Getaway Maps — The Perfect Cure for the Destination Blues

Believe it or not, there are other places to go on vacation besides Cabo San Lucas. Heresy! Heresy, I know, but give me time to redeem myself.

The three main factors in getting away for the weekend are budget, time and location. Sure you could get away for the weekend to Hoboken, but it really doesn’t have the charm. And we’d all like to go to Fiji, but ticket prices aren’t too competitive right now.

What Farecompare has done is created a tool that factors those two variables into one that displays the lowest price of tickets in a region against a Google map. It’s called a Getaway Map; you know you want to get away at some point this fall, you know you’ve got three hundred bucks and you know you want to go somewhere in Central America. Plug in your hometown to the root Getaway Map page, click on the Central America page and you’re set.

Farecompare takes the cheapest fare from a broad survey of fares from the present to deep into 2008, so to get the price you want you may have to tinker around with the software. There can also be small discrepancies in price; international tax isn’t always calculated correctly and it will sometimes take a few hours for new fares to load (I’ll explain that later).

Along those lines though, one nice thing you can do is set up a fare alert to tell you when cheap fares to any particular region go on sale — Toledo to Europe for example. And since the fares load early, you often know about the sale before it shows up on Expedia and you can call your girlfriend in a panic telling her to break open the piggy bank. Not that I have done that.

Point is, Farecompare is a very powerful tool for those who are flexible on vacation date, budget and location. Plug in a few sample destinations and give it a try. Between you and me, Farecompare is one of the only three travel websites that I check multiple times a day.

Vacation Apartment Booking Strategies 101

As our good friend Martha pointed out last month, renting an apartment while abroad is a great way to defer egregious hotel prices, experience some culture and cultivate a little bit of adventure in a normally mundane itinerary.

A great idea on paper, but many people are still hesitant to do the research and book an apartment. In my numerous conversations with people attempting to sell the idea to them, I think it distills down to comfort. Not relative comfort of the hotel, mind you, comfort in the booking and security of a hotel room. It’s easy for one to amble up to hilton.com, plug in your destination and know that you’ll have a minbus and driver waiting for you once you exit the arrivals gate at BCN.

Yes, I’m afraid you’re going to have to work a little harder to find, book, locate and get to an apartment at your destination. But you have to concede that the benefits of this work create a more genuine, less expensive result. And while you do assume some risk in working with a private party, common sense and careful planning should guarantee you never have any problems. I’ve booked apartments in Morocco, Spain, Puerto Rico, China, Russia and the Czech Republic all in the last two years — never, not once have I had a problem.

To get you kickstarted, here are my three favorite sites for apartment hunting:

vrbo.com
Vacation Rental by Owner is a library of vacation rentals across the globe. While they don’t have a wealth of properties in third world countries, I’ve still been able to book a half dozen units through them. They also have the option to send the same message out to several properties, so if you find several candidate properties you can get business done quickly. The above apartment was booked on VRBO.

craigslist.org
Go to yourfavoritecity.craigslist.org and search under vacation rentals for classified listings of vacation rentals. Good for cities that aren’t thoroughly covered by vrbo.com

homeaway.com
Home away is a similar animal to vrbo.com with many of the same links. Some people prefer their soft friendly graphics and niceness though.

$200 from Los Angeles – Guatemala City. Got any Plans this Weekend?

There appears to be some squabbling for the Los AngelesGuatemala City (LAX-GUA) route today. Spirit, American Airlines, Taca and Mexicana all have been showing excellent fares between LA and the Latin capital, and I’m currently seeing a price of about 200$ on Taca starting this weekend through Q1 2008.

Usually, fares departing on such short notice are hard to come by. So if any of you left-coasters are free this weekend, surprise your significant other or mother with a trip down to Guatemala.

Don’t even think about telling me that you think Guatemala is dangerous. I was there in March and got there and back just fine, even with a white girl in tow.

