Tagged: vacation

Snacks Are Back On United Airlines

Well here's some news that may put a smile on your face (just as it's moving your belt buckle an inch more towards your hips). United Airlines has announced that it will be bringing…

Holiday Road Trips 101: Staying Safe

For the majority of travelers, heading home for the holidays involves hitting the road. That translates to crowded highways, and drivers making stupid mistakes because they're driving…

How to Survive Family Holiday Celebrations

Most people hitting the road this holiday season will be heading to family gatherings. Which means that, for many, time away from home won’t feel much like a vacation. According to an…

More Free Lodgings! This Time The Giveaway Is For Members of the Military, 2500 of Them

Seems to be the season of freebies! Massive timeshare corporation Westgate Resorts is doing the gifting and amazingly, nobody will have to sit through a timeshare presentation to…

Florence With the Experts: A New Program Italy-Bound Travelers Should Know About

Florence (photo by PapaPiper/Flickr)Italia Rail, the company that has been, for the last decade, the largest international vendor of Italian rail tickets, is taking that…

Airfares Are Dipping Once Again (and Two Other Pieces of Good News for Flyers)

Overly chatty seatmates, cramped seating and long security lines: these unhappy byproducts of airline travel aren’t going away anytime soon. But this week, several news events…

The Way of Wanderlust: A Delightful New Book of Travel Essays

By their very definition, travel memoirs introduce readers to corners of the planet they may never get to themselves. But The Way of Wanderlust, a collection of travel essays by…

Paris Extends Shopping Hours in 12 Major Neighborhoods

Thanks to a recently passed bill, Parisian stores in such popular neighborhoods as the Marais, the Champs Elysees, and Montmartre will have the option to stay open on Sundays and up…

Death By Selfie: The Dangers of Taking Too Many Selfies While Traveling

With every technological advance, there’s also a step backward…and sometimes that step can be a fatal one, in the case of selfies. The modern smartphone, with its ability to not…

Meteorologists Predict Changing Weather Will Make This Year's Fall Foliage Different

First the bad news: leaf-peeping along North America’s eastern seaboard, and in the inland areas of New England, may not be quite as vivid an event as it usually is in 2015.…

A New App Promises to Make Travel More Safe for Solo Vacationers

Men and women travel differently. And that’s not a comment on shopping habits or boozy pub crawls. For women, especially solo travelers, safety is always front of mind,…

The Sky Isn't Falling But Airfares Are: Air Pricing Sees the Biggest One-Month Drop in 20 Years

For months, the second most popular travel question that's been lobbed my way (after "is X, Y or Z safe?") has been: "Why, with the cost of gas so low, haven't airfares…

A La Carte Cruise Pricing To Become Even More A La Carte, At Least on Norwegian Cruise Lines

Start boning up on your math. You're going to need those calculating skills to determine which cruise vacation will now have the overall highest costs.I reported last week that…

Safety First: What Parents Need To Know Before They Send Their Kids Off to Summer Camp

Earlier this year, my 12-year-old daughter was studying the concept of utopia in her history class and having trouble grasping what the word meant. I told her to think of her summer…

Hey Yank, Want to Go to Cuba? You Can Now Get Travel Insurance and a Bed More Easily If You Go

And another piece—no, make that two—has fallen into place for Americans with a yen to visit the long-forbidden Cuba. Today, massive online lodging company AirBnB (it serves as a…

Portrait of a Family Volunteer Vacation in Chennai, India

When Vani (not her real name) was five years old, her mother dropped her off to live at the SEAM Children’s Home in Chennai, India. Vani’s mother had remarried, and her new husband…

Want to Use Your Frequent Flyer Miles? Guess How Many You'll Need. No, Really, GUESS, Says One Airline

How would you feel if you walked into a grocery store and underneath the butter, the broccoli and the babaganoush were signs with question marks rather than prices?Well, Delta has…

Hot Deals On Flights to Europe From the U.S. (And One Is For Business Class!)

Not only is the U.S. Dollar continuing to crush the Euro, airfares across the pond are now a better value, per mile, than flights within the continental United States. Three…

Exellent Trips on a Lean Budget? Say YES to Mooching

Mooching can be an art. Sure, it’s lacking in dignity, but it can be quite effective, as anyone with, well, relatives knows. Travel mooches can be a particularly canny way of not…

Drop That Towel! Hotels Get Serious About Foiling Linen Thieves

Is hotel check out about to become a much more emberrassing ritual?It might if you're one of the 5 to 20 percent of hotel guests who steal towels, robes and other linens each…

Last-Minute Deals on Hotels Are Getting Better and Better! Here’s Why

Speak on a mobile phone instead of text? That’s considered a rude act nowadays in many circles. But while mobile technology has, arguably, made us less social, many in the travel…

A New Monopoly on European Airport ATMs Means Lousy Exchange Rates for Travelers

I just had the pleasure of co-hosting our radio show with Samantha Brown, Travel Channel star par extraordinaire. (You can hear the podcast here). Whenever I chat with Samantha, I…

Point/Counterpoint: Pauline Frommer Gives Her Impressions of Colonial Williamsburg

I won’t lie: I was dragged, kicking and wailing, to Colonial Williamsburg. I thought the idea of spending Thanksgiving at the famed “living history museum” was a goofy one, and…

Et Tu JetBlue? Carrier Will Be Adding Bag Fees and Extra Seats to Cabins

Today, JetBlue released a bombshell-filled securities filing, one that will make investors happy but is going to take the swing out of the step of many travelers (this one included).…

American Airlines Goes Its Own Way on Frequent Flyer Miles….For Now. And Travelers Should Be Grateful

Loyalty doesn’t always go both ways. That’s the sad truth that members of the frequent flyer programs for most of the major North American carriers found out this fall when two of…