Most observers would claim that the very best beach resort in Nicaragua is the 230-unit Spanish-owned Barcelo Montelimar Beach Hotel on two miles of white sands fronting the Pacific Ocean (all about 35 miles from the airport of Managua). In addition to that remarkable beach, it has the largest swimming pool in Latin America, a casino, nightly entertainment, several à la carte restaurants in addition to a buffet restaurant, and every conceivable sea sport and associated entertainment.

For a double room in July, including all three meals a day, unlimited drinks, unlimited sea sports and recreation, the cost is about $90 per day per person. Single persons traveling alone can often obtain a single room with all-inclusive arrangements (three meals and unlimited drinks) for about $110 a day.

Most observers would also claim that these rates undercut any other equivalent, five-star hotel in Central America. You can learn more at www.barcelo.com, or at www.barcelomontelimarbeach.com.

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Labels: deals, nicaragua

Whether or not one cruise ship is better than another is often a hard question, and not always easily determined. But one thing is fairly sure: ships of Celebrity Cruises and Holland America Cruises are almost always higher in quality (in food, service, cabins and various amenities) than ships of Carnival Cruises, Royal Caribbean Cruises, or Norwegian Cruise Line. Therefore, when bargains are offered for a Celebrity or Holland America sailing, attention should be paid.

1) An August 31 departure of a Holland America ship cruising the coast of Alaska, for $549 per person, is one such top opportunity. Earlier this week, I wrote about an end of June sailing of a Holland America ship for an astounding $399 per person. But that's awfully soon. For travelers needing more time to prepare, a near-equivalent is a $549 price per person for a seven-night sailing of Holland-America's upscale Zaandam leaving Vancouver on August 31, and proceeding along the Alaskan coast to Seward, entering famous Glacier Bay along the way. This one's offered by VacationsToGo.com (tel. 800/338-4962; www.vacationstogo.com), listed as Fast Deal#27747, and because Vacations to Go has also quoted a price of $499 in other media, you might do well to name the $499 rate as what you're seeking, when you call. Even for $50 more, this is a big opportunity.


2) A 10-night sailing of the Mediterranean, round-trip from Barcelona and leaving on October 10, 31 and November 21, aboard the elegant Celebrity Century, with outside ocean-view cabins available for $919 per person, is an equivalent marvel. The ship stops in Nice, France; in the port for Florence/Pisa, Italy; near Rome (Civitavecchia); Naples/Capri; Valletta; and Tunis, before returning to Barcelona, and the 10-night duration means that you're paying below $100 a day for a high-quality ship. This one's offered by Online Vacation Center (tel. 800/780-9002; www.onlinevacationcenter.com), and apparently needs to be booked by end of day on June 1, just shortly from now (though who knows how firm is the deadline?).

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Labels: cruise, deals

Periodically on this blog, I've listed the companies that arrange rentals of apartment and homes all over the world: Homeaway (biggest of the lot), VRBO (oldest), EVRentals.com (richest), Rentalo.com (aggressive), Craigslist (cheapest), Kijiji.com (coming up fast), and the like. To that list you might add Zonder (www.zonder.com), with an impressive website containing multiple photos of the homes they offer for rental. Zonder also claims its services are superior because they deal only with homes rented by local management firms that can fix things on the spot if furnishings or fixtures break down.

Having said that, it's obvious that these big worldwide companies can't be familiar with all the properties they represent. When they proclaim, as some do, to offer more than 60,000 properties, it's obviously impossible for them to have looked at the homes or apartments they make available.

Clearly, the best-informed of the rental agents are the ones that limit their services to a single destination, like Orlando, or London, or Vegas, and are located in that destination. These are the hometown firms with names of which you've never heard, but with impressive knowledge of the conditions and neighborhoods in their community.

And where do you find these firms? Apart from hunting them up on the web, using Google and then inserting the name of the city or area in which you'll be vacationing, your better course is to use a guidebook that contains names of the top rental agencies in that city or area. And so help me, I'm being entirely objective when I suggest that the new series of Pauline Frommer Guides, on sale in all major bookstores, performs that function extremely well. Pauline realized that the skyrocketing cost of hotel rooms would compel many travelers to substitute homes or apartments for hotels. And therefore, in the lodgings sections of her guidebooks, she has made it a point to describe the work of local rental agencies whose premises she has visited and whose owners she has interviewed.

Those discussions of rental homes and rental apartments usually lead off the lodgings discussion in her books. And from the responses of large numbers of readers, that assistance is now recognized as among the most valuable features of her books.

