A reader has recently send me an admonition, gently scolding my failure to point out that many activities and sights in Europe and elsewhere are free-of-charge to experience. Because it's an important point that shouldn't be overlooked in the responses to this blog (especially his tip on how to find these freebies in the places to which you're traveling), I'm repeating his statement here:

In all your blogs about keeping travel expenses in Europe down, you have forgotten to mention FREE things. There are a lot of free things besides people-watching out there. Use your favorite search engine to look for "free things to do in BLANK" (whatever city you're traveling to). London has a great array of items. For example, we signed up at a website which offers free tickets to concerts, plays, etc., and snagged two tickets to a top concert with top seats. This event turned out to be the highlight of our trip. Museums usually have at least one day a week that's free ... You just need to do a little research before you go, and then ask once you're there.

Labels: budget, europe

Although I felt an obligation to point out yesterday that Britain's ultra-low-cost bus company (megabus.com) was apparently terminating several of its services to and from Los Angeles, it's important to note that these cheap buses are a number of them still in service between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. While that may eventually mean that one or two may be wiped out by their competitors, for the time being so many cheap buses are erupting into view that you need a fast list to keep them all in mind. As a reminder, they are: Boltbus (www.boltbus.com), Fung Wah Bus (www.fungwahbus.com), megabus.com (www.megabus.com), DC2NY (www.dc2ny.com), Todays Bus (www.todaysbus.com), Sunshine Boston (www.sunshineboston.com/bustours/nyc), and Lucky Star (www.luckystar.com).

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Labels: bus

Travelodges in England are different from Travelodges in the U.S., and operated by an entirely different firm. Though the Travelodge chain of the U.S. is quite reasonably priced, it doesn't hold a candle to the ultra-cheap Travelodge chain of Great Britain. To our English cousins, Travelodge is like a stripped-down, lower-cost version of our own Motel 6 chain -- the cheapest of the cheap, and sometimes almost absurdly cheap. And yet most of them are rather modern motels with very decent amenities, but with prices that make you think you're in the Dominican Republic and not Great Britain. A look at its website (www.travelodge.co.uk) is instructive.
Every June at this time, Travelodge launches a summer sale in which some rooms are sold (for stays in July and August, primarily) for as little as £19 (around $38) -- far below what even the cheapest Motel 6 currently charges. The £19 rooms are sold to persons who book 21 days in advance; while other rooms are sold to people booking 7 days in advance for a still-remarkable £29-to-£59 per room.

Last summer, my daughter Pauline, her husband Lonnie, and their two children traveled by car through Scotland, having first made reservations at Travelodge hotels at the £19 rate. When she learned this morning that the same remarkable sale had been announced for summer 2008, she sent me the following short note about her experience with Travelodge in Great Britain:

We took advantage of this very same sale last year, and got one of the £19 rooms in Scotland. The hotel was on a highway, behind a chain breakfast place and gas station, but was just a quick jog into town. And our rooms was quite nice. The furniture had an Ikea look to it, and many rooms (including ours) were with couches that could fold out into two single beds (they're more like a trundle bed). So that's what we did with our daughters. When we checked into a slightly pricier Travelodge in Edinburgh during the Festival (it was one of the best deals in town), one of my daughters, who had just stayed at a very basic, shared-bath B&B in London with us, looked around our motel-like room and exclaimed: "Now this is luxurious! Why couldn't we have stayed in a hotel like this in London!"

If you're headed to Great Britain this summer, book your lodgings at Travelodges.
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Labels: accommodations, great britain, scotland

As I recently pointed out, it's important to keep up with the bad news of travel, too. Just yesterday, American Airlines lowered the boom on those many passengers who bring overly heavy luggage or boxes to their southbound, international flights. The exact American Airlines ban on such practices reads as follows:

Whether you're traveling to visit loved ones or making one last business deal, we want to make sure that your checked bags arrive at your destination with you this busy summer travel season. For that reason, American Airlines and American Eagle will implement limitations on checked baggage and boxes from June 7-August 17, 2008.

For the destinations identified below, boxes and excess, overweight (more than 70lbs.), or oversized pieces will not be accepted for transportation. Bags weighing 51-70 lbs. will be accepted with the collection of the applicable fee.

