Sure, this Newsletter is the best place online to find low fares, great deals and travel tips. But we're not so arrogant as to think this is the only place you should look. For a truly comprehensive look at all the travel deals and news going on, bookmark these sites.
General Travel News Sites
USA Today's Today in the Sky (www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/today/sky.htm), a true travel blog, is the first place we look for airline news each morning. Reporter Ben Mutzabaugh does a great job of collecting news stories from around the country on the triumphs and frustrations of flying, and boiling them down into bite-sized paragraphs. Read this daily report not for fares, but to learn about new routes, changes in airline policies, and the latest political battles over air travel.
Travel pundit Chris Elliott (www.elliott.org/blog/archive.htm) publishes a similar blog on his Web site. Like Mutzabaugh's, it is independent, honest, and a great distillation of the latest air travel news. Elliott's perspective is a little tarter than Mutzabaugh's, though, and he's unafraid to express his opinions (which usually involve bashing the big airlines in some way.)
Deals Sites
First thing first: unlike most sites, we here at Frommers.com are completely independent. We pick out our deals based only on our years of journalistic experience.
Smarter Living (www.smarterliving.com) mixes independent journalism with sponsored advertising, but at least they label their ads. They're good with comparison shopping, too, always telling you whether the deals they list beat out other prices they found. Just watch out for those pages marked 'sponsored.'
MSNBC's "Savings Sleuth" (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4506296), is another independent source for deals, staffed by some of the fine writer's from Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine. Sometimes they catch deals we miss (and vice versa), but there's enough to go around for everyone; they're especially good with package deals.
Travelzoo (www.travelzoo.com) isn't journalism - it's advertising. Yes, all the fabulous deals on this site are bought and paid for. That doesn't mean they aren't deals, and Travelzoo's staff at least double-checks to make sure all their deals are bookable. Look at them as raw material for your fare search. They do most of their updates on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but add a few deals every day.
If you're a crazed, obsessive frequent-flier-mile fanatic, you'll love Gary Leff's dry but informative View From The Wing (www.webflyer.com/blog), where he collects oddball shopping discounts and the best obscure ways to earn frequent flier miles. If you're not an airline coupon-clipper, you'll wonder what all the fuss is about. Check it out, though - you might love it.
Travel Boards
The Frommers.com bulletin boards are the best in the world, of course. But we'd like to give a shout-out to our competitor Lonely Planet's fabulous work on the Thorn Tree (thorntree.lonelyplanet.com). A comprehensive crew of experts on the Thorn Tree answers questions about locations all over the globe, with a focus on extreme budget travel (i.e. staying in hostels.) Post a question there, and you're likely to get an answer from a resident of even the most obscure locales.
If you don't get a quick answer to a New York question on our boards, and your question isn't about what hotel to stay in, try stopping by Ask A New Yorker (www.askanewyorker.com), where a tight handful of native New Yorkers (including some Big Apple Greeter volunteers) answer even the most obscure NYC questions. As they're natives, though, they haven't stayed in many NYC hotels, and so aren't the greatest for helping you with hotel questions.
The debate between the two Priceline watchdog bulletin boards goes like this: BiddingForTravel.com (www.biddingfortravel.com) has a far better library of past bids and Priceline hotel lists, but the moderators are very strict. BetterBidding (www.betterbidding.com) is much, much smaller, but friendlier to newbies with vague questions. Use both for the ultimate Priceline smart bidding experience.
What are you favorite travel sites? Tell us where else you look on our Message Boards today. It's free, easy to use and a great way to talk to fellow Frommer's readers.