Brewery Tours and Wine Tasting: Free, or at least Cheap

by Jamie Rhein on

Martha’s post on boozing for cheap reminded me of brewery tours. When I was a student at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark through the Danish International Student program (DIS), I was mostly broke and determined to have enough money for a month long trip through Europe before I headed back to the U.S. Most people in my program were in the same life of getting by on little cash. For fun and frolic, there was nothing like a Carlsburg or Tuborg Brewery tour in Copenhagen on a Friday.

I went to each brewery at least four times over the course of three months. There were so many people from my program that headed to Tuborg on a regular basis that the brewery gave us a huge party at the end of the semester. The catch was, we had to take the tour before the party. Some in my group were able to recite, word for word, the beer-making process and knew all the guides by name. For current review of Carlsburg, click here. The Tuborg Brewery bottling hall building I went to has been changed to the Experimentarium science museum.

Although there’s an Anheuser-Busch brewery in Columbus, this one doesn’t give tours. No free beer for me on a Friday. Of the 12 breweries in the U.S., you can see how Budweiser and other Anheuser-Busch products are made on a FREE tour at five on them: Fairfield, California; St. Louis, Missouri; Ft. Collins, Colorado; Merrimack, New Hampshire; and Jacksonville, Florida. At each you can drink FREE beer. At all but the Fairfield brewery, you can also see the horse stables of the Clydesdales, the brewery’s trademark.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin is a beer drinkers hot spot. There are three breweries that give tours. The Miller Brewing Company tour is FREE. I went on this slick tour the summer after I got out of the Peace Corps during my across the United States by bus sweep. I still remember the great time I had hanging out in the beer garden listening to music and visiting with my friends. Of, course, the beer garden isn’t open in the winter, but the Miller Inn is. At Lakefront Brewery the tour will cost you $5, unless you go on Friday. In that case, it’s $10. A fish fry is included in the price, so when you think of that, what a deal. You also get to keep the glass. This brewery is considered the most environmentally friendly in Wisconsin. The Sprecher Brewing Company tour is a chance to brush up on some beer brewing history at the Rathskeller museum before taking in the tour and the tasting. The tours cost $3 for adults and $2 for seniors. The $1 charge for the under 21 crowd is donated to charities. You get to take the souvenir glass home.

I haven’t been to Sarnac Brewery, but after discovering its Web site, I thought, this is appealing. The brewery has been making the good stuff since 1888. Personally, I love the labels and we do buy the beer, even in Ohio. Spending time in Utica, NY in the Adirondacks wouldn’t be a bad way to spend some time, either. Look at all there is to do in the city itself. I assume the tours are free since the Web site doesn’t say otherwise. You need to call for reservations, so ask.

I’ve also been on the Guinness brewery Storehouse tour in Dublin, Ireland. Even though I’m not too fond of heavy beer, the tour was great and I was more than happy to down the complimentary pint at the end of it.

Where ever your traveling, check out the brewery options. Maybe, you’ll find a local brewing company that offers tours and tastes. People who brew beer are passionate about it and it’s catching. Also, if you’re not a beer drinker and you have children along, these are kid-friendly places with soda options.

P.S. I noticed that I included wine-tasting in the title of this post, but didn’t included that. Stay-tuned.

$1 Bus Rides to Major American Cities

by Neil Woodburn on

I’ve spent many hours of my life in transit to San Francisco. Back when I was a student in college, I’d make the six hour drive from Los Angeles in my car. My only cost was about $15 for gas. I was quite proud of this and never thought I’d be able to make the journey for any cheaper.

I am happy to now be proven wrong by a company called Megabus.

Megabus currently operates in 21 cities across America. Sure, Greyhound services a lot more places, but do they sell seats for just one buck? Nope, I don’t think so.

Megabus does, however. As long as you book early enough, tickets cost just $1. And no, there aren’t $50 worth of taxes added on like budget airlines tend to do; just a 50 cents per reservation fee. That means I can make the six hour trek from Los Angeles to San Francisco for an incredible $1.50. Another buck will get me to Las Vegas, and yet another will get take me all the way to San Diego.

This, folks, is a great deal!

Top Five Foreign Travel Search Engines to Fuel Your Budget Travel

by Grant Martin on

With the tanking dollar and rising fuel costs, it’s getting harder and harder to find cheap fares out of the US these days. But not all markets are created equal. Airlines and travel agents base their prices on supply and demand; if they decide to cater to a particular country or region, often times the prices from that area will reflect it. As the New York Times recently reported, it can therefore be useful to try querying an off-shore search engine in addition to your favorite domestic website.