Passengers will be allowed to check a maximum of two pieces which must be within the size and weight limits as follows (linear measurements calculated by adding the length, width and height of an item):

• 1st piece: up to 62 linear inches and 50 lbs.
• 2nd piece: up to 62 linear inches and 50 lbs.

Carry-on items may only be up to 45 linear inches and 40 lbs.

American's embargoed destinations list is rather long, including Kingston, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Panama City. The complete list is available on the AA website.

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Labels: airlines

I owe it to our readers to advise them not simply of travel triumphs but of travel disappointments. Several weeks ago, I was excited to learn of the expansion of Britain's megabus.com company to the U.S. west coast, offering ultra-low-cost fares between Los Angeles and several nearby cities, including Las Vegas. And I wrote at length about MegaBus, which had earlier enjoyed great success in the mid-west.

Now, according to our friends at LasVegasAdvisor (www.lasvegasadvisor.com), megabus.com service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas has been discontinued, and soon will be halted to other west coast cities as well. Sin City's best website responded to a reader's question about megabus.com as follows:

Q: Do you know if trips from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (or vise versa) with megabus.com will be discontinued? I've been trying to make reservations for myself for mid-June or beyond but the website isn't allowing me to do so.

A: In August 2007 we first shared the glad tidings that megabus.com, an intercity express bus offering travelers $1 fares, was beginning service that week from its new West Coast hub in LA to six city destinations, including Las Vegas...We confess that until you submitted your question, we hadn't heard a lot about it or given it much thought. But you piqued our interest, so we tried to book a trip, just as you did, and found ourselves similarly thwarted. We called to see what was going on and have nothing but bad news to convey for bargain-bus travelers: Not only will megabus.com's California-to-Las Vegas route be canceled on June 8, but the entire West Coast service will be curtailed sometime shortly thereafter on a yet-to-be-announced date. Lack of demand and too much competition were blamed for the demise by the helpful rep we spoke with; while gas prices weren't mentioned, we figure they must have played a significant role as well.

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Labels: bus

My mail is filled with messages bemoaning "the end of the era of inexpensive international travel." They cite the decline of the dollar, the skyrocketing price of oil. One particularly elegant, elegiac message (from reader Ted Marcus) reads:

The all too brief age of inexpensive, casual travel Mr. Frommer helped to usher in with Europe on $5 a Day may be now at an end. It certainly wasn't sustainable, and we may regrettably have entered a new era in which most of us will regard international travel as a rare and extremely precious privilege to be anticipated and savored only a few times in a lifetime, if that.

I vehemently disagree. The persons who have concluded that international vacations are no longer affordable are referring mainly to the use of standard hotels and restaurants.

But the era of low-cost international travel wasn't based on standard lodgings and meals. When I published my first guidebooks, I didn't write about hotels. My advice was to stay in guesthouses, B&Bs, pensiones, monasteries and convents, canal house hotels, private homes, hostels, student hotels, guest-accepting farms, and houseboats. And I still recommend that kind of lodging, not simply to save money but to experience a better form of international life, to interact with actual foreign residents, and also to meet a more interesting, less pretentious, fellow traveler at the lodgings you chose.

Last week, I spoke by phone with friend and travel writer Reid Bramblett, who was calling in from Verona, Italy. On his stay in Europe up to that moment, he had stayed in a monastery in the centrally located Trastevere section of Rome for €40 (slightly more than $60) a night. At the time of the call, he was in an "agriturism" lodging near Verona, for under $100 a night. Elsewhere, he had paid $70 (for a single room) in numerous other modest lodgings in non-hotels (namely, pensiones and guesthouses) in other cities.

The tourist, and the tourist couple, who make the firm decision to seek out those alternative lodgings are able to continue exploring western Europe at reasonable cost.

Now obviously, it will be a different kind of vacation. It will require a mental adjustment for those who have usually chosen standard hotels for their lodgings. But the Americans who make that leap are invariably delighted with the transformation of the travel experience that results.

And those adventuresome sorts include people of all ages and income classes. They find that by seeking out the "other" life of Europe, they improve their travels and yet spend less.

Recently, one of the websites devoted to hostel accommodations in Europe published statistics about the increasing use of hostels by middle-aged and even elderly people. The latter have discovered that these former "youth centers" are now fully open and welcoming to people of all ages, and that a growing percentage of them have private rooms available for occupancy by one and two persons.

