Downtime Travel

Ten Destinations Where Your Dollar Will Go Far

2008-02-27T12:13:00.002+01:00

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.

Source: AOL

Travel Well on the Weak Dollar

2008-02-27T11:47:00.003+01:00

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

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Winter Travel To Europe

2008-02-06T12:11:00.000+01:00

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.

Low tricks of low season

2008-02-05T17:19:00.000+01:00

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.

Know Your Seasons for the Best Travel Bargains

2008-02-05T17:15:00.000+01:00

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.

Off Season Travel In Europe - Tips and Tools for Off-Season Vacations

2008-02-05T17:12:00.000+01:00

By James Martin

Travel Cheap - Enjoy Europe's Culture - Go in the Off-Season

You'll hear seasoned travelers extolling the virtues of September-May off-season travel so often you probably know them by heart: fewer tourists, greater cultural options and mingling opportunities with the locals, more relaxed atmosphere, cheaper airfares and hotel rates, and the lack of that summer swelter. But there's a reason folks travel in high season in Europe: it seldom rains, there's maximum daylight, it's easy packing light, and there are abundant tourist resources. But off-season travel still aces out high-season travel in my book, because all those problems with off-season travel can be overcome with a few tricks seasoned travelers call upon to make their vacations meaningful and fun. Read on.

Off Season Take Offs

2008-02-05T17:10:00.000+01:00

By Mark Kahler

Blame a lack of frequent flier miles.

The year we wanted to go to Europe, two free tickets in summer required 100,000 miles. In March, that total was just 70,000. For many of us, that gap takes a long time to close. Call it March Madness: We spent 14 days in Italy and France.

How attractive is Paris in March? How cold is the wind off the water in Venice? A shortage of miles aside, why go?

The answer can be found in your pocketbook.

Astounding Airfares

Airlines sometimes cut the number of Trans-Atlantic routes they offer during the off-season, since there are fewer vacationers. But they still have seats to fill, and generally the way to populate those seats is to discount them.

Paris and France Monthly Events Calendar, Typical Weather and Trip Planner

2008-02-05T17:09:00.000+01:00

By Kelby Carr

Get a Guide to Visiting any Month in the Year

No matter when you will visit France, be prepared for the national holidays, typical weather, major events and more. The month-by-month calendar and trip planner discusses the pros and cons for each month, month-specific packing tips and more. This is also a great guide to choosing the timing of your next French vacation.

France in the Off-Season

2008-02-05T17:06:00.000+01:00

By Kelby Carr

Save Cash and Avoid Crowds in the Cooler Months

If "Paris in the Springtime" conjures up images of smothering crowds, consider visiting France in the off-season. Bargains abound, the lines are short and you can live like a local.

From November through March, there are many hot deals for tours, airfare and lodging in France. Even if a jaunt to Paris is normally out of reach, this is a time to visit on the cheap. Or this is also an ideal time to book a stay at some of France's finest and most luxurious hotels at a lower cost. As the hotels empty for winter, the savings are deep.

Visiting Venice in the Off-Season

2008-02-05T17:00:00.000+01:00

I travel a lot but have never to been to Venice, mainly because I am fearful, as I have heard, that it is always so crowded with tourists. I can travel whenever I want and the weather doesn’t concern me at all. I was thinking of late November and early December as those seem to be times when the travel season is the lowest and you can get the best fares.

William Yeago,
Paris

Read the answer by Travel Q and A...

Off Season Ireland

2008-02-05T16:56:00.000+01:00

By Bernd Beige

Over the last few weeks I received a few e-mails with the question whether specific months were good for traveling to (and in) Ireland. Good question. And best answered with a definite "maybe".

Ireland's tourist season runs from, roughly, Saint Patrick's Day or Easter to the October Bank Holiday. From November to mid-March the whole island goes into hibernation. Well, sort of - many B&Bs and rural guesthouses close down, a number of attractions drastically curb their opening times or shut down completely. True, many seasonal "attractions" open for Christmas, but apart from a few exceptions they are downright tacky. Think "Santa's Grotto" in the most down-at-heel shopping mall you can imagine.

But quite honestly - the time between November and March is great for experiencing Ireland.

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Off Season Vacation Weather - It’s The Reason to Go

2008-02-05T16:51:00.000+01:00

By Vacapedia

I love to travel in the off season. No, it’s not that travel is cheaper. It’s the weather.

Really.

As I type this, the rain pounds down in San Francisco, the first big one of the fall season. It reminds me of Salzburg’s famous Schnürlregen. No, a Schnürlregen is not a pastry, it’s a type of rain, called “string rain,” that comes down hard at an angle, in piercing strings of water that pound the dust and oil out of the streets.

Then, it’s gone. Sudden as it came. Everything’s the same as before, except for the streets. They’re clean. You could eat off them.

But the fun part is that the suddenness of the rain makes you hurry to duck into any nearby cafe. You don’t have time to ask yourself if the folks inside might speak English, or if the place looks welcoming, or even reputable.

Just as suddenly as the rain began to fall you’re in the company of strangers. But wait, the strangers are all in the same predicament! And they’re animated about it. There’s something to talk about. The weather. Do you have weather like this where you come from?

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In the Off-Season, It's Even More Laid Back

2008-02-05T16:36:00.000+01:00

By Diane Roberts Special to the Washington Post
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Key West

Katharine Hepburn lies supine across Clark Gable's long body. From the other side of the veranda, Yvonne De Carlo watches, narrowing her green eyes. Hepburn yawns, sticking out her pink tongue, stretching her paws over her head. De Carlo switches her tail. Gable keeps sleeping.

Key West is famous for its exotic creatures: skinks, conchs, feral chickens, feral poets, parrotheads, drag queens, pirates manqu and, of course, Ernest Hemingway's polydactyl cats. There are four dozen of them, at least half descended from Snowball, a six-toed cat given to Hemingway by some ship's captain he met in a bar. Or so the story goes. The cats, named for movie stars, disport themselves throughout the big-windowed antebellum house Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, bought in 1930. I hang out with them every time I'm in Key West.

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