Does Facebook Inspire Vacation Copycats?

The travel industry website TravelMole posits that people are planning vacations based on the trips their friends post about on Facebook and other social media sites.

My friends aren’t that impressionable, but they’re plenty mean.

My friend Elissa takes vacation taunting to new lows by posting photos of beautiful beaches on Facebook and tagging an empty spot with my name. My other Facebook friends like to post resentful remarks under my vacation snapshots, often threatening bodily harm. Hawaii seems to really set them off.

Do Good, Save Money With BiddingForGood

My husband, already a master of Priceline bidding, has come up with another place to find travel bargains.

The website BiddingForGood hosts online auctions for nonprofit organizations. Among the items auctioned off by schools, civic organizations and other nonprofits around the country are hotel rooms and restaurant certificates.

Don’s most recent winning bid was for two nights at the Hotel Andaluz in Albuquerque (its lovely lobby is pictured here) for $75 a night. That was about half the lowest rack rate.

Want to try this site to save money and do good at the same time? A few tips:

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Groupon Launches Travel Site

The new Groupon travel site has launched at groupon.com/getaways. The initial offers include a night at the Las Vegas Palms for $89 and a four-night stay at the swanky Lotus at Diamond Head in Honolulu for $500. I’m thinking the wildly successful Groupon model could become a powerful force in the travel industry.

Save On Travel Expenses With Groupon

I occasionally buy discount coupons from Groupon, mostly for eating out, but it only recently occurred to me that I could use the site for travel.

In advance of an upcoming trip to New Mexico, I started to look not only at the Hartford area deals but also those for Albuquerque, which includes some offers for Santa Fe. (Groupon says a separate site for Santa Fe is in the works.)

I found not only restaurant bargains but deeply discounted tickets for the Road Runner Express, the light rail system between the two cities.

Groupon has also announced a Groupon Getaways travel site in partnership with Expedia, but that doesn’t seem to be up and running quite yet.

To Fly Or Drive?

The inimitable Johnny Jet recommends, in a recent newsletter, the fly or drive calculator on befrugal.com.  Enter information about your trip and it will estimate the cost of driving versus the cost of flying, as well as travel time and the  carbon footprint for each option. Great tool.

Groupon For Travel?

The Club Med resort chain has vexed travel agents in Britain by offering a discount on the British Groupon site, Travel Weekly reports.

The deal, a £250 voucher toward a Club Med vacation at select resorts for £20, was available only through direct sales on the Groupon site. Club Med seemed unmoved by the travel agents’ complaints that they were cut out of the deal and described it to Travel Weekly as a test.

Groupon also recently announced a partnership with Expedia in the United States and Canada called Groupon Getaways. I just signed up for email alerts, but so far I can’t tell what is being or will be offered.

This could get interesting.

Momondo Adds Hotel Search

Momondo has added a hotel search function to its site, already home to an excellent airfare meta-search engine.

Momondo says the hotel search covers 450,000 hotels around the world and seeks out price comparisons across various hotel booking sites. Tnooz reviews it here.

I have used Momondo mainly to find air fares outside the United States, where it seems to do a better job than some of the U.S.-based search sites in finding good fares on small, regional airlines.  It will be interesting to see if the hotel search delivers the same advantage on foreign hotels.

Waste Not The Hotel Toiletries

There’s some buzz gathering around an operation called Clean the World that collects leftover soap and shampoo from hotels and reprocesses them.

The recycled soap products are distributed to homeless shelters in the United States and to needy people in poor countries, where soap can save lives by halting the spread of infectious diseases.

You can help by sending leftover soap products you’ve accumulated, donating money and asking hotels to participate in the recycling program. The Clean the World Web site has more details.

A Quirky Hotel List

Gamirasu Cave Hotel

HotelsCombined.com has released a list of the 10 quirkiest hotels in the world and, much to my surprise, it includes a hotel I’ve stayed in.

The Gamirasu Cave Hotel in Ayvali, Turkey, is third on the list. I didn’t really find it all that quirky when I stayed there in 2008, but these lists tend to be pretty subjective, anyway.

The rooms at the Gamirasu are dug into the soft rock of Cappadocia, where people have lived in caves for thousands of years. It’s a beautiful place and a great value, plus the breakfast buffet is fabulous. Quirky or not, I highly recommend it.

As for the Jumbo Hotel in a grounded 747 in Stockholm or the Alcatraz Hotel in a former jail in Kaiserslautern, Germany, I’ll let you know what I think if I ever get there.

Travelzoo Stockpiles Travel Deals

When you confront the question of where to travel for an outrageously cheap vacation, Travelzoo may have the answer.

Travelzoo specializes in travel deals the way Overstock specializes in remaindered merchandise. Every day the site adds new bargains: reduced hotel rates, last-minute cruises, airfare sales and discounted vacation packages.

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