If you are at all concerned about the high cost of a standard European vacation, then make the decision (and convince your spouse or companion) to use monastery lodgings in Italian cities, the canal house hotels of Holland, the guest-accepting private homes of Britain and Ireland, the gites of France, the hostels of Switzerland and Germany, the hostales of Spain. You'll be glad you did.

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Labels: accommodations, budget travel, western europe

Recently, on "Good Morning America," a panel of museum administrators, travel writers (Pauline Frommer, Patricia Schultz, Michael Robers), and a noted photographer for National Geographic, were called upon to choose the 7 Great Wonders of the United States -- a list that suggests, among other things, vacation trips you might consider making at some point of your life. Though each participant arrived with a longer, individually-prepared list that seemed self-evident, they soon found themselves in a heated, contentious, four-hour debate. As Pauline put it:

When I went in with my list of 10 wonders (we all chose 10 in advance), I felt that they were so obvious, there'd be almost no discussion. But as the four-hour long panel started, we realized that there had been almost no overlap between all our lists. Places I considered shoo-ins weren't even mentioned by the other panelists. And I have to say, the panelists were all very passionate about their choices. It was quite an intense, fascinating discussion.

We decided to create a list that not only honored the Natural Wonders of the U.S., but also man's greatest accomplishments. And that possibly said something about what it meant to be an American.

The final list? Here it is (and are there others that ought to replace the 7 winners?)

1. The Grand Canyon
2. The Badlands of South Dakota
3. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
4. The Mall in Washington, D.C.
5. The skyline of New York City
6. The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
7. The Saturn V Rocket in Huntsville, AL

(Incidentally, viewers of the show picked one more wonder: Yellowstone National Park.)
Any wonders that, inexcusably, were left out? Would love to learn your own picks.

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Labels: pauline

After much hemming and hawing, after announcements of the dreaded deadline followed by frantic withdrawal of such announcements, after contradictions between two agencies -- the State Department and Department of Homeland Security -- after all that, the two government departments have finally collaborated on a joint announcement of the absolutely final, cross-my-heart, definitive date for needing a passport or passport card to enter the U.S. by any means -- cruiseship, car, or train, let alone airplane -- from abroad, is June 1, 2009.

Let me set forth the verbatim report of the Cruise Line Industry Association (which obviously has been fighting to put off the requirement for cruise passengers). Their release reads as follows:

Final U.S. Passport Requirements

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of State have announced that, as of June 1, 2009, travelers will be required to present a passport, passport card or other approved secure document denoting citizenship and identity for all land and sea travel into the United States. This includes U.S., Canadian and Bermuda citizens. Special provisions will be made for organized groups of children under 18 to enter with only proof of citizenship.

CLIA urges all consumers to obtain a passport. The expense and minimal effort required (applications can be submitted at post offices throughout the country as well as at passport offices) are well worth the result: an official document proving identity and citizenship that will facilitate easy travel throughout the world.

If you are to have any sort of future travel life, you must now proceed to obtain a passport (or a less expensive passport card).

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Labels: passports, red tape

Been to an ATM machine recently? If it's not a member of your own bank or ATM system or network, you'll pay an increasingly hefty sum to use it, even for taking out as little as $20. The former $1 and $1.50 fees have virtually disappeared. Nowadays, it's common for an out-of-network ATM machine to charge a minimum of $2, and often $3 and even up to $4 per transaction. And if you're out-of-town (and especially overseas), and can't easily find an ATM machine belonging to your own bank or network, you'll pay those hefty fees every time you use an ATM machine, incurring a growing expense.

To the rescue comes: Commerce Bank. Commerce Bank is a fast-growing bank that's out to be recognized as America's most consumer-friendly bank. It charges no fee for using your ATM card, issued by them, at an out-of-network machine. And if, by chance, you are nevertheless charged such a sum, it will refund the amount when you return home and present your receipt to them.

On our radio program yesterday (noon to 2pm, www.wor710.com), my daughter Pauline and I discussed the reports we had heard that Commerce Bank charges no ATM fee. Within the hour, we received an e-mail from friend and colleague, travel writer Reid Bramblett (www.reidsguides.com), sent from Verona, Italy (where he is researching a travel article), and commenting on our discussion as follows:

I heard you guys mention something about Commerce Bank and the rumor regarding its ATM fees.

