I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather this week, so Part 3 of my foodie article will resume on Wednesday. Today I’d like to talk about last-minute gifts for Christmas, which is a mere week away now. While you can still order many things online and get them to their destination on time, wouldn’t you rather NOT spend $30 on expedited shipping? That’s a whole other gift that you can buy with that money. Instead of that, how about buying something travel-related that you can actually get via email or skip down to the mall and pick up (if you get there right when they open, you’ll be in and out in no time)?
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Do you have a Disney-addict on your list? Do they go to Disney every year and own every piece of Disneyana possible? Well, a gift card will fit their wish list perfectly. Either a generic Disney card or else a Disney park-hopper pass. You can pick these up at the Disney Store in the mall. Park-hoppers are available for Disneyland parks or you can buy the generic gift card that can be used at the Disney Store, Disney.com and almost everywhere within Disney parks, including Downtown Disney stores and restaurants. They can even be used towards park tickets. Attach the card to a cute little plush from the store display, The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland or a Disney movie and you’ve got a great looking gift for the holidays…and one that is super useful.
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Guidebooks make wonderful gifts, especially if you know that someone will be traveling to a new destination in the coming year. For example, if I were planning a trip toGuatemala, I would love to find a box of guidebooks under the tree. Lonely Planet, Fodor’s and Frommer’s are the top three brands, but certainly you will find many others, like the Wallpaper guides.
Airline gift cards and/or miles will get them further! If you know a trip will be planned, but you don’t know where, then an airline gift is always welcome, especially if you know they fly the same airlines, like we do! If a gift card isn’t a viable option, spend the same amount and purchase some frequent flyer miles for them and have it emailed right to them.
Give the gift of a pain-free back with the Healthy Back Bag. Ameribag makes these in many different sizes, colors and materials. There’s one for everyone and they are the BEST to travel with. With interior pockets and the main zipper towards your body, they are super secure and the curvy body and padded strap conform to your shape and distributes weight evenly. I love mine, my friend loves hers and I met a woman in EPCOT who also loves hers and wanted to know what fabric mine was made of so she could get another one! They sell them at luggage stores worldwide and also at your local AAA travel store. If you have Amazon Prime, there’s still time to order one and receive it by Christmas Eve!
Got a friend or relative that can never find their car? Run up to your local outdoor store, like REI, and get them a Bushnell BackTrack GPS. Not only does it fit in a pocket and comes in a variety of fun colors, but it will also help anyone get back to their original starting point, whether it’s a coffee shop, hotel or car in a parking lot. The one drawback is that this doesn’t work indoors, so if you park in a garage, you won’t be able to pinpoint your coordinates. Probably not a great gift for someone who often gets lost in shopping malls.
And hopefully next year, my book Shereen Travels Cheap will be on this list, too. I am working hard to find a publisher, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be something to cross off my Christmas wish list this season. Of course, you’ll be the first to know when it happens! Thanks for being such loyal readers!
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Don’t forget to watch this space for new posts and updates on featured posts by ME! Yeah, yeah, I’m all about myself sometimes…but still, please check out the following websites that are very informative and have been kind enough to let me write for them and promote myself. I’d also like to thank WhichBudget.com and Airlikes.com for giving my blog numbers a nice boost with their reposting of my website reviews for their pages on both their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
So, I thought I'd take a break from food travel for the moment and talk about something that might be more helpful to your holiday travels.
It’s true that there are a million travel websites out there. Some are really useful and some less so. Unfortunately, it’s become common to just jump onto Expedia, Priceline or Travelocity and not really look at any other sites. There are new sites cropping up every day, for all kinds of things, but with travel being a multi-billion dollar industry in just America alone, new web addresses are showing up on the internet. I never advocate using a site you’ve never heard of that doesn’t seem to have existed five minutes ago, as they can always be scams, but it pays to do a bit of research in that case. Look for reviews and any complaints. Likewise, look for positive feedback, too. Today, I’ve compiled 5 of my favorite lesser-known travel sites that can be super useful and even save you money. Considering I’ve checked out and even used these sites, you have my word that they are totally safe!
