can sit at the bar and enjoy a few beers along with their meal. They can head over to the dining area which are picnic tables on a gravel floor. This is as basic as it gets. The atmosphere is extremely interesting and enjoyable. We have talked to other patrons who tell us that they go to the Shed every time they are in the area. The combination of food and eclectic decoration is wonderful.
In case you are wondering this is not an advertisement written by the restaurant staff. Although it might sound like it. We really like the food . We really enjoy going to this particular restaurant every time we are in Mississippi along the golf coast.
We just read an article about tipping, which suggested that just about anyone who provides a service to you should be tipped. This is part of our research about, ” Do Americans tip enough?”. This includes the taxi driver, the person who delivers furniture to your home. Also the person who cuts your grass, the restaurant waitress, the bartender and on and on and on. There have been some acceptable norms in terms of tipping and most people will tip 15% for average service.
The cost of parking in downtown areas in most cities in North America has become the incredibly expensive. For example if you are parking using parking meters it can be as much as three or four dollars an hour. If you use a parking lot that is maintained by a parking authority is not uncommon to pay $20-$30 a day. Whether you are going to work or a tourist visiting the city it makes sense to plan your parking so that you can save money and reduce your overall cost for your vacation.
This is another really great restaurant in Bucerias, Mexico. Just down the block from Marks restaurant, you might not even go onto this restaurant because it is also a boutique at the front with a great looking tropical restaurant at the back of the building. You may think it is just another small store, however if you go inside and go to the back of the store there is a great restaurant with great food to try!
Tropical outdoor setting with a band playing on some evenings. As you can see from this picture, it is a very enjoyable spot to have a glass of wine or a beer. Perhaps some tequila, which is Mexico’s drink of choice.
This page is totally dedicated to providing a running news source of all of the posts that we have written over the years. In fact our news twitter feed will show you a random feed of posts with links to our various web sites. We constantly update our posts and we also add new posts every week. Check them out from time to time!
Most people who are going vacation and only have a couple of weeks to be away from work. They want to maximize time that they have while on vacation and as a result they’re paying great deal for hotels and airfare and meals. But there are other ways to go on vacation and have your cost kept to a minimum while still enjoying all of the things that there are to enjoy in other countries. If you are wondering how to take a 4 month vacation, read on. We have some great ideas for you to consider. Developing a plan to take a 4 month vacation is very important as well.
We cannot understand why anyone really would want to go to all inclusive resorts in Puerto Vallarta. It is not because they are not nice places to go. They are extremely great places to go. Especially if you want to go somewhere and be pampered, not worry about a thing and not even be concerned about where you are going to eat breakfast, lunch or dinner.
This is a really interesting story that puts earth’s population in perspective. If you could fit the entire Earth’s Population into a village consisting of 100 people, maintaining the proportions of all the people living on Earth, that village would consist of
There is no doubt that Palm Springs and really all of the valley towns derive their lively hood from tourists. Vacation rentals of homes, condo’s and of course hotels / motels provide many places to stay. During the spring Palm Springs Rental traffic swells the city to at least double its normal size. All of the snowbirds that are in town for the season take up many rooms. You can literally see the difference in the amount of people in the city after March 31st. The majority of the snow birds leave town at this time.
We saw this email and just had to include it here on our blog because we are Proud to be Canadian. Not sure who the writer is, but whoever it was he did a good job! This represents the English side of Canada. There may be something like this hanging around for our french contingent. If there is, let us know and send it along. We would be happy to include it on this blog. This is both funny and also contains a lot of truth to it as well.
We have traveled a lot over the years. Travel Tips for Busy Parents will help you prepare for your next trip. We have found that there are a number of steps you can take to make your travel more enjoyable and a lot less stressful. This post is an attempt to help other people who love to travel. They want to be organized and enjoy their trips at the same time without feeling the need to take a huge amount of clothing, or have problems with lost luggage etc. This is our list of Travel Tips for Busy Parents and what works for us. If you feel that some additional items should be added, feel free to leave us a comment. We will be happy to add your item to the list if it makes sense for travelers. Here we go:
At the Village Pub Palm Springs, the beer is cheap during happy hour, $2.00 for draft beer all day long, except after 7pm on most nights when it gets busy unless you go upstairs to the bar. The atmosphere is also ok with subdued lights, fire pits and heaters to keep you warm outdoors on cool evenings. Yes, it can get quite cool in the desert.