The Consumerist has 8 ways by which you can tweak your travel plans and get a tankload of free gas by making strategic choices for hotels, destinations, car rentals and purchases. Hotels.com is offering a $50 gas card with a 3-night booking before July 6th. Use code GAS50. If you rent a Hertz car through Travelocity it comes with a free tank of gas before June 30th.

Moving on, David L. Sifry, founder of Technorati, comes up with Offbeat Guides (www.offbeatguides.com) - personalized, on-demand travel guides created dynamically, based on your travel dates and your destination, covering over 30,000 travel destinations. “From the information you tell us, we can create a guide that includes events in the city you are visiting when you’re there, the most current exchange rates, key phrases in the city’s language, and even a weather forecast based on your travel dates!”

Way it works is, you enter your name, destination, where you are coming from, travel dates and optionally - Where you will be staying at the destination. Based on this input, you have the option of further customizing and building your guide to include all of some of the following features - Ability to include or exclude chapters of your guide; weather forecast for the duration of your trip; Maps - local, city center and neighborhood (where your accommodation is); Events calendar during your stay;  Language guide;  Short phrase guide;  Exchange rates; Tipping recommendations; Sudoku; Emergency numbers;  Electrical requirements;  Almanac.

You can then have your guide printed and shipped to you or download a PDF version directly off the site. The printed color guide shipped to you costs $24.95 and the downloadable pdf version costs $9.95.

Offbeat Guides is still in private beta, so they’ll likely be tweaking the site for some time to come, and adding more features as they get feedback. Plus, they get the data for the guides by pulling it off of sources on the net. Which means the better and more number of sources they have, the better their guides will be. So at this stage, Offbeat Guides is basically a work in progress. But they are offering a money back guarantee if you are not completely satisfied. And I like the concept. Its a marriage of travel guidebooks with the ability of the internet to provide uptodate information.

Moving from Offbeat Guides to hotels hitting guests with a ton of extra fees. USA Today publishes a piece, based on surveys of hotels which they conducted, where they outline which hotels charge for stuff like package handling and toll free calls and which ones overcharge for things like laundry. The point they’re trying to make is that if you’re on a vacation in Seattle, you’d prefer spending time on all the things to do in Seattle, rather than finding a laundromat. And hotels take advantage of this by charging rates way in excess of local rates.

 At the Atlanta Marriott Downtown, it costs $4 to receive an overnight letter from a courier company and $11 to receive a package up to 25 pounds. A 51-pound package has a $45 handling fee. At the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley, there is no charge to receive a package, but it costs $10 to send a package, or $25 for a package over 49 pounds. At the Chicago Marriott O’Hare, there is no charge to send or receive a package. USA TODAY’s 20-hotel survey found some of the cheapest rates — $2 for a man’s shirt and $11.50 for a suit — at the Radisson Gateway Seattle-Tacoma Airport. The Radisson Boston and the Wyndham San Jose in California have the lowest rate for cleaning a skirt — $6.50. The New York Waldorf-Astoria has the highest rates for laundry: $17 for a shirt, $32 for a suit and $20 for a skirt. It’s $10 extra for a pleated skirt.  - Guests get fed up as hotel fees pile up, Gary Stoller, USA Today, June 2 2008

Posted on June 3rd, 2008 by PLing
Filed under: Travel News, Travel Tips