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.

Saving Cash in Las Vegas

We just got back from Las Vegas, a fun and exciting city designed entirely to suck money out of suckers’ pockets. So here are my top tips for coming home from with at least enough cash to get your car out of the airport parking lot:

1. Time it right. Las Vegas room rates are less predictable than airfares, owing not only to seasonal fluctuations but to the schedules of major conventions and other events. When choosing travel dates, plan well ahead, go directly to the hotel websites, check the rate calendars for the best prices and book those dates. In general, Fridays and Saturday nights cost more. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas can be a particular bargain.

2. Don’t gamble. If it weren’t a losing proposition for the gambler, casinos wouldn’t exist. If you must gamble, pick a low-stakes game with decent odds so you will lose less money and it will take longer. There’s a single-zero penny video roulette game at The Four Queens downtown where I swear it could take me all day to lose the price of a latte. At that rate, it’s cheap entertainment, not real gambling.

3. Take an airport shuttle to your hotel. The cost of $6 or $7 a person is usually lower than the cost of a taxi, unless there are more than two of you.

4. Bring enough cash. The casino ATMs typically charge $4.95 per transaction, on top of what your bank may charge you. So if you withdraw money to gamble, you’ve already lost before you start playing.

5. Tip the casino cocktail waitresses. Yes, they’ll bring you free drinks but if you don’t tip, they’ll go elsewhere. And if you give them a few bucks in advance and ask them to keep coming, they’ll do that.

The New Face Of Las Vegas

If you haven’t been to Las Vegas lately, have a look at the latest additions to the skyline, as seen from my room at the MGM Grand. It may change again soon — there’s talk of demolishing the unfinished Harmon Hotel because of structural deficiencies.

Dining Outside in Las Vegas

View at dinner. (Kate Symmonds)

Al fresco dining in Las Vegas? It’s not only possible, it can be tons of fun.

Last night, my daughter, her fiance and I got lucky and scored an outside table at Mon Ami Gabi at the Paris hotel on the Strip. It was around 9 p.m., the temperature somewhere in the 80s and we were right up against the railing with a splendid view of the Bellagio fountains.

While Mon Ami Gabi counts as a bit of splurge in my book, it’s a moderately priced restaurant by Las Vegas standards. The steak frites is a house specialty at about $22 and it’s very good.

And with the view we had, I wouldn’t trade it for a $65 entree at the Strip’s really expensive places.

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.

Southwest Sale For Fall Travel

Southwest Airlines is promoting a sale to celebrate its 40th anniversary. One-way fares are $40, $80 and $120, plus taxes and fees, depending on the distance.

Fares must be purchased by midnight on Thursday, June 23, for travel between Aug. 23, 2011 and  Nov. 16, 2011. The fares are offered every day except Friday and Sunday. Columbus Day and the Labor Day weekend are blacked out. 

From Bradley International, the $40 fare is available to Baltimore, Buffalo, Newark, Norfolk, Pittsburgh and Washington Dulles. The round-trip fare, with taxes and fees, will total about $120, with slight variations depending on the number of stops.

The $80 fare is good for Birmingham, Charleston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Greenville / Spartanburg, Indianapolis, Jackson, Kansas City, Little Rock, Louisville, Milