The terrorist bombing on the island of Bali last month that claimed the lives of nearly 200 people, many of them tourists, made Alicia Nieva-Woodgate reconsider her planned trip to the Far East. “I thought: What if something like that happens again?” the San Francisco sportswriter says. “I just wanted to be prepared for the worst.” So before she leaves for a three-month adventure to Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Thailand and Burma in December, Nieva-Woodgate is buying a $199 travel insurance policy that covers medical expenses, lost luggage and the cost of returning home if a terrorist incident interrupts her trip.
The Travel Tightwad
We aren’t the same travelers we were a year ago. How could we be? The September 11, terrorist attacks affected us like nothing else. The changes that have taken place, though subtle, are important. We’ve developed a deeper awareness of ourselves and our role in the world.
Sigmund Freud once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Fortunately the good doctor never had to fly, because if he did, he’d discover that sometimes an airline ticket isn’t just an airline ticket. It’s no joke. You can pay good money for a flight, only to get charged extra for everything from a scheduling change to a luggage fee. And thanks to the tailspin that the airline industry finds itself in today, these fees are multiplying with alarming speed.
The Collesi’s 50th anniversary cruise on Royal Caribbean’s “Enchantment of the Seas” was supposed to be a festive occasion surrounded by family and visiting charming Mexican ports like Cozumel and Costa Maya. And it was—until the bill for dinner arrived one evening. “They charged $1.45 per soda for each child,” remembers Roz Collesi, a Des Plaines, Ill., retiree. “They really nickeled and dimed us to death.”
Local calls at the Marriott University Park in Tucson, Ariz., cost a dollar each. So why did Dean Kennedy have to pay $28 for his phone call? It turns out he’d left his laptop hooked up to the phone one night because he was expecting an important e-mail. “The clerk informed me that local calls were a dollar plus 10 cents per minute for calls over one hour,” remembers the Chandler, Ariz., accountant. “When I looked again at the placard, sure enough, some extremely fine print notified me of this charge.”
Rich Swisshelm thought he’d found a bargain when he locked in a rate of $28 a day for a sport utility vehicle in San Jose, Costa Rica. But when he tried to pick the truck up from the Advantage Rent-A-Car counter, he discovered he’d thought wrong. “The agent informed me that I had to purchase liability insurance at $20 per day and personal accident insurance at $8 per day, which doubled the cost of the rental,” he remembers. “They said both insurances were mandatory, and I could not rent the car without purchasing the insurance.”
If time is money, then frequent travelers must be the poorest people on the planet—at least the ones who try to redeem their miles. Consider Bryan Littlefield, who wanted to cash in his points for two first-class tickets to Paris on Delta Air Lines recently. “I tried over nine months in advance and was unable to get a flight,” remembers the Alhambra, Calif., technology consultant. “I did not want to chance waiting till things opened up if ever. Luckily, after doing my own research, I discovered the beauty of airline partners and managed to get a flight on Air France with my miles.”
Miami is one of those destinations where everything is on sale, at least when it comes to travel. It’s on sale during the summer. It’s on sale during the winter. Here in the land of year-round sunshine and discounts, a Web connection can just add to the bewilderment. Don’t think it’s any different when you’re a local. Just as an example, I live less than a block from a Marriott property in South Florida, a really nice one with a marina, a white sandy beach, and a great little bar. The rooms are comfortable, and the staff is friendly. But the prices are more changeable than the weather.
Jeff Hatch, a retiree from Truckee, Calif., turns to the Internet when he’s looking for a bargain on a hotel in Los Angeles. With good reason. He recently clicked on a website called California Riviera to find a room near the beach, and the booking service landed him a good deal. “They booked me a suite at Four Seasons in Newport Beach,” he recalls. “The price was so good that the desk clerk thought it was an error and put me in standard room.” Hatch fixed the problem with a phone call and got re-upgraded.
Going to the Big D? Log on to the Internet before leaving for Dallas. A visit to the Web can save you lots of money. Hard to believe, considering that the ninth-largest city in the United States isn’t exactly known as a tourist destination. But the discounts are there – not as abundant as they are elsewhere, nor as easy to find. But they’re there.
The nation’s capital is the only city in which I almost always end up getting lost, no matter how many maps or Internet driving directions I carry. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been a regular visitor to Washington since 1975, or that I lived just a short drive away, in Annapolis, for four years. D.C. confuses me. Bargain-hunters often feel the same way. Washington is a tourist town but it’s not dependent on the visitors for its livelihood to the same extent as Orlando or Las Vegas. So the deals can be harder to find. The Web makes that task a little easier. Although moneysaving Internet sites aren’t as evolved as they are for some of the bigger destinations, they are nonetheless useful guides for travelers looking to trim their expenses.
Tim Dawson doesn’t like to travel with flimsy luggage. His tastes run to the high-end, ballistic nylon designer baggage by manufacturers such as Tumi, which he says serve him well on his frequent trips. “It’s got a solid reputation,” says the Frazer, PA, financial analyst, “but it’s also expensive.” So you can imagine Dawson’s surprise when he found two Tumi bags at Neiman-Marcus at 45 percent off the list price recently. “I paid $298 total plus tax. It was not a discontinued model, and it came with a full warranty,” he recalls. But now he wonders—could he have done even better?
Before she discovered Hotwire, Anna Blackman routinely reserved her cars through a rental company website. She says she did it for the frequent flier mileage credit and because the rates were better. But she recently snagged a great price on Hotwire for a one-week rental in Baltimore – a brand-new midsize car from National Car Rental for $22 a day – that made her forget about her miles. “It was much cheaper than my reservation with any other car rental company,” says the El Sobrante, CA, executive.
Finding an airfare at the last minute may seem simple for Enda Carey, a computer systems analyst for a brokerage firm in New York. But the actual process is far from it. “In order to plan trips based on what’s available at the last minute, I use a variety of sources,” he says.
Forget everything you know – or think you know – about finding a cheap airline ticket on the Web. Sites that sell so-called “last-minute” tickets constantly add and remove inventory. But now the pace of those changes is accelerating beyond what most travel experts believed possible. The old rules no longer apply with these dot-coms on steroids, meaning that you’ve got to think quicker, act more decisively, and learn to play the airfare game better when you’re ready to buy.
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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