Dohop is one of those websites that gives you awesome information and you wonder why you've never heard of it. It basically lets you build your own search engine by searching round-trip or one-way flights between any two locations and then giving you all your options, starting with the least expensive. It searches over 600 airlines and shows you the best fares possible, even if it means flying to or out of a different airport in the area. It's the only intuitive search engine that I know of that gives you these options without you having to tell it you are willing to fly in or out of surrounding airports. If you want to book, Dohop directs you to the right website to reserve your flight(s).
This week, Dohop launched Dohop Away, which is a great function for finding new places to visit. Enter your starting airport and when you want to travel and you will get a list of all the flight deals available for that timeframe. Pretty easy to just click and choose a vacation and then decide what to pack!
Dohop also has a great search function to find you low-cost hotels and car rentals worldwide. I also recommend you signing up for their newsletter. It is quite witty and has some great information, including guest posts from other travel bloggers (like me!).
Don't forget to "Like" Shereen Travels Cheap on Facebook. My page offers even more deals and budget-travel tips and members can ask questions and leave comments on my wall, which I love to read and respond to. And if you are one of the first 500 members, you will be entered into a drawing for one of two cool travel bags from Travelon. Make sure you tell your friends to join, too, because there is a sweet prize for those that refer winners, making your odds of winning bigger, the more people you invite to join!
I discovered Venere years and years ago and keep telling people to use them for hotel booksings, because they just keep adding great features that make it super user-friendly. Venere is a UK-based hotel search engine that has listings for hotels, B&Bs and apartment hotels. It gives you all the information you could need on the majority of them, including pictures, amenities, location and traveler reviews. Then even offer listings for lodgings that don't yet allow for Internet bookings, but you can still see pricing and contact info so you can call them directly.
Venere is branching out to include hotels worldwide. While they are adding accommodations, they basically only have major tourist destinations everywhere outside of the UK and Europe, but the list keeps growing, making them good competition for the bigger search engines out there. I have found amazing deals on Venere that I couldn't find elsewhere. Aside from that, many of the hotels don't require prepayment, so you can pay once you get there or just put down a deposit to hold your reservation. This makes it really convenient to use, because you aren't forced to pay for a big chunk of your vacation months before you go.
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While you may or may not have seen my posts about the awesomeness that is Airlikes, please take some time to check out their site and help this new website grow, which can only be achieved by travelers like you. Even if founder Nicolas Pellier hadn’t added a link to my blog on his brand-new website, I would have gladly given him a great review, because his website is innovative and something I find very useful for myself and potentially for many travelers worldwide.
Airlikes is like TripAdvisor for airlines and airports. Aside from being able to search for flights and hotels, the whole purpose of this France-based website is to give travelers information on airlines and airports all over the world. There are always readily available reviews for hotels and car rental companies, but not so much onairports or airlines themselves. With Airlikes, travelers like you can post reviews of both to help out other travelers booking their vacations and trying to avoid airports that are always busy or inconvenient or just figuring out how to lessen the stress of being there and making it easier to navigate. With all that going for it, you can also find news on airports and airlines, as well as weather conditions, general information on the airports and the airlines that fly there and also information about the country it’s located in. Pretty nifty. Check out this nice interview Nicolas did with tnooz, then go write a review of your home airport!
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Don’t have time to keep checking all the rental car sites to see if a better deal exists than the one you already booked? Then you need AutoSlash. Jonathan Weinberg, one of the two founders of AutoSlash, was nice enough to thank me for mentioning them on Twitter and Facebook, so I thought I would expand a bit on their actual services for those that wish to know more or missed my posts (and if you did, please consider following me on Facebook and/or Twitter, so you don’t miss any cool new websites or offers.) Use AutoSlash for free and let them find the lowest rental rate on cars at your destination. Not only that, they offer you the best discounts and codes available and will continue to monitor rental rates FOR you and alert you when they find a better deal with instructions on how to go about rebooking. I don’t know how you can go wrong with such an awesome (and FREE) service. Try if you must, but I would save yourself a lot of time and money and let AutoSlash “take the wheel”. Want to know even more? Poke around AutoSlash yourself or read this great article on tnooz. At less than a year old, this site has gotten some rave reviews already and I think you are really going to love what they can do for you.
