Book Hotels Cheaper

Trip Insurance

I have posted more than a couple of articles regarding the need for trip insurance and where to find some brokers who can provide quotes and coverage. As I get older, I begin to realize the value behind insurance more and more. So as a public service, I am forwarding this great article from another blog that explains travel insurance very well. It is an easy read but the information is very valuable. As I have written before, depending upon your itinerary, travel insurance is not always cost effective - perhaps even necessary. But sometimes it makes more sense than we would like to consider. For that reason, I offer you insurance as seen through the eyes of WiseBread. Keep my link to the right in mind in case you want to get a quote from over 30 travel insurance providers.

Turkeys and Mops

It won't be hard to guess what a post will be about near the end of November: either Thanksgiving or turkeys. I dedicate my post to the bird (as you can see) because unfortunately for me, Thanksgiving is on a Thursday and I work Thursdays.

So there will be no big dinner for me and that means I miss out on cleaning the house BEFORE Turkey Day and after dinner as well. Darn my luck - I was SO looking forward to wrestling with the mop again. On a lighter note, traffic is not very heavy, I get home near midnight to party (when everyone else is sound asleep) and I don't wake up with a tummy ache from overeating.

So what does all this have to do with travel? Nothing - and it isn't supposed to. I write every 3 days about travel so I am entitled to a couple of FREE days aren't I? Oh, I though the union had covered that. My bad.

Travel, travel.. I know! You need something to toast about at dinner with friends? How about being thankful for a country where travel is unrestricted and for the most part affordable. I know, gas prices skyrocket and wreck budgets, fuel surcharges prevent more trips and longer stays, long lines make travel a real headache at times. But we have a pretty good living going on, truth be told. There are no Berlin Walls where we live, no gendarmes checking 'papers' arbitrarily, no restrictions on coming or going into the country now (if you have a passport) so we have little to complain about. In my view, we should be thankful for many things and freedom to travel is one of them.

Hotel Booking Site

In my book concerning finding a hotel room when the area is sold out, I offered several foreign sites where you MIGHT be able to squeeze in a reservation. This is possible because many hotels do not bother to 'close off' these foreign or less trafficked sites where few bookings come from anyway and they can absorb the occasional booking that comes through. It is one of my secrets to finding a room when you hear "Sorry, We are Sold Out" over and over.

I have now placed a link on my blog (right hand margin) for Booking.com, where you can check out availability in foreign and domestic cities and may be able to push through a reservation at a tremendous discount to current rates.

This happens because hotels have a set rate with these sites and cannot change it as easily as they can with Expedia or automatically like with Orbitz. So you may try to get into an area that is hosting a motor car race and all the hotels want $200 or they say they are sold out. You look on Booking.com however and they may show you 4-5 options at half that price. In fact, this site often has rooms at better discounts than Expedia or Travelocity and should be considered whether the area is sold out or not.

There is one caveat I should offer. If you are using this site as a last minute booking (meaning you will arrive within minutes or hours) I would CALL the hotel after getting a confirmation number from Booking,com and make sure they haven't made a mistake and really do have a room. You wouldn't want to arrive there at 10pm and find out they have no rooms and start hassling with the clerks and Booking.com to actually find a room. Booking.com (like any Third Party site) cannot guarantee the hotel representing a room actually HAS a room, so even they advise you should contact the hotel directly and confirm your room and rate. If there is a discrepancy, at least you can hash it out BEFORE you arrive.

LAX to Hawaii for $144 ROUND TRIP

TRAVEL ALERT

If you want to fly to Hawaii from LAX in December and are flexible with your dates, you can leave on Sat. Dec.6, return Dec 15th (just one example) for $224 tax included AND get a $100 e-certificate good for inter-island travel or mainland to Hawaii travel good through Dec. 2009. Check out this post for details:

Current State of Travel

I am in the midst of preparing a 2009 outlook newsletter which I hope to have ready before December is over. In the meantime, people are constantly asking me how our hotel is faring since the 'Mini Depression' arose as the economy melted down. Is it another 9/11 disaster? Have people really stopped traveling? What is the outlook? When should we book? How much should we pay?

I can't answer all these right here and now. In fact, I might not be qualified to answer them under ANY circumstances but I can tell you what has happened to the hotel business since summer ended.

It's actually hard to tell to be honest. After a brief drop in October, the rest of October shaped up much better than we had expected and November has also been a winner. We are pragmatic enough to assume this won't necessarily continue however so we are following the others and cutting prices. But here is the strange thing. I monitor nearby hotels public information as they post rates on Third Party sites amd sure enough when predictions came in for a disaster in the airline and hotel business, many hotels slashed prices. In my last evaluation, almost 40% of hotels had lowered prices - some significantly. In my present research however, the same hotels that had LOWERED rates 2 weeks prior were now RAISING rates.

It would be simple to assume they obviously over extended the lower rates and were now adjusting them to where they should have been to begin with. But I have been doing this for a number of years and I do not feel that is what is happening. I can sense when panic sets in and prices are slashed across the board by MANY hotels and what happened weeks ago did have that feel of panic. Most hotels adjust prices downward after summer ends anyway (for SFO that means October as both it and Sept. are arguably the two best 'weather' months to visit the city and bookings remain strong historically until November) but what I saw was sheer panic. Not many $5-$8 reductions - I saw rates drop $10, $20 even $40. Now they are rising $4, $8. $10 even $20. Yes, some hotels are still lowering rates but I see a lot more $1 and $3 changes than I do $14 or $20.

TRAVEL ALERT - Obama Inauguration

Tickets and rooms are scarce and pricey IF you can find them. A recent AP wire story reported that hotels in Washington are offering rooms at $400 per night with a 4 night minimum and they are being snapped up quickly. To avoid paying that tab, people are already booking as far away as Baltimore and Richmond VA. The story added that rooms on Craigslist were once an option but that prices had skyrocketed there as well, with one house renting for $50,000 for only 1 week!

You can read the full story here, which offers some common sense alternatives, like joining up with church groups, tapping your friends for a couch to crash on plus they list a web site to help people with renting out or searching for rooms. Airfares are also apparently climbing so if you muct fly AND need a hotel room, you'd better book it now. Inauguration tickets are a whole other story too.

My personal advice would be to see about renting an RV for a few days or a week and just drive in and out when needed or park well away from D.C. and take any public transportation you can into town. RV's can easily be had for $1000 in summer and may be much cheaper for January. You could actually fly into a cheaper city, rent the RV there and perhaps save hundreds of dollars by avoiding the high traffic airports and hotels in D.C. It still won't be cheap, but at least it is 'cheaper'.

Anybody for Australia?

It looks like Richard Branson is at it again. Owner of the upstart Virgin Air mega-airline, he has announced service to Sydney from LA on his soon to start flying V-Australia airline. Never the one to ignore a PR opportunity (like his under $100 'promotion' fare to NY for the lucky few when he announced Virgin America) he is offering severely discounted fares for travel this Spring. Only, there's a couple of catches perhaps.

My friends at the LA Times alerted me via Twitter of a special promo fare from LA to Sydney in Feb/Mar 09 of only $480. I was unable to duplicate that fare and suspect it was another SPLASH promotion for only the earliest of early birds. I did see fares of about $1160 round trip and that is pretty much what Qantas charges from LAX to SYD. However, intermittently, airfares are slashed for certain periods and routes - I just saw a Qantas ad for about $350 one way to Sydney so a R/T fare of near $700 is pretty good, though not as good as $480 obviously. And the $350 fare has the usual 'book by and travel by' restrictions, so you can't just book it for next summer necessarily.

Check Out Discount AirFares

Some of you may have noticed I added a link recently. I am now offering a direct link to cheapOair as one of the sources you should use to locate the best airfares for your travels. I want you to know that while you can go through my affiliate link or not, you will not pay any more than if you called CheapOair on the phone and bought a ticket. So you do not pay extra to book plane fares.

