Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 24

Here's a Fast Round-Up of the Websites that Will Help You Find Value on Your Next Vacation

It's vacation time. We're fast approaching the start of summer, and it's important to begin choosing both flights and accommodations. As an aid towards making those decisions, it might be useful to review a number of websites that usually prove helpful in finding the top values of travel. Here are the ones I'd suggest using:
 
For finding low-cost values in European hotels: www.venere.com (though it actually deals with the entire world, its headquarters in Rome give it a decided talent for finding European bargains).
 
For booking low-cost tours of port cities on cruises anywhere in the world, www.cruiseexcursions.com , a British outfit that is currently and considerably undercutting similar companies in price.
 
For finding low-cost apartments in cities all over the world: www.airbnb.com and www.wimdu.com .
 
For finding hotel rooms in the U.S.A.: I like www.getaroom.com , that actually encourages you to make toll-free phone calls to its telephone reservationists, via the number listed in its website.
 
For finding top values in air transportation both domestically and internationally: www.dohop.com , www.hipmunk.com , and www.momondo.com .
 
For snaring a free-of-charge overnight in the homes or apartments of outgoing people around the world: www.couchsurfing.org , www.usservas.org , www.globalfreeloaders.com .
 
For vacation homes: www.vrbo.com or www.homeaway.com .
 
There are others, of course, but I've found top values with the ones named above.

The Number of European River Cruises Currently On Sale Don't Match the Bargains Offered by Glamorous Viking River Cruises

There's no denying that Viking River Cruises ( www.vikingrivercruises.com ) is among the leading and most dynamic companies in the world of river cruising. It is engaged in a massive expansion of its river cruiseship fleet, it has upgraded many of its newest ships with ultra-modern amenities (balconies on cabins, fitness rooms for working out, unusually spacious lodgings, flat-screen tvs, you name it), and from all accounts it is doing well, enjoying a surge of bookings.
 
But with so many new ships to fill (the line has certainly doubled, perhaps tripled, in size over the past two years), there have to be numerous sailings on which many cabins remain unsold. That's the probable explanation for an unusually aggressive recent marketing campaign by Viking; I can't recall a recent week in which it hasn't announced some unusually attractive discount, some major bonus for last-minute bookings, some added benefit of booking aboard a particular departure.
 
And the ultimate in those bargains appeared on the internet yesterday, when Viking announced remarkable discounts on its 11-day vacations from Budapest to Bucharest for departures on each of May 3, 11, 17, 25, and 31.
 
Each of those May sailings was initially priced at $6,599 per person; they have now been reduced to $2,999. And to make the trans-Atlantic flights to eastern Europe less forbidding, Viking has announced that it will be providing round-trip air to Budapest or Bucharest, for all of those dates, for a stunning $697 per person (which compares with an earlier $1,395 per person).
 
The itinerary is an attractive one. You begin with two nights in Budapest, sail past many natural wonders of Hungary, visit the Serbian capital of Belgrade, stop in the Croatian town of Osijek, visit several historic villages of Bulgaria, and end with the many important sights and experiences of the Romanian capital of Bucharest.
 
The $2,999 offer (and the $6,599 airfare offer) both expire on April 30. I'd give them hard thought. To book, call tel. 800/707-8697.

A Spate of History Making Discounts on Luxury Cruises and Resorts Indicate All Is Not Well in that Glamorous World

It is always interesting to check up on how the super-deluxe cruiseships and hotels are doing. I usually perform that exercise by learning the current rates of all-suite Seabourn Cruises and the all-suite Vdara Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.
 
Seabourn Cruises are about as luxurious as you can get. Every accommodation is a suite, fine wines are poured for no extra charge at every lunch and dinner, and room and dining stewards can't do enough for you. Its normal rates are so high as to make you gulp -- try a 10-night cruise for $15,400 per person, 14-nights for $14,760 per person, seven nights for $13,650 -- but prices like those should be chicken feed for members of the 1%. So why is Seabourn currently discounting some of those rates by as much as 82% and 79% in May, June and July?
 
