Today, a special edition of Trip on a Deal, Arthur Fromer's top 10 bargain travel tips
you've probably never heard of.
Welcome to Trip on a Deal, I'm John.
And I am John.
We are here at the marvelous Cafe Rhonda in Manhattan and we are joined by the legendary
Arthur Fromer.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
We're delighted to have you.
Arthur Fromer and TravelBetter, Cheaper and Smarter is packed with ways to actually make
that dollar go further on your trip.
That's the purpose of the book.
One of the things that Lucena really struck by is in the foreword, you say that mainstream
travel media are not helpful to regular travelers, why not?
One is worse than the next.
The people who run these media, they do not provide service-oriented material, they don't
deal with the needs of the vast bulk of the American population.
With that in mind, we called for your book and we picked the top 10 great travel bargains
that people probably have never heard of.
So we're going to go through the 10.
Yeah.
All right.
You ready?
All right.
Here we go.
Number 10, the best travel search engines are not the ones you might think about.
You list for flights a Danish site as the best travel site.
That's right.
It comes up with cheaper prices for flights within the United States than you can get
from the big airfare search engines.
Now for hotels, you list another international site, an Australian site, hotelscombined.com.
Anybody knows about in the United States.
They search everybody else and tell you what's out there and then you yourself call the hotel
directly.
They're doing very well now.
All right.
So generally for the best travel search engines for cars, you say there's one site that if
you don't use this site, you will not be getting the best deal.
BreezeNet.
They ferret out which car rental companies are the hungriest during a particular week.
During a week in Orlando, there may be one of them that has a lot of unrented cars that's
willing to come down to $50 a day rather than $40.
Number nine, the best cheap stay in America.
Arthur, tell us about the new deal going at Motel 6 of all places.
Most people would never consider staying at a Motel 6.
Their image of Motel 6 is of a shabby, shabby, sordid facility with the doors hanging off
their hinges.
Motel 6 was recently taken over by a big French hotel firm, Accord, one of the biggest in
the world, that has put a lot of money into Motel 6.
Go into the Motel 6 website or into their catalog.
Motel6.com.
And look for the words, interior corridors, that's the tip-off.
Number eight, a lesson for students and teachers.
You list two websites that help students and teachers.
Number one, educatorstravel.com.
Yes, that's a bed and breakfast organization of teachers who have an extra cot, an extra
spare room, who have an extra bed in their room and would like to earn some additional
money by taking in other teachers.
And for students, they can travel for as little as $69 to $89 anywhere in the U.S.
If they go to airtranu.com AirTranU, the airline known as AirTran, has set up a facility to
make flights, or rather, available to students.
They do it on a standby basis.
But if you have an identity card, you go on AirTran and you pay so little for your flight.
Number seven, avoid the new sneaky hotel fees.
Oh, that's a rough area.
The hotel industry has a lot to answer for.
When you get your bill, they suddenly give you a fee of $3 a day for use for the existence
of the safe.
In the closet, in the room where you're saying, even though you haven't used it, these extra
fees are destroying the reputation of the hotel industry.
There are outright fraud and the respectable heads of major hotel chains should be ashamed
of themselves.
But right now, you know who you are.
You know who you are.
We're taking names.
We're taking names.
Number six, repositioning yourself.
What is a repositioning cruise?
A repositioning cruise is the movement of a cruise ship from an area where it is no longer
needed to an area where the season is just beginning.
Now, mainly what they are doing is simply crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
They spend six or seven days simply at sea.
I think this is heaven to be on a ship, to be lying on a chef's lawn, to be reading
a novel, to have a couple of bouillons put into your hands, to have these are called
repositioning cruises.
They often cost as little as $40 and $50 a night per person.
So they're good if you have a lot of time, but not a lot of money, essentially.
Now, I will bring up number five, which is one of the, this made you madder than almost
anything else in the book.
Speaking of cruises, never book your cruise excursions through the cruise line.
The smart tourist doesn't do that.
What do we do instead?
You may feel like simply getting off the ship and wandering around on your own two feet,
or you make use now of certain independent companies that I talk about and ask Arthur
Fromer that create their own shore excursions.
Shortrips.com.
Shortrips.com.
Portpromotions.com.
They have some shore excursions.
Number four, volunteer vacations.
They're not necessarily free or even cheap.
All right.
So I think there's a lot of misconceptions about volunteer vacations, which is a very
trendy thing right now.
And yet the average American believes that when you go on a volunteer vacation and you
lend your services to a worthy cause, you should be living free.
In actual fact, on a great many programs, you're paying more than if you were to book
a normal tour because the arrangements are very complex to create.
There are wonderful organizations that permit you to enjoy a less expensive vacation, that
is a volunteer vacation.
The Sierra Club, where you perform useful services, restoring hiking trails and the
like habitat for humanity, puts you up free of charge.
So you can do good and feel good about what you're spending.
That's true.
Tip number three, never, but never go to a commercial money changer when you're looking
for foreign currency.
Of course.
There is one place that you go to universally throughout the world today to change your
money, and that is a plain old familiar ATM machine.
They give you a decent deal, and you get a decent exchange rate.
We're coming down to the final.
Now are these the more important tips?
These are all important.
Don't you think every page of this book is important?
Number two.
You ready?
Right.
It's a little controversial.
User-generated websites are, and I quote, virtually useless.
You say in your book.
It's actually useless because people have estimated that perhaps 50% of their recommendations
are fakes.
And you named names.
Are they very popular?
Tripplevisor, of course.
Tripplevisor.com.
Logic would tell you if you were running a hotel today, you would encourage every cousin,
every aunt, every friend, and the acquaintance of yours to write in, there is no way in
the world that these user-generated sites are able to distinguish between the genuine
and the fake.
And the number one, number one great tip from Arthur Fromer's book, we enjoyed this very
much from the back of the book, labeled truths, and you say, the less you spend, the more
you enjoy.
The more you enjoy.
Why is that true?
The less you spend, the more authentic is the travel experience.
The more informal it is, the greater are the chances that you will meet other residents
of the location, and this has been the theme of all of our books from the very beginning,
and it's a reason why the Fromer Travel Guides are now the largest selling series of travel
guides in North America today.
Well, we've been talking about Ask Arthur Fromer with Arthur Fromer, it's an amazing
resource.
If you want to get any of the links that Arthur Fromer talked about today, go to Trippleadale.com
or go to Fromers.com, they're the only guidebook series that puts all their material online,
it's an incredible resource.
Thank you, Arthur Fromer, for joining us today, and thank you, Kathy Rhonda, you're in New
York City for allowing us to shoot, and don't you forget to join us next week so you can
trip on a deal.