If you want to be super safe, the trick is to leave Guatemala City as soon as you touch down and head straight for Antigua, the old capital of Guatemala. Here you’ll find an historic Central American village high in the mountains surrounded by volcanoes. Head out to see La Merced Church or stick around for a few weeks to attend spanish school.

There are a variety of activities in this safe, colonial town that will keep you busy for a long relaxing weekend without breaking the bank. And to put the safety issue in perspective, I ran into a guy from my home town, Ann Arbor as I was walking down the street one day; tourism is fairly common in Antigua.

If you get bored, you can pay a few pesos for a trip to Lake Atitlan or the top of one of the local volcanoes. I would recommend a tour in that case though, because things can get a little dicey outside of the Antigua bubble.

Use a flexible search engine such as Kayak to locate the best itineraries for your window. And as always, fare sales can disappear in the blink of an eye. If there’s any question, book now and ask questions later.

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Tips for Upgrading Your Airline Seat — On the Cheap

I used to enjoy flying, but lately it’s become such a chore. Long lines, delays, and uncomfortable seats. Well, Aviation.com offers some help for the seat situation. These tips won’t get you through airport security any quicker, but they might make a long wait on the tarmac a bit more bearable. Here are a few of the tips for scoring a more comfortable seat:

  • Fly JetBlue. JetBlue’s has added extra legroom on its Airbus jets, with at least a 36-inch seat pitch in the first 11 rows of its Airbus 320 fleet and at least 34 inches in rows 12-25 (seat pitch is the distance between any one point on the seat and that same point in the row ahead or behind). Some airlines have 32 or even 31 inches between seats.
  • Pay for an exit row. Gadling blogger Iva is all for upgrading to an exit row — while it may cost as much as $75 for all that luxurious legroom, it’s worth the price on an international flight. Aviation.com lists some exit row seats going for as low as $5.
  • Look for “premium economy.” On United, you can sometimes upgrade to “economy plus,” which has 5 more inches of legroom than regular economy. Frequent United flyers might want to look into Economy Plus Access, which allows passengers to reserve economy plus for themselves and a guest for a year of travel, which at $349 a year isn’t too expensive.
  • Use miles to upgrade to First Class. I still haven’t flown in First, but one of these days I’m going to cash in my miles for a taste of the good life.

These are just a few of many tips offered; it’s worth reading the full article at Msnbc.com.

Budget Travel’s ‘Cheapest Place in the World’ Not So Cheap

When my news feeder gave me the headline “Cheapest Places in the World,” I clicked excitedly on the link, anticipating a new traveler’s hot spot, a place where I might travel on $30 a day at the most.

I was wrong. Budget Travel’s “cheapest place,” Mancorá, Peru, may be inexpensive for someone who can afford a vacation, but it’s far beyond my backpacker’s budget. Usually when I buy a plane ticket to somewhere far, far away, it means I’m going to be gone a good long while. And if that’s the case, there are no $40/night hotel rooms — my budget ranges from $60-100 a day (Europe) to $20 a day (India). If I’m headed to Peru, I’m going to be shopping for the cheapest possible accommodation, and I have a feeling it can get a lot cheaper than $40 for a bed. Ditto for eating — Budget Traveler suggests that a $6 meal is a bargain, but the writers obviously haven’t looked to street food for their culinary delights. As we’ve written about the merits of eating street food many times here at Gadling, I won’t say more than this: Street food is generally less risky, much tastier, and a lot cheaper than restaurant food, especially if said restaurants are anywhere near tourist hot spots.


Get more tips for enjoying budget travel!

So, who is Budget Travel catering to? I’m guessing it’s the demographic I’m increasingly less a part of: the unattached, DINKs (Double Income No Kids), 20- 30-somethings who have the same travel bug in their veins from studying or volunteering abroad when they were younger, but who can afford to class up their travels just a notch. But for now, Budget Travel’s recommendations are a bit out of my budget.

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