Go to Vacations To Go ( www.vacationstogo.com ), specify the Mediterranean as your cruise area, and name Seabourn as your cruiseline. You'll be agog to discover a seven-night cruise from Athens to Venice leaving May 12 (can you leave that soon?) on the Seabourn Odyssey, which is now offered at a mammoth 82% discount off the original $13,650 brochure price (that was almost $2,000 per person per day). Lucky bargain hunters can take that sailing for only $2,499 per person--or only $357 per person per day for a suite. On June 1, the Seabourn Quest offers a 68% discount off the original $7,800 for a seven-night cruise from Athens to Venice, now selling for the same $2,499. And you can do the same on the Seabourn Odyssey for its departures of June 16 and June 23, again at 68% off.
 
On June 24 and July 4, you can enjoy a 79% discount on the Seabourn Spirit sailing for 10 nights from Venice and back to Venice, a voyage originally priced at a modest $15,400 per person for a suite. By waiting to book that bargain close in, you can enjoy thje same suite on the Spirit for only $3,199 per person ($320 a day). Has any cheaper cruiseline ever offered discounts of 79% and 82%?
 
As for the Vdara Hotel on the Vegas strip, this too is ne plus ultra: a property consisting only of suites containing tiny electronic motors for raising and lowering the shades, multi-directional sound systems, 300-count Egyptian cotton pillow cases, and all the rest. And yet in May and June, there's not a single date at the Vdara shown as sold out, and suites are on sale on five nights in May for only $109 per night, on one night at $119, and on six nights at $129. It gets worse in June, when suites are priced at only $119 on 12 nights, and $129 on six nights. (Go to www.mgmresorts.com for the booking charts of the Vdara). These are accommodations that were meant to sell (when the hotel first opened) for upwards of $400 a night.
 
So pity the poor travel facilities that were meant for millionaires and billionaires. You may want to help them out by booking the bargain dates I've mentioned (which are only a partial listing).

This Weekend's Travel Show Was Almost Too Full of Information

On yesterday's broadcast of The Travel Show, which is now carried over several scores of major stations across the nation (see www.wor710.com/arthur-frommer for a podcast of the entire show), my daughter and I were able to cover a fair number of miscellaneous travel developments, both in our own discussion and in interviews with travel figures.
 
Jason Cochran, a consumer reporter and travel expert ( www.jasoncochran.com ) told of how the inside cabins on Disney's newest cruiseships (the Fantasy and the Dream) have become more popular than the seaside ones because of their fake portholes, which are actually rounded television sets carrying live videos of what is actually viewed from outside the ship. To save money on your next family-oriented cruise, you'll want to book one of the less-costly inside cabins (which now tend to sell out faster than the outside ones).
 
In responding to another interview, this time with Christopher Elliott about his Washington Post write-up of the non-disparagement clauses appearing in rental contracts for vacation homes (they create significant financial penalties for those renters who submit negative reviews to websites), several listeners phoned in to say that they had seen such clauses (or somewhat similar ones) in other rental agreements, and one listener claimed that a hotel had handed him a contract to sign that would have prevented him from critiquing his lodgings; he crossed out the clause, and a startled hotel front desk clerk simply accepted the altered agreement.
 
We discussed the battle now shaping up in The Netherlands over legislation that would prevent tourists from making use of the marijuana-selling coffee shops of that nation. In the Dutch city of Maastricht, the pot-selling merchants have simply stated they would pay no attention to the law -- and would proceed as before. In Amsterdam, the city's mayor is preparing to declare the city a vast, open-marijuana zone, claiming that easy, legal access to the mild drug is necessary to (a) prevent the selling of marijuana by various con artists in the streets, and (b) continue to attract tourism, claiming that one third of the city's visitors are drawn there by the easy access to pot. Stay tuned.
 
In the "controversy" of crying babies -- namely the complaints by super-sensitive adults that their flights have been ruined by the constant shrieking of an infant in a nearby seat -- Malaysia Airlines has announced that an entire floor of its new, two-story-high A380s, would be forbidden to parents with children under 12. That would permit the complainers to totally avoid the disturbing presence of children. One or two American airlines have stated they are studying the possibility of sending all parents with infants or very young children to the last rows of seats in the plane, which would protect a majority of the other passengers (but not all of them) from the worst of such disturbances.
 