There are Pauline Frommer Guides to: New York City, Las Vegas, London, Paris, Italy, Costa Rica, Alaska, Orlando, Washington, D.C., Cancún & the Yucatán, and Hawaii, with books on Spain and San Francisco about to join the list (see a complete list in the Frommers.com bookstore). As a vacationer, I would always prefer the services of the locally based rental companies found in each book to the large worldwide websites listing tens of thousands of properties that no one has ever inspected. Call me biased, if you must, but that's how I feel.

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Labels: accommodations, websites

$399 -- I'll tell you where to get it in a moment -- is probably the lowest price ever offered for a ship of high quality, sailing a classic itinerary of Alaskan waters (which includes a day in Glacier Bay, the high point of all such cruises) and for a high season date. The Volendam of Holland-America sails on June 22 from Seward, Alaska, and finally arrives -- after hitting all the highlights of the Alaskan coast -- on June 29 in Vancouver. And the line has apparently made arrangements with Cruises Only (tel. 800/CRUISES; www.cruisesonly.com) to sell inside cabins for only $399 per person, based on two persons traveling together.

The only other date when the Volendam will be substantially reduced in price is on its similar, southbound departure of August 17, when inside cabins will be sold for only $699 per person.

The Cruises Only website carries a headline claiming that it will also arrange "up to" $300 of free-of-charge purchases (drinks and the like) aboard the Volendam, but then makes no more specific reference or promise later on. It's important to inquire about this when you reach a telephone reservationist at Cruises Only.

You'll also want to scan the map of the ship's voyage that appears in the website.


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Labels: alaska, cruise, deals

Back in 1844 a young American of modest income named J. Bayard Taylor resolved to make "the Grand Tour" of Europe, crossing the ocean on a four-masted sailing ship. On his return, he wrote a book entitled Europe Seen With Knapsack and Staff, and it was published in 1846 by Wiley & Putnam, predecessors to the John Wiley & Son, Inc., that now publishes the Frommer's series of travel guides.

A yellowing, fragile copy of that book has now been presented to me by an officer of Wiley, who found it in the antiquarian stacks of the famous Strand bookshop of Manhattan. I am still reading this cost-conscious diary, and marveling at the lessons of intelligent, sensibly-priced travel that it conveys. I shall be writing about individual episodes of J. Bayard Taylor's journey in later posts, but wanted to leave you with one of his mid-19th-century observations at the end of the volume:

In large cities, we always preferred to take the second or third-rate hotels, which are generally visited by merchants and persons who travel on business; for, with the same comforts as the first rank, they are nearly twice as cheap. A traveler with a guidebook and a good pair or eyes, can also dispense with the services of a courier, whose duty it is to conduct strangers from one place to another. We chose rather to find out and view the ‘sights' at our leisure.

Throughout the trip, Taylor was assaulted by Europeans with references to the Slavery maintained in America. I'll discuss his responses in later editions of this blog.

The French say: Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose (The more things change, the more they remain the same). It's fascinating to see how persons over a centuries and a half ago found the same challenges, the same rewards, the same lessons, of travel.

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Labels: budget travel

A considerable number of blogs were breathlessly reporting, as of yesterday morning, that United and Continental had introduced miraculous airfares of $270, round-trip between Newark or Houston, and Honolulu, for persons booking at least 21 days in advance, actually traveling after mid-August, and going only on certain specific weekdays. Imagine! $135 one-way between the east coast of the U.S. and Oahu!

I heard the news first, to their credit, on Beat of Hawaii (www.beatofhawaii.com), the smart, new website for Hawaii enthusiasts. In announcing these sensational rates, the two authors of Beat of Hawaii took pains to emphasize that fares like those would disappear in a day.

No such caution was exhibited yesterday by various purveyors of airfare bargains, who all announced these rates and urged you to consider them -- apparently, at your leisure. Never has there been a more dramatic sale, caught by bloggers who spend their lives pulling up airfares, but totally unmentioned in a single press release or other announcement by the airlines themselves.

Last last night, it became obvious why the airlines hadn't trumpeted the bonanza. I can only assume they assigned about four seats to the $270 price, because as of today, the $270 airfare has disappeared from the internet. If you'll look at one of the replies to our own post you'll see a message from Beat of Hawaii confirming that the $270 has been replaced by fares three and four times as high.

To my knowledge, no other blog has advised their readers that the airfare no longer exists. Sorry about that.

