Great budget adventure travel begins at home. If you prepare for your trip before you walk out your front door, your vacation will be better organized, more full of all the exciting extra experiences to make it more memorable and you will almost certainly save significant money.
Not only that, you will be better able to put together a budget adventure travel experience to give you an insurmountable bragging edge over your friends and neighbors.
Start with research. No I am not talking about the dry, dusty book stacks that haunt your memories of college when you had put off an important paper until the last minute and your friends were out on the town while you were playing catch up with the librarian. I am talking about going online, to the bookstore, and maybe to the library (but rest assured, the travel section probably does not contain dusty stacks). (more…)
Today, when airlines offer more economy seating and more cut-rate fares, some customers and industry watchers predict the end of first class travel.
After all, many of the most luxurious methods of travel in the past – including the once-famous MGM jet and the Concorde – are no longer offering service. It’s too early to mourn the end of first class travel, though. At a time when it seems that low-cost air travel and trips are de rigeur, some companies are working harder than ever to provide high-quality first class travel experiences. Many more business, executive, and even pleasure-seeking travelers are choosing to travel first class.
There are many reasons why customers choose first class travel arrangements. Many note that the exceptional service and small extras – such as blankets and better food – ensure a pleasant trip experience. On a longer trip, these small extras allow passengers to arrive in good spirits and in a relaxed mood, ready to begin their day’s business or their vacation without undue hassle or fatigue. (more…)
There’s no shortage of websites offering last minute travel deals. The idea behind these deals is that if a hotel is going to have a room empty or a flight is going to have an empty seat, it’s better for them to offer it to you at the last minute for a steep discount than it is to just let that spare capacity go to waste.
The big contradiction of last minute travel, however, is that while the places with a lot of spare capacity get cheaper, the places with very little get much more expensive. Booking Christmas flights at the last minute, for example, will never get you a good deal, simply because so many people want those flights. Instead, you will probably end up paying much more than you would have if you had booked early.
As last minute travel deals are for the least in-demand places, you can end up with places that no-one wanted for a reason. Some of the hotels on offer can’t attract any customers because they’re truly dire. The flights on offer are often in the middle of the night, at times when it’s very difficult to even get to the airport without a car because the public transport links are closed. There are all sorts of gotchas waiting with cheap last minute travel. (more…)