I am happy to confirm that it is absolutely true. This is a major reason I have been a loyal Commerce customer for nearly a decade now. They do not charge you to use out-of-network ATMs, regardless of whether than ATM is just a Citibank machine in Manhattan or a Banco Popolare di Milano machine in Milan, or an HBSC machine in Bangkok. Other banks charge between $1 and $4 to use out-of-network (and out-of-country) ATMs. Commerce doesn't nickel-and-dime you on anything like that. (And, since foreign banks have yet to hit upon the money-making scheme of tacking on a few extra bucks for using an out-of-network card, you don't get charged a fee from their end, either.)

Between my Commerce ATM card not charging me fees (or greedy extra percentage points for the foreign exchange process) and my Capital One Visa card not adding on any fees beyond Visa's 1% for foreign transactions (and they use the actual best published exchange rate; I've checked using my own statements and the rates from Oanda's historical currency convertor), I have the most financially streamlined way of spending money on the road.

For our readers who may not be familiar with Commerce Bank, it does business (and has branches) in the following states: New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, northern Virginia, District of Columbia, Florida, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and Oklahoma. There may also be a way (I haven't done it) to open an online bank account with Commerce and thus obtain a Commerce ATM card. That's obviously a valuable card to have.

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Labels: fees, money

The biggest travel news of the week just past was an announcement by American Airlines that it plans to reduce its flights to many parts of the Caribbean -- San Juan, Antigua, St. Maarten, among them -- by at least one third, commencing September 1. To some of those destinations, like San Juan, a current 30 some-odd flights per day from several gateways will be reduced to as few as 18 flights per day.

Surprisingly, little of this seems to have appeared in the consumer press (the daily newspapers, the TV newscasts), though it was heavily covered in such trade media as Travel Weekly. In my view, the drumbeat of bad travel news (the continued weakness of the dollar, the sharp rise in the price of oil, the economic slowdown) has been so constant and unavoidable that editors just found it unpleasant to run additional news about a cut-back in airline capacity.

The news is devastating to the Caribbean. It will starve many islands of the continual flow of incoming visitors needed to support their hotels and other tourist facilities. It will bankrupt some of the hotels. Keep in mind that American Airlines is the chief source of air traffic to the Caribbean, so much so that American Airlines officials once joked, in my presence, that the ocean to which they flew should be called not the Caribbean but Mare Nostrum (our sea), that offensive term for the Mediterranean from the days of the Roman Empire.

On the other side of the equation, the cut-back will confront the tourist with an occasional inability to find seats. Unless the various islands immediately replace the lower capacity with new independent airlines that they subsidize, a giant area of the world will lose much of its tourism. And with the demand for seats directed at a much lower available supply of seats, airfares will inevitably increase. On the other hand, desperate hotels will need to discount their rates in order to attract a diminished number of visitors.

It means two things: first, that if you plan to enjoy a Caribbean vacation this coming autumn and early winter, you must obtain your air reservations much earlier than usual. Flights will quickly be sold out. But the long-stay tourists, the visitors who can stay for two or three weeks, will find that they can amortize their airfare over a longer period of time, and then enjoy considerably savings by bargaining for advantageous hotel rates from disadvantaged hotels.

As I pointed out in a recent post, though airfares will be going up, the cost of staying in a Caribbean resort will be one of the few bargains in worldwide tourism. The hotel-resorts of the Caribbean -- especially those in hotel-heavy Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and most of Central America -- will become the "cheap" lodgings of world travel, a sharp contrast to the situation in Europe. Wonders never cease.

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Labels: airlines, caribbean

A real estate investor named James Krieger (who, I assume, is a real estate developer because his website is an unrelieved pitch for investment in Nicaraguan real estate) has published a fairly lengthy commentary on my recent discussion in this blog about the ethical concerns I have about taking advantage of the pitifully low prices of that suffering country. Among other things, he lists various charitable organizations to which Americans can contribute for the purpose of alleviating poverty in Nicaragua.

In the thought that readers might like to consider Mr. Krieger's gentle criticism of my own unease, I'd like to direct you to the website in which his Frommer-refuting article appears: nicaraguarealestateinvestment.org. I have no idea why the website is entitled to use "org" as its domain, and I have no factual evidence on whether Mr. Krieger is either a publisher of the site or is possibly simply a writer who was encouraged to offer his views.

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Labels: nicaragua