I’ve been doing this for a few years with mixed luck. What I’ve found is that with a little bit of patience and clever planning, one can frequently find competitive fares by searching on foreign sites. The difficulty is in finding the best engine and method suiting your needs; not all sites accept US-based credit cards nor are they in English. Occasionally, you’ll also have to deal with paper tickets and will need to find a foreign address to send them to. But these are small hurdles on your quest to dirt-cheap fares. A little research and patience and you’ll be well on your way to secret low-cost tickets from abroad.

Luckily, you have me to give you a head start. I’ve compiled a list of my top five favorite tools for finding good deals from foreign sites. Don’t forget to convert your currency!

1. zuji.com
As I reported earlier this week on Gadling, Zuji is a powerful tool built off the Travelocity engine, with the added benefit of broad flex searches. I’ve booked several mainland China flights through Zuji with no problem — just watch out for their added taxes at the end.

2. kayak.co.uk
The British analog of kayak.com, kayak.co.uk (or kayak.fr or de.kayak.com) provides a similar fare search from a European perspective. As the NYT article mentioned, Paris-Nice flights researched on kayak.fr were generally cheaper than those found domestically.

3. opodo.co.uk
There is a faint stench of Oribtz on the Opodo website, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of the operation, you can’t go wrong with the solid architecture on the site. I subscribe to the weekly fare deals coming from Opodo, and occasionally they come up with some competitive prices.

4.travelprice.be
Travelprice only comes in two flavors, French and Dutch, but that just adds to the authenticity of the site. Pawing around the reservations page you’ll find a lot of the same options as in any other search engine (airport codes are always the same) and you should be able to find your itinerary after tinkering around for a few minutes.

5. flylc.com
If you’re traveling solely in Europe its also always handy to check the low cost carriers to see if any of them serve your route; most of their itineraries don’t show up on legacy travel search engines. Flylc has a comprehensive list of city pairs and the airlines that serve them, just click your departure and destination and you’ll see what carriers are available. I always cross reference flylc flights to the legacy carrier itineraries to see if there is a huge fare difference.

Zuji.com: Singapore’s Flexible Travelocity

by Grant Martin on

If you’re anything like me, you want to spend as little as humanly possible on your plane tickets. If this means you have to fly on Air Plus Comet, a cargo plane or as a courier (impossible in this day and age, by the way), it doesn’t matter. As long as you land in Madrid/Ibiza/Topeka ok, you can handle the temporary discomfort.

For this reason, it pays to be flexible on booking flights; we all know that flying on a weekday or off-season is less expensive, but legacy online travel agents like Orbitz and Travelocity make it difficult to do a broad search. Sure, you can sometimes factor in a few days of flexibility or maybe even a week or month. But if you just need to “get to Greece some time next summer for as cheap as possible,” these engines don’t have that capability.

Alternatively, try using Zuji.com, the Singapore-based company loosely associated with Travelocity. If you select “other” as your country and select “flights,” you can run a flex search between any number of months and just ask it to find the cheapest fare across the board. Depending on the strength of the Singapore Dollar you can also occasionally find cheaper standard fares than on a legacy site. Granted, you’re going to have to convert from SGD to USD and they do impose taxes right at the end of the transaction, Zuji is still an excellent resource for research into budget fares. If you have qualms about booking on an offshore site, do your research on Zuji and book through Orbitz or directly through the carrier.

Northwest Airlines Sponsors Destination and Miles Giveaway

by Grant Martin on

For those of you frequent flyers out there who subscribe to Northwest Airline’s Worldperks program, they just launched their fall promo. Dubbed Mystery Miles, this season’s dish is another points-based program, encouraging travelers to fly certain routes in certain fare classes to collect points. Come January 31, points are tabulated and you get a mileage bonus for the number of points you earned. This can be anywhere in the neighborhood of 500 – 100,000 miles, but 95% of us will be under 10k.

Earlier this year (or was it last?) I participated in the ‘Mile Safari’ promotion where I earned points in a similar fashion. While it didn’t turn into a wealth of miles, six thousand miles here and there never hurt anyone, especially if all I had to do was plug my frequent flyer number into their form.

In addition, Northwest will be posting clues on mystery destinations each week. If you can figure out and submit the location, you’ll be entered in a weekly drawing to win round trips to that destination. And I have a feeling that once the clues come out you’ll be able to Google the answers you need to partake. Lets hope the fantasy destinations aren’t Haiti and Ohio.