The other important item to be mentioned is that I do not recommend or promote anything I do not believe in myself. I have researched airfares using a variety of sources and find cheapOair to be among the very best at finding the lowest fares available. Be aware of one huge caveat - Southwest does NOT participate so you should always check SW first to see if they fly to your location and book directly with them if the answer is affirmative.

I suggest however that you use CheapOair in addition to any other search engine protocols you normally use and see for yourself if they don't find a rock bottom price. My research included this: They recently advertised a Pittsburgh to Ft. Lauderdale fare of $173. I checked and Continental only wanted $168 BUT Continental's flight was not non-stop! To save $5 and have to stop over each way is simply not worth it to me. They advertised Philadelphia to Orlando for $118 plus tax and I found that equaled the lowest direct fare I could get as well. I also searched for SFO-Honolulu and found CheapOair's United flights to be almost $100 cheaper than United offered them for directly. Keep in mind one major item - the price (plus taxes and fees) may not include the "up to $25 service charge" CheapOair includes.

And like all internet sites, you must use CheapOair at your own risk. I confess I have researched them and found complaints about double credit card billings, tickets not delivered, fares increased between booking and confirmation, etc. But I am also the one who wrote a book about understanding hotel reviews and in my opinion, none of the complaints seemed out of line for an internet business that handles so many transactions. Most people also complained about being sent off to "India" to their call center and I also do not like off shore call centers. But I have uncovered a dispute resolution phone number and email address in New York that I will pass along if anyone who booked through my link has any problems. I should also mention I found many testimonies about how cheap the tickets were and how easy it was to use CheapOair. You must understand they often buy bulk tickets as wholesalers and that when these wholesale seats can run out, their advertised low fare can suddenly disappear at the press of an enter button.Some people say that is bait and switch but the same thing happens booking directly as well.

Aloha All Over Again

You could almost take the post I wrote on Jun 20th and republish it verbatim. In that Hawaii Calling post, I mentioned trouble in Paradise and the summer was indeed a bummer for Hawaii. Peter Greenberg's blog indicated that tourism was down 9.3% through 9 months from 2008-2007. In august alone, hotel occupancy dropped 6% in Maui - an incredible amount for a vacation paradise like Hawaii.

I guess this is why i am updating my previous post. Bargains are REALLY starting to pop up as things only got worse in September. I recall in late summer reporting fares had fallen from the $1000 the travel agent mentioned to $550 from SF to Honolulu. Guess what? American will fly you there in mid November until AFTER the Thanksgiving break for only $385. They even offer decent flight times - not leaving at midnight or returning at 3am. And if you are the type that likes using more expensive Third Party sites, you can actually get 4 nights and airfare at the Marriott Waikoloa for under $800. That's not a bad rate for the Marriott but it's still $100/night. For the economy minded person or for those on a stricter budget can easily find off the beaten path motels and hotels in the $70 range and save another $100-120 perhaps.

Oh brother, here we go!

In the last two days, I have come across two examples of absolute idiocy when it comes to telling people how to book hotels and airfares at the cheapest cost. One came from the Wall St. Journal's own Marketwatch of all things where some lame business person promoting his new travel site said this: "Popular websites such as Expedia, Priceline and Hotels.com offer travelers discounts on airfare and accommodations." Shame on the WSJ - they should know better than to allow this type of misleading statement to float around unchallenged.

The other came from a blogger that wrote while he didn't DISagree with those who 'rail' against Third Party internet sites, he didn't necessarily AGREE with them either. I commented on his blog, pointing out that he failed to mention WHY people like me rail against the Expedias and Travelocitys - because they CHARGE MORE (sometimes FAR more) for accommodations than you can get them for by using other means. It's no wonder people believe the TV ads and hype put out by these sites that they ALWAYS have the LOWEST prices - even the apologists for these sites tend to validate their business model.