We also discussed that some critics of the T.S.A. have become so hysterical in their attacks on the federal security agency that they have resorted to what appears very much to me as fabrication of stories about abuses by that agency. Does anyone believe that a T.S.A. agent in a major U.S. airport forced one middle-aged gentleman to drop his pants and underpants -- in the plain sight of a line of other passengers -- to confirm his claim that he had undergone a hip replacement operation implanting metal on his person? I simply don't believe this happened, and am astonished that the opponents of the T.S.A. should be circulating such fables.
 
And finally, we reviewed the world of unexpected hotel fees, which have become more frequent and flagrant. Some leading hotels are apparently charging as much as $39 a day for self-parking. Others are imposing "energy surcharges" of $20 a day and more, or 20% "service charges." It's become more and more necessary that you demand of the telephone reservationist, when you call for a room, to declare and confirm in writing (via an e-mail to you) that the price they quote for a room is the final price and that no other fees other than government-imposed ones, will be added to your eventual bill.
 
There were other topics that filled our two-hour show, but the above is a fair sampling.
 

Summer Trans-Atlantic Airfares Have Not Yet Skyrocketed to Unaffordable Levels

A great many alarmists inhabit the world of travel, and when you go to any gathering of avid travelers, you hear exaggerated predictions about the amount of money you'll need to fly the Atlantic round-trip this summer. I've heard people throw around such frightening forecasts as $1,800 round-trip between New York and London.
 
Now it may be that some experts expected the cost of airfares to rise that high, but the worst-case scenarios just haven't happened -- yet. If you'll go to almost any airfare search engine and insert dates for a round-trip flight to London coinciding with peak activity in the Olympics, you'll find it's not difficult to find non-stop, round-trip flights for $1,162 (my own recent test results) between New York and London. Those are the figures I encountered, including all fees, taxes and fuel surcharges, for a hypothetical flight taking off on July 14 (just prior to the start of the Olympics), and coming back on August 4 (in the midst of the Olympics). You can even reduce that figure by about $200 by booking a one-stop flight to London on, say, Icelandair via Reykjavik or Finnair via Helsinki.
 
Now there are isolated dates around this time when airfares spike even higher. There are also flights during any particular day that are priced at higher levels. But without too much difficulty, you can still find an $1,162 round-trip fare.
 
Of course, $1,162 isn't cheap, especially as compared with the prices of earlier years. But it's a figure that you can offset with drastically-reduced housing and meal costs once you're in Europe. As I've pointed out before, the smart tourist is currently opting to rent a European apartment rather than a hotel room, and thus reducing not simply the costs of accommodations but also the cost of meals that can now be prepared in the kitchenettes that come with such apartments. And the least pretentious among tourists is opting to stay in hostels, of which there are an increasing number in every European capital.
 
So take heart. International travel is still available for the person who makes a strong effort to reduce his or her costs once they are in the destination city. And it may be that public resistance to increased airfares has caused the international airlines to delay the sharp rise in prices that they must ardently desire.

An Associated Press Reporter May Have the Best Way to Decide When to Buy an Airfare

You're scheduled to take an expensive, long-distance flight several months from now. When should you buy your air ticket? Now? Or should you wait a few weeks in hope that the price may come down?
 
That's one of the most common predicaments in travel, and no one -- until very recently -- has suggested a persuasive answer. But Samantha Bomkamp of the Associated Press (she's an aviation writer for that organization) has devised a test that, to me, seems the best I've ever heard.
 
Samantha suggests that you go through the motions of inserting a booking into the website of an appropriate airline for your trip -- but without committing yourself. In other words, you fill out everything up to and including the moment when you are asked to choose your seat from a booking chart. But you don't go further than that.
 
Instead, you analyze the booking chart. If the plane for the dates of your trip is already heavily booked, if more than 70% of the seats have already been requested, then you can be pretty sure that the airline will not be reducing the price of seats in the future. Your best course will be to make a firm booking now, given that it appears that the flight will soon be completely booked up.
 
