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| The Basics | Save big with last-minute travel deals
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To find 11th-hour bed-and-breakfast getaways, sign up for free weekly e-mails from Bedandbreakfast.com. Every Wednesday, youll receive a list of places offering deals of 20% or more off regular rates for the upcoming weekend in the city, state or region you prefer to visit. For instance, on three days notice you could have recently booked a weekend stay in a first-floor room at the Bayberry Inn, in Newport, R.I., for $125 a night, versus the regular rate of $215 a night.
Low-cost cars
Rental-car companies put unreserved cars on fire sale at the last minute, but they prefer not to advertise these low rates. Their solution is to offer discounts via blind-booking Web sites, such as Hotwire.com and Priceline.com.
For example, in August, Cindy wanted to book a car for a spur-of-the-moment trip to Chicago. On three days notice, Alamos Web site was offering a three-day rental for $112, after taxes and fees. But Priceline.com accepted her bid of $14 a day, for a total of only $57. The entire process took her about 15 minutes.
Priceline.com brokers cars from five companies: Alamo, Avis, Budget, Hertz and National. The auction service lets you specify dates, type of car, pick-up location and the price youre willing to pay. If a car-rental company accepts your bid, Priceline will reserve the car.
Priceline also lets you pick a rental-car provider and pay the listed rate, but its name-your-own-price deals usually save you more money. Choosing the rental-car company, however, could save you time during your trip. For example, Avis and Hertz usually own the lots closest to airport terminals so that the companies can cater to their business clientele.
At Hotwire.com, you can specify dates, car type and pick-up location. The site then fetches rates. Select the rate youre willing to pay, and Hotwire will book you with the company of their choice. Hotwire rents cars from Avis, Budget and Hertz, but you wont know which company is offering your nonrefundable rate until youve paid.
For example, on two days notice, Hotwire offered a rate of $60 (not including taxes and fees) for a two-day weekend rental of a midsize car. At the same time, the lowest rate offered directly from one of Hotwires partners was $83.
Quickie cruises
Sometimes, early birds -- people who book a year in advance -- cancel at the last minute, making bargain-priced cruise cabins available. To find these deals, stop at discount travel site SkyAuction.com.
For example, SkyAuction recently put up for bid an inside cabin for a seven-day cruise on the Queen Mary 2 from New York to London, sailing Sept. 2. The winning bid for the cabin (and a return flight) was $966 per person, double occupancy, and was announced nine days before the voyage. Taxes and service charges added $323 per person. Early-bird prices for a comparable deal were 46% higher.
Tips for better fare browsing
After each search for fares on a travel Web site, clear the cookies, or data files, that the site adds to your Web browser. (Click the browsers Help tab to learn how.) Keeping cookies sometimes means youll pay more for travel. For example, if you check a Web site for airfares multiple times, the sites cookies may tell your browser to show you the fares youve already seen, rather than the latest deals, or perhaps show you more pricey fares.
Clearing your cookies could uncover price breaks, such as a recent $49 savings on a round-trip ticket from Seattle to Honolulu on Northwest Airlines on one days notice. A search on Northwests Web site turned up a fare of $406. A repeat search, keeping our computers cookies, found a fare of $455. After clearing the cookies, a third search again dug up the $406 fare. Similar searches for fares from other airlines, and at other travel sites, uncovered similar discrepancies.
An alternative is to redo your search on a different computer. In a recent test, one computer search found a $750 ticket for the Seattle-Honolulu route on Northwests site, but another PC came up with a $406 ticket for the same itinerary. The difference? The first computer had already been used to search Northwests site and had cookies stored on it; the second was free of the sites cookies. But theres no guarantee that switching computers will get you a better bargain than clearing cookies. In repeat tests, we found no pattern.
By Sean ONeill, Kiplingers Personal Finance
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