Ten Destinations Where Your Dollar Will Go Far

Lisbon, Portugal

What $20 Will Buy: A Lisboa card provides use of nearly all public transportation and discounts on some tours and admission to museums and monuments.Why It's Hot: It's affordable, charming, sophisticated and near the beach.When To Find Deals: September and October, when four-star hotels in central Lisbon generally go for $100 per night and round-trip airfare from Chicago starts at $800.Top Bargains: At the Instituto do Vinho do Porto (Port Wine Institute), you can try more than 300 vintages of the country's signature liquor. Tasting prices start at 1 euro.

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Source: AOL

Travel Well on the Weak Dollar

Tim Leffel (author of Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune), skipped London and Lisbon this summer, and instead, took his wife and daughter on a two-week trip to Guatemala. There, they stayed in a "gorgeous" hotel with a panoramic view of a volcanic lake for $60 a night. With a bit of planning and research, you too can maximize the worth of the dollar and enjoy an affordable international vacation.

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Source: AOL

Winter Travel To Europe

By James Martin

Why not travel in winter? Hotels and airfares are cheap, sweaty summer crowds are a dim memory, and there's plenty going on:

• Attend Cultural events: Opera, Theater, and Symphony Winter Seasons.
• Have Fun in the Snow: skiing, snowboarding
• See Christmas Markets, Festivals and Carnival
• Enjoy Winter food - an entirely different animal from summer's simplicity!

Why Travel in Winter?

While it's great fun hanging out under the August sun slurping spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce at an outdoor cafe in Rome, winter travel offers some interesting opportunities you may not have considered. There are the obvious ones, like skiing and snowboarding. But what about the opera and orchestra season? European cultural events in historic halls are going full blast in winter.

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Low tricks of low season

By Clive Dorman

NO SCHOOL holidays in sight, we're deep into the travel "low season", but air fares are climbing when they should be falling. Thankfully, there's other competition to choose from, but Qantas' current Red E-Deals - its best online fares - look like something out of the olden days.

Its best fare on the benchmark Melbourne-Sydney route is now $125 one-way, dearer than it was before the arrival of Impulse and then Virgin Blue half a decade ago. And it's the same across the network, with $10 or so added to the best fares seemingly every month for the past few months.

Virgin Blue is pushing up its margins as well: its best Melbourne-Sydney fare is now $109, when a year ago it was $69. You can get a "cheapie" for $89, only if you travel on a Tuesday or a Wednesday and only if you're prepared to spend plenty of time online looking for that rate for travel at least a month out.

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Know Your Seasons for the Best Travel Bargains

By Tim Leffel

Shoestring travelers go to great lengths to stick to their budget: finding inexpensive lodging, getting cut-rate airfares, and taking the cheapest local transportation. One often-overlooked variable, however, is the time of year they visit a particular destination.

In any area that attracts a lot of tourists, high season is expensive. In some cases, downright outrageous. High season can be as long as summer, or as short as New Year's Eve weekend, depending on the location. In any case you are sure to pay top dollar. Whether it's a Thai party beach during the full moon, Goa around the Christmas break, or Europe in the summer, this is the time when prices shoot up and you'll find little to no room for negotiation.

Low season is often low for a good reason, however. Prices are cheap, but they often deserve to be. Hurricanes are blowing around the Caribbean and Florida, Egypt feels like the inside of an oven, the Andes are obscured by clouds. Many beach towns all over the world are literally boarded up in the off-season. It can be a good time to work on a novel or to meditate, but many find the lonely streets and bad weather during low season to be a downer.

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