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I was fortunate enough for WhichBudget to contact me through Facebook and tell me all about their website and Facebook pages. WhichBudget started up to help travelers learn about all the new budget airlines available which allow them to fly more often for much less. With the number of airlines increasing and many more people needing to travel inexpensively, WhichBudget is so helpful. Plug in your starting and ending locations and you will see all the airlines (and flights) that fly between those cities. With all the options and pricing available at your fingertips, it’s really easy to choose one that works for you. WhichBudget will direct you to the correct website where you can make your purchase and get ready to plan your trip.
Another awesome thing about WhichBudget is the option to choose just a departure city to find the many places you can travel to for cheap and when. This is great for people who want to find new cities to travel to, but also for those who don’t know where they want to go, just that they want to travel somewhere. When I searched other sites for travel options between London and Paris, I got quotes in the hundreds of dollars range. With Which Budget, I got a quote on EasyJet for less than $100 per person. Try it! It works internationally, including the U.S.
Wish there were even more deals in this blog? Well, you can subscribe to The #traveldeals Daily, too, and get a newspaper page full of travel deals from Tweeters like me.
Don’t forget to watch this space for new posts and updates on featured posts by ME! Yeah, yeah, I’m all about myself sometimes…but still, don’t forget to check out these great posts I did for the following websites (which you should also take a look at, because they were awesome enough to let me post for them and because they are totally useful).
Anything I haven’t covered that you’re longing to see? Well, don’t be shy! Take the anonymous poll and let me know where it is you want to go or learn more about! If you don’t care about being invisible, you can take it anyway, or you can come post on my Facebook wall and ask me questions. I LOVE feedback of any kind.
Food for thought: Travel and food go hand in hand. Do you often think about food when you think about travel and vacation? I know I do. We will try our darndest to find the cheapest flight available and hope that it has a layover in Dallas at the DFW airport. If we didn’t have real travel plans, we have talked about vacationing IN that airport. Unfortunately, it could only be a 2 day trip, but it would be 2 days full of shopping and eating! Since we do make real travel plans, we settle for a long layover (3 hours is good), so we can look at some shops, ride the Skylink, eat at Chilis Too and grab an order of Popeyes Chicken to go. Yeah, I know we’re the weird couple who actually enjoys being at the airport, but it also affords us to take our time, stretch our legs, maybe grab a way-too-many-calorie Ben & Jerry waffle cone ice cream sundae and do a solid bit of people-watching. It is fact that we have more food packed from DFW to our destination than when we started our journey out of Portland, Ore.
Shereen Travels Cheap is featured on Ebates! This is really exciting, since Ebates has a huge audience, but I guess all my posts are exciting to me. If you or someone you know is interested in taking a destination holiday this year (or any other year) please take a look and pass it on via Facebook, Twitter or email. Thanks for the support!
So, why travel to other destinations if I could just go to DFW and get my fix and come home? There are so many reasons why.
New cuisines.I may love Chilis and am still hurt by their multiple-restaurant closure in Oregon (why?!), but I’m aware it’s not “cuisine”. I can get the same thing anywhere else in the country, probably closer to home, but it’s one of my favorite restaurants, so eating there on vacation makes it special. Aside from that one thing, I am excited to try new foods that are local to where I’m visiting. I could probably eat at Tigin Irish Pub & Restaurant in D Terminal, but I would much rather eat at a real Irish bar in Ireland.