If, on the other hand, the booking chart reveals that very few people have yet requested seats, you know that the flight is not terribly popular and you can surmise that the airline will probably reduce the price in the future in an effort to fill up the plane.
 
Isn't that a neat suggestion? I think Samantha has come up with the smartest solution I've ever seen to the conundrum: when should I book, now or later? Have you ever seen a better plan?

ResortForaDay Connects Cruise Passengers with Hotel Passes for Beach Use and Unlimited Meals and Drinks

You're on a Caribbean cruise and about to stop for the day on an island where all you want to do is relax on the beach. But you know very little about that island's hotels, and you are particularly uncertain as to which hotels permit visitors for the day. Particularly at all-inclusive hotels, the management is likely to be unwilling to permit beachside guests to then dig in to those payment-free, all-you-can-eat meals at the hotel's various restaurants. You are also uncertain about how to reach the hotel.
 
That's where ResortForaDay ( www.resortforaday.com ) comes in. A relatively new service, it sells hotel passes at hotels on ten popular Caribbean islands. And some of those passes are valid for all-inclusive hotels and resorts, where you will have the right not simply to devour a huge, all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, but also to enjoy unlimited drinks -- tropical cocktails with tiny paper umbrellas and bits of fruit, local beers, as much wine as you want.
 
Prices for the passes seem rather reasonable, particularly when you consider the drinking privileges. For an all-inclusive hotel with those unlimited drink and meal rights, they average (depending on the island and resort) $55 and $60 per adult for the day, $40 per child under sixteen years of age. Even at hotels that aren't all-inclusive in character, most passes include the right to at least a lunch at the hotel's restaurant.
 
In addition to such day passes, ResortForADay also sells round-trip transportation from the dock to the hotel for a varying sum.
 
To buy a single pass, you simply need to make a $20 deposit to ResortForADay, and can pay the remaining amount directly to the hotel.
 
Here's an interesting travel device that eliminates the uncertainty (or anxiety) that some cruise passengers have about finding a hotel that will let them use the beach. And incidentally, day passes include the right to use changing facilities, and also give you the right to obtain beach towels for the day.
 
You might want to take a look at the website address listed above.

By Slipping Non-Disparagement Clauses Into Contracts with Renters, Real Estate Firms Seek to Silence Criticism

Tomorrow afternoon, my daughter Pauline and I will be conducting a recorded interview with our travel-writing colleague, Christopher Elliott, about a story he recently wrote for the Washington Post about the non-disparagement clauses that are increasingly cropping up in the contracts that travelers sign when they rent a vacation home. That interview will undoubtedly run in this coming Sunday's broadcast of The Travel Show ( www.wor710.com/arthur-frommer ).
 
It's an important -- not to say a chilling -- issue that deserves a great deal of attention. Apparently, the real estate firms that rent vacation homes are including contract clauses that prohibit the renter from posting critical remarks about the rental on the various user-generated websites. In the case cited by Elliott, a couple rented a home in Arizona through VRBO.com, but the contract they signed was with a local real estate firm. Dissatisfied with the rental, the couple posted a negative review on the website operated by VRBO.com, only to be told that if the review were not withdrawn, their credit card would be charged for $500. Why? Because they had violated a non-disparagement clause in the rental contract with the local real estate firm.
 
Think about that for a moment. Because the property -- or theoretically, the hotel or resort -- where you rent accommodations has your credit card, they can enforce these non-disparagement clauses by simply hitting you with a penalty. Doing the same, hotels in the future could hand you a small-type contract containing a clause that you will not later criticize that property on a review submitted, let's say, to TripAdvisor; and if you did, you would be charged a penalty of $500. Unless you signed the contract, you would not be permitted to rent a room at the hotel. (You can almost hear the hotel industry collectively exulting over this method of wiping out the effectiveness of user-generated reviews.)
 
Now the various people who defend these clauses, base their arguments on all sorts of horrid, potential and hypothetical threats. They claim there are a lot of people who, upon checking out, threaten the rental property with a negative review unless they are given a retroactive discount on the rental. They claim, in effect, that vacation renters are blackmailing them.
 
