Free Entry to the U.S. National Parks For Students, Veterans—and Everyone Else
Posted on 11/02/2020, 10:00 AM
The U.S. National Parks had big plans for little people this year. But like so many things, they went awry. Long story short: 2020 was supposed to have been another year when all of the country's fourth graders (and their families) got free entry to the parks, wildlife refuges, and other public lands, a program administered for half a decade by the federal government. But because so many of us had ...
A Delightful New Book About Countries That Have "Fallen Off the Map"
Posted on 10/30/2020, 5:00 PM
In this time of not being able to travel almost anywhere, one of the most intriguing new travel books is a volume that takes readers to places that no longer exist. I’m talking about Gideon Defoe’s droll new tome, An Atlas of Extinct Countries: The Remarkable (and occasionally ridiculous) Stories of 48 Nations That Fell Off the Map—a whirlwind tour through the pleasingly oddball tales of history's...
New Rules Transform New York City Into a Wonderful, Open-Air Bazaar
Posted on 10/28/2020, 3:00 PM
What's the top reason people visit New York City? If you guessed Broadway shows, museums, or even restaurants, you'd be wrong, wrong, and wrong. Year after year, shopping is cited as the main reason people plan a trip to the Big Apple— something I know well, as the author of Frommer's EasyGuide to New York City. As in the rest of the United States, the city's retail sector has been walloped by t...
Pauline Frommer: A Worthy Vacation Rental Search Aggregator Has Arrived
Posted on 10/27/2020, 12:00 PM
Fewer travelers may be hitting the road right now, but among those still traveling, the top accommodation choices have shifted dramatically from a year ago. As I wrote last week, more people are choosing vacation rentals over hotels. The change has made Airbnbs more expensive than hotels in most North American markets. We’ve also seen a huge uptick in the percentage of travelers choosing RVs, ten...
Dingle, Ireland's Beloved Dolphin, Fungie, Has Disappeared
Posted on 10/23/2020, 5:00 PM
Ireland may be the land of leprechauns, banshees, and merrows, but its most magical being was real, and it swam in the waters off County Kerry. In 1984, a lone, bottleneck dolphin was spotted in the bay of the town of Dingle, on Ireland's west coast, by a lighthouse keeper who was escorting fishing boats out to sea. The dolphin was still there when the keeper brought the boats back into the harbor...
In a Trial to Rescue Travel, Canada to Test International Arrivals at One Airport
Posted on 10/23/2020, 1:00 PM
The multibillion-dollar problem for the travel industry right now is how travel will get back to normal. For many, the solution could be summed up in three words: easily accessible testing. Since most scientists are expecting it to take a good eight months to a year before a vaccine can be approved and widely distributed, testing is a stopgap measure that allows governments to curb the spread of ...
Pauline Frommer: Thanks to 2020, Airbnb Isn't Always the Cheapest Option Anymore
Posted on 10/21/2020, 3:00 PM
The conventional wisdom used to be you’d save money by renting an Airbnb rather than booking a hotel room. That now needs to be revised in yet another reversal brought by the pandemic. A new study from Wanderu, a website usually devoted to comparing bus and train ticket prices, found that in most of North America, average Airbnb nightly rates are now higher than average hotel prices. Sometimes t...
Panama Is Reopening for Quarantine-Free Visits, So Is This the Winter to Finally Go?
Posted on 10/10/2020, 7:00 AM
As Frommer's Panama author Nicholas Gill writes, "Panama is home to a staggering array of natural landscapes, each beautiful in its own way." That includes lovely beaches, perfect spots for snorkeling and scuba diving, mile after mile of pristine rainforest, rugged mountains laced with top whitewater rivers, state-of-the-art golf courses, mangrove swamps, coffee plantations, dozing volcanoes, coas...
How to Find the Best Rates for Last-Minute Car Rentals
Posted on 10/07/2020, 7:00 AM
Save money when you rent a car—every time—using our time-tested, expert-approved tips
...
The Department of Transportation Says It's Not There to Ensure Passenger Safety
Posted on 10/07/2020, 6:00 AM
In late July, members of 33 transportation unions—flight attendants, pilots, TSA inspectors, ferry workers, bus drivers, and others—filed an official petition with the Department of Transportation begging for a federal mask mandate on all commercial transportation. Such a move clearly would have made sense. Trains, planes, and buses cross state lines, so the only way to have consistent measures fo...
