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Posted
Sep 21 2009, 01:06 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This Saturday, Sept. 26, there is no excuse for sitting alone in your room.
Via two promotions, you can either visit any of the 391 U.S. national park for free as part of National Public Lands Day or you can get into hundreds of museums free as part of Smithsonian Magazine's Museum Day.
The National Public Lands Day is also the National Day of Service, in which volunteers are invited to help clean up and maintain parks. Last year, 120,000 volunteers built trails and bridges, cleared paths and planted trees. Many parks also are planning special activities.
Museum Day provides free entrance to hundreds of museums of all types on Saturday, Sept. 26. A few museums that are closed on Saturday are providing free entry on Sunday, Sept. 27. The promotion even includes some zoos. The venues are as diverse as the Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaii, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The J. Paul Getty Museum near Los Angeles and Miami Metrozoo.
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Posted
Aug 28 2009, 04:25 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
To keep their most loyal travelers coming back, airlines are making it easier to qualify for elite status in their mileage programs. In some cases, they're also making it easier to earn miles, The New York Times reports.
"What we're seeing is a bit of a resurgence on the airlines' part in focusing on their frequent-flier programs," Tim Winship, who writes about loyalty programs for SmarterTravel.com, told The Times.
Unfortunately, the airlines don't seem to have made it easier to actually get a seat with your frequent flier miles. If anything, cutbacks in flights have made such seats harder to come by this year, the McClatchy News Service reported.
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Posted
Aug 19 2009, 04:15 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
It may still be 95 degrees outside, but as far as the airlines are concerned, it is time for the fall sales. If you're thinking about traveling any time this year, including the holidays, it may be time to buy the tickets.
United Airlines rolled out a Labor Day sale this week, followed by Southwest Airlines, and pretty soon all the airlines had followed up with sales. Southwest's sale is for travel through Jan. 7, with some holiday blackout dates. Frontier's sale covers travel through Feb. 10 on off-peak days. And JetBlue's All You Can Jet pass, $599 for a month of travel, is also still on sale. Tom Parsons' Best Fares outlines some of the domestic deals, and Sherman's Travel shares some good international and domestic fares.
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Posted
Aug 14 2009, 12:21 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This weekend, Aug. 15-16, is your last chance this summer to make a free visit to the more than 100 U.S. national parks that normally charge a fee.
The U.S. Parks Service offered free park admission for three weekends this summer in response to the recession. We confess we're going to leave Everglades National Park to the mosquitoes (it's a winter destination) and visit a free beach instead, but in much of the country this will be a great weekend to visit a beautiful natural spot on the cheap.
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Posted
Aug 13 2009, 04:07 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Everybody in the travel world is talking about JetBlue's new All-You-Can-Jet-Pass for $599, which gives you unlimited flights for a month. Is it a good deal or isn't it?
It depends on where you want to go and how many trips you want to take.
For a business traveler who flies frequently between two points on the JetBlue map, it might be a good deal, Sarah Morgan of SmartMoney notes. It might also be a good deal for people in commuter relationships, someone flying weekly to check up on aging parents or even someone who has friends and family in a number of JetBlue cities and wants to spend a month visiting them all.
Bing: Jet Bue
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Posted
Aug 12 2009, 12:54 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Continental Airlines' offer of refunds and travel vouchers to the 47 people kept overnight on a grounded commuter plane wouldn't fly with Linda Maddox if she had been one of those passengers.
"Oh yeah, what I want from you now is a VOUCHER for another flight, so I can get trapped in another one of your cans ... again. Give me a refund, and I'll call a cab," Linda, who is claustrophobic, commented at The Two-Way blog at NPR.
Could this latest outrage be the one that breaks the opposition to the proposed air passengers' bill of rights?
"If senators don't think the air-travel bill is as important as health care and some other issues, maybe they should hold a town hall meeting with the 47 passengers who were forced to sit on a grounded airplane for six hours last weekend in Rochester, Minn.," opined Maine's Kennebec Journal.
Tom Belden said at Winging It, "Whatever, I suspect the chances of Congress actually adopting federal rules for treatment of airline customers during long tarmac delays just got a lot better with a tale from a flight this weekend."
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Posted
Aug 11 2009, 06:17 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Want to be the first to hear about airfare sales and hotel deals? You might want to join the microblogging service Twitter.
Twitter has become the latest place for airlines, hotels, tour operators and attractions to "tweet" their top deals. Twitter can take you deep into the Internet to find the latest information about hotels, restaurants and airfares, Everett Potter wrote in his Twitter primer for travelers in Travel + Leisure magazine.
JetBlueCheeps tweeted some $9 Boston-to-New York fares last month. United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines also are on Twitter, as are hotels, tourist offices and numerous travel writers and sites that gather travel deals and information. BestTravelDeals.net, for example, has just expanded its services to include travel deals from Twitter. You can see them to the right on the website or follow the company's Mary Song on Twitter.
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Posted
Aug 04 2009, 05:00 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
It turns out we are not the only ones bothered by the difficulty of making travel reservations online. A new report released today by Forrester Research found that 15% fewer travelers enjoy using the Web to make travel arrangements than they did in 2007.
Only one in three travelers believes travel Web sites do a good job of presenting choices.
"What we've seen is growing frustration," Henry H. Harteveldt, a Forrester travel analyst, told The New York Times. "Consumers see other Web sites becoming easier to use -- retail Web sites, banking Web sites, media Web sites. But travel is treading water as a category. There are very few travel companies that are really looking to improve the planning and booking process."
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Posted
Jul 30 2009, 02:07 PM
by
Teresa Mears
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
These days, buying an airline ticket is a cross between a major online research paper and playing the lottery. Which airline has the lowest fare? Will an airline with a better schedule match it tomorrow? Will there be a better deal next week? What about baggage fees?
If you live near several airports, which has the best deal to your destination? Don't forget to take into account the cost to get to the airport and the charge to park your car, which can exceed $10 a day where we live.
We thought earlier this month that airfares had gone as low as they were going to go this summer But this week, several airlines announced new sales, most for travel starting in mid-August. Can you get a better deal now? Maybe. It depends on where you want to go and when. But move quickly. The sales at Southwest (no bag check fees) and Spirit airlines end today. The sales at Delta and Frontier have various expiration dates, and other airlines have matched those prices. We're going to book some fall trips today.
Will prices be lower or higher next week? Who knows? Bing has some new tools for predicting airfares, but not all cities are included yet.
We just hope we don't have to change our plans, because the high change and cancellation fees will easily wipe out any savings from buying discount tickets in advance.
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Posted
Jul 29 2009, 07:56 AM
by
Teresa Mears
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
We really like Starbucks' Java Chip Frappuccino ice cream. But at $3.79 a pint, it's not usually on our grocery list. The pint we tried was particularly delicious because it was free, thanks to a Starbucks promotion (alas, now over) on Facebook.
Social networking is today's business buzz phrase, and more and more businesses are opting in, creating business pages on Facebook through which they offer deals to their "fans."
Companies are increasing communicating with their customers via Facebook and Twitter, notes Kimberly Palmer, who writes the Alpha Consumer blog for U.S. News and World Report. For some companies, that means offering deals and coupons, sometimes only for Facebook fans. Unlike many national deal sites, Facebook also offers pages and deals for small local businesses. If you run a small business, it's a cheap and easy marketing tool.
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