In my view, simply to state that argument is to refute it. You could justify a great many denials of our First Amendment rights of free speech with scary hypotheticals like that.
 
I regard this issue as an important one, and fear that a great many hotels and real estate companies may soon adopt this method of shutting off negative reviews. Have any of our readers encountered such "non-disparagement" clauses? I'd be interested in hearing of your own experiences or reactions. And in the meantime, you might like to tune in to The Travel Show this coming Sunday to hear a further discussion of the topic.

Cruise Discounters Are Now Confirming Mediterranean Super-Sales I Told You About Last Week

Last week, I brought to your attention that sailings of the Mediterranean during the month of June have dropped through the floor in price. I mentioned that on one departure at least, Royal Caribbean was offering inside cabins on seven-night sailings of the Med for as little as $346 per person (that's $49 a day).
 
Today (April 16), Online Vacation Center (tel. 800/329-9002; www.onlinevacationcenter.com ) has confirmed that phenomenon in spades. It has announced this morning that on EVERY Mediterranean sailing from now until the end of June, seven-night cruises of the western Mediterranean are available for $347 per person on the Adventure of the Seas leaving roundtrip from Malaga, for $399 per person on seven night cruises of the Eastern Mediterranean of the Navigator of the Seas leaving roundtrip from Rome, for $659 for 12-night sailings of the western Mediterranean on the Serenade of the Seas leaving roundtrip from Barcelona (that's $54.90 a day)... and so on and on.
 
You heard about this first, on Frommers.com. Expect the same on July sailings, as we approach July. A dramatic drop has apparently occurred in the cruise market for the Mediterranean.

Context Has Obtained a Grant Enabling it To Operate Tours for Only 5 Euros, 5 Pounds, or 5 Dollars

It is always a pleasure to disclose an internet program that was developed as a labor of love and not for the purpose of scoring a financial coup. That is certainly the case of Context ( www.contexttravel.com ). A system of scholar-led walking tours in 19 cities (London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice, Naples, Edinburgh, Florence, Athens, Istanbul, Prague, Beijing, Shanghai, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D.C.), it was developed by an American couple living in Rome who were dissatisfied with the crowded, standard, motorcoach sightseeing tours of dead, physical monuments and ruins in that city.
 
So they devised a number of walking tours that brought participants to the lesser-known sights and activities that revealed important lessons about the culture, art, architecture and history of Rome. And they proceeded to enlist a team of graduate students, professors, scholars, and other academics (some with Ph.D.'s) in other cities to do the same. It is the high quality of these "private docents" (as Context calls them) that most distinguishes Context's art-heavy, architecture-heavy tours from the more casual walking excursions sometimes offered in the same cities.
 
Context, which the founders (Paul and Lani) now direct from their home in Philadelphia, is a thriving organization that enjoys a growing number of enthusiasts among intellectually-curious travelers. It limits its tour groups to six persons -- imagine that! -- and thus conducts its "Walking Seminars" (as it calls its tours) in a manner that respects the dignity, personality, and access-to-authenticity of participants, who usually pay a per-person fee of about $55 for a two-hour tour, $85 for a three-hour tour (less in New York, where a three-hour Art Galleries of Chelsea tour costs $65), for those experiences. It also will operate walking tours simply for an individual or couple for a flat fee.
 
Context has received every kind of award from organizations honoring innovators in travel, and it has certainly received a fair amount of press coverage. But more recently, it has inaugurated a new program called "Tours in the Public Interest" (you can find it by navigating through its website), financed in part by its own Foundation for Sustainable Tourism, on which tour charges are only $5, €5, or £5 per person. Sample topics: Thomas Jefferson in Paris, the Croton Aqueduct in New York. Since these new cut-rate experiences have scarcely been noticed to date, I'm highlighting them in this Blog.
 
And incidentally, if Context's normal charges seem high to you, then you haven't recently noted the average charges for a standard motorcoach tour in the cities where Context is active; they are, quite often, at least that much and more.
 
If you're planning a trip to any of the above 19 cities, you'll want to study Context's website (and Context requires that you make advance reservations for its unique tours).