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Labels: deals, hawaii

Last week, I glanced (very briefly) at the situation in Nicaragua. And I pointed out, among other things, that tourism was one of the few promising industries of that ravaged nation (which is slowly emerging from civil war and an earthquake that destroyed its entire capital city).

Though the tourism of Nicaragua is a very special activity, for a rather adventurous person, it is nonetheless of great interest. About the only standard sights are those in its colonial capital of Granada, showing the high aesthetic standards of the conquistadores, who left glorious structures that have been well-preserved and reflect the artistic culture of 17th and 18th century Spain. Several of those buildings have been converted into high-quality hotels.

The coastal areas are different, and also wholly unlike the beach areas of countries that have enjoyed a greater increase in tourism. Though tourism is booming (from a percentage point of view), fewer people visit Nicaragua than go to any other Central American country. And thus the beach communities are supplied primarily with tiny hotels, some of them accommodating as few as 20 and 25 guests. There are no giant beach resorts of the sort found in other Central American nations.

In one such place, on Little Corn Island, dinner is served precisely at 7pm in each such "hotel," and both the staff of the hotel and the guests eat at the same table, partaking of exactly the same meal, which is usually composed of fish caught that morning and two vegetables, washed down with beer. That's typical of many Nicaraguan resorts, and a reason why tourism there can be so exciting. Here's a place that perfectly fits the definition of the Caribbean as it used to be.

The Corn Islands 30 miles off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua are one of the nation's "tourist centers." You get there either by plane from Managua (about $175 round-trip) or via a daylong trip by bus and ferry from other cities. Once there you find yourself in a different world of backpacker-like tourists living in extremely modest lodgings and enjoying nature and a laid-back form of life, to put it mildly. In addition to enjoying a pristine-like tropical innocence, you snorkel and scuba-dive or simply enjoy the outdoors, to which you walk on tiny Little Corn Island (where there are no cars) or hop a taxi on Big Corn Island, paying $1 as your fare to any point on the Island.

The other touristic magnet, currently, is San Juan del Sur on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, where real estate interests are currently building homes for American retirees and more small hotels for tourists. Surfing is the chief draw here; and surfers are a special type of visitor whose presence may or may not enthrall you.

At a recent real estate conference which I attended in Panama City, various promoters of Nicaraguan retirement living for Americans were talking about the joys of living in your own home in low-cost Nicaragua, where you could -- allegedly -- hire a sleep-in maid/cook for about $15 a week, or a gardener who doubles as the chauffeur for about $20 a week. And thus, on your U.S. Social Security income, you could live like a king in Nicaragua. I was both horrified and offended by these sales pitches, and they highlight the dilemmas posed by economies like those in Nicaragua.

Because one group of human beings lives in abject poverty (the Nicaraguans), another group of humans is able to live like royalty (Americans). Twenty-or-so years ago, we (the United States) devoted giant military resources to defeat that country's insurgency, and then proceeded to completely forget about that country once the insurgency was defeated.

Still, if you now wish to enjoy a different kind of vacation, a real immersion in the tropics (where the weather is warm throughout the year), and provided only that you can block out the conditions that surround you, then Nicaragua awaits.

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Labels: central america, nicaragua

There was a time when travelers could benefit by waiting until the very last moment to book their airfares for trips within the United States. There was always an airline with unsold seats, desperate to sell them at a reduced price.

No longer. The fact that American Airlines has already announced that domestic air capacity will be cut back by at least 10% once the heavy summer season is ended, virtually guarantees that airfares will ascend even higher once September is reached. By purchasing your autumn/winter air tickets now, you are bound to get them at a lower price than later.

That was the advice from Hugh Crean, General Manager of Farecast.com (now owned by Microsoft), who was interviewed by my daughter, Pauline, on yesterday's radio edition of the Travel Show (www.wor710.com). He was emphatic in expressing the view that we have only begun to witness the airfare increases that will eventually be put into effect, especially with fewer flights and seats available for a public needing to fly. With a reduced number of planes, the airlines will necessarily take advantage of their ability to raise the fares for people clamoring for seats.

He also mentioned in passing:

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturday afternoons will remain the best days to fly at lower cost. Flexibility is the key to finding a lower fare -- your willingness to travel a day earlier or a day later may result in a different and lower fares. And the best fares will be obtained directly from the airlines and not from the various, famous, airfare search engines.

Airfares have already risen by 20% in recent months. They will now undoubtedly go higher in the future.


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Labels: airfare