Meet the locals. I’m sure most of the people that work in DFW are local to the area and there are probably more nationalities in that airport at any given time than most other places I would go, but they are all busy and going one place or another. I want to immerse myself in a culture when I travel. The destination is the goal, I just happen to also enjoy the journey there.
Carry-on free. I like running around the airport with all my worldly (travel) possessions in my wheelie bag, but this doesn’t really help you browse stores or look at things. At least at your destination you have a home base for your things and can leave them without worrying about airport security blowing them because unattended luggage might be a bomb.
Kodak moments. I suppose I could take a bunch of pictures of myself and Eric in the airport doing random things, like buying bagels, and say we had a wonderful trip, but people are going to ask me why it looks like we’re in a mall in each picture. Get out, see the (real) sights and take pictures of scenery, buildings, people, animals and whatever else looks like it would make a good statement hanging on your wall at home (or in your photo album).
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When you think of places that are famous for food, do you long to go there like I do? Which food is calling your name? Is it sushi or pasta or kangaroo burgers? (Don’t blame me that that’s a real thing.) Well, let’s see what other fun places you can visit that is a foodie destination.
Ever been to a luau? If roast pig, poi, pineapples and coconuts sound like your kind of culinary adventure, Hawaii is on sale for you through Monday December 13. Rates from west coast cities are at some of the lowest prices I’ve seen for Hawaiian airlines (or any other carrier), starting at $333 to Maui and Honolulu. Ask for a new bathing suit and sunscreen for Christmas so you can start packing for your trip. Travel between January 11 and June 9. You don’t even have to pack snacks on your flight, because Hawaiian still feeds you for free! Travel ticker can even help you find an affordable hotel if you need one.
I guess it depends on your food preferences on whether or not you go to Ireland for the cuisine, but many people do and proclaim its deliciousness (unless that’s the Guinness talking). If boiled bacon and cabbage or Irish stew don’t really sound all that yummy to you, what about Boxty (a traditional potato pancake), DublinBay prawns or even Dublin Lawyer (lobster cooked in whiskey and cream)? Even I have to add those to my list of something to try when I make it over there. Get myself a nice Irish coffee to go with my dessert and I’ll be good to go…to sleep that is. After a meal like that, I’ll need a good night of rest so I can get up the next day and do some sightseeing that doesn’t involve the local pub.
Right now, Priceline is offering a great deal to those who want to kiss the Blarney Stone. (Seriously, don’t do that. It’s covered in germs.) 4 nights at the 5-star Adare Village Resort and 2 nights at the 4-star Croke Park Hotel in Dublin, with RT airfare on Aer Lingus and car rental for the week from the low, low price of $499 per person. (This price is based on 4 travelers in a party, but deals also available for 2-6 travelers if you have less or more!) Book by midnight December 14 for travel dates in 2011.
I love to hear about food the world over even if I can’t travel there…yet. Sign up for the Found It. Ate It. blog on Divine Caroline and get 3-4 yumtastic listings every few days sent to your email inbox. Each one is different and may focus on a topic (like fries) or a place (such as San Francisco), but all have great suggestions that make you hungry. I print out listings I find particularly tempting and put it in my “future travel” folder for when I plan a trip. Then I will have some ideas of shops, food carts or restaurants I want to visit when I get there. And if the words don’t getcha, the mouthwatering pictures surely will.
When you go out for your birthday and get to pick the restaurant, do you immediately think of inari, California roll, unagi, tako and some wasabi? If you have no idea what these are, then you probably are not a sushi lover. For those of you that are, you are a lover of the lunchtime sushi-go-round and anywhere else that serves the tasty rolled up ocean-dwellers. While I’m not a fan myself (the rice wine vinegar is not my friend) I can appreciate the art of the sushi roll and wouldn’t mind a trip to the founding nation of the bite-size nibbles. I’m talking, of course, of Japan. Known for more than just sushi, you can go skiing, visit the beach and much more (one of those being Tokyo Disney).
Priceline has teamed up with Japan Airlines (JAL) to bring you this flight deal that is almost half of the regular flight prices I’ve seen in the last 6 months! $796 RT will fly you to Kyoto, Tokyo, Okinawa or many other cities. You must book by December 23rd for flights through March 17. This is a great opportunity for you to fly around the globe for almost the cost of flying across the country.
While not really a foodie destination, Las Vegas is full of buffets, which can have many different ethnic foods. One of my favorites is the Around The World Buffet at Rio. You can get almost anything you want there and if you aren’t sure, it gives you the ability to sample something from different parts of the globe.
Right now, you can spend more on buffets and less on lodging by booking a room at the Polo Towers Suites on The Strip. For just $49/night (weekend rates add $20) you can stay in a suite with a kitchenette and balcony. Book by December 15 for stays through March 31. This is a heck of a deal. Regular rates can be well over $200/night at this hotel. Located next toMGM and New YorkNew York, you can visit the lions for free, walk the streets of New York, take in a Cirque du Soliel show, take a roller coaster ride and try your luck at the slots. When you want to get away from the action of the casinos, go back to PoloTowers and use the rooftop pool and jacuzzi.
To Be Continued…
Still need a holiday gift for someone that loves to travel? Here are some of my new brilliant ideas that haven’t already been given out in the previous posts over the past month.
Culinary Travel Journal
Good food, journal writing and European travel combine to form an enticing new package designed for gourmands venturing to European shores. We've included the ever-popular handy travel tips and information sections, as well as ample writing space to record every delectable moment of your trip. Special to this volume are entirely new sections on cooking schools, established European restaurants, farmers' and outdoor food markets, wine regions, food and specialty shops and more. With this journal in hand, you can fulfill all your foodie fantasies and have the pages in which to record every last sweet and savory detail.
Abroad: A Travel Journal and Organize
Going somewhere? Wish you were? There's no time like the present for planning that dream trip. Both travel guide and travel journal, this is the place to plan, dream, document experiences, and keep track of important details. Abroad is packed with inspiring tips and travel information, and features two pockets for storing tickets and maps, an elastic band, and enough amusing asides from fellow travelers to keep you smiling through most train and bus rides. With Abroad in hand, the trip never has to end.
Violight VIO200 Travel Toothbrush Sanitizer
For the traveling germaphobe in your life. The Violight is able to kill 99.9-percent of the bacteria living on your toothbrush with its UV light. Runs on AA batteries. You brush your teeth, put your toothbrush in the Violight, close the lid and let it do its job. It automatically turns off when sanitation is complete.
Can’t afford a trip this holiday? Make a trip to your nearest Cost Plus World Market store and pick up a box of Beers of The World (or buy online). Get 10 bottles from a variety of nations. It’s like international bar-hopping, but without having to pack or leave your house (except to buy it).
Wish there were even more deals in this blog? Well, you can subscribe to The #traveldeals Daily, too, and get a newspaper page full of travel deals from Tweeters like me.
Don’t forget to watch this space for new posts and updates on featured posts by ME! Yeah, yeah, I’m all about myself sometimes…but still, don’t forget to check out these great posts I did for the following websites (which you should also take a look at, because they were awesome enough to let me post for them and because they are totally useful).
And next week (tentatively), Shereen Travels Cheap will be featured on My Itchy Travel Feet, a great blog for baby boomers, but really informative no matter what your age is.
Anything I haven’t covered that you’re longing to see? Well, don’t be shy! Take the anonymous poll and let me know where it is you want to go or learn more about! If you don’t care about being invisible, you can take it anyway, or you can come post on my Facebook wall and ask me questions. I LOVE feedback of any kind.
Like your info snack-sized? Well, you can follow @shereentrvlschp on Twitter and get a smaller portion of my daily deals, budget tips and product recommendations.
with you everywhere? Well, you can! Subscribe via your Amazon Kindle and get instant updates as soon as they're published. Don't have a Kindle? No problem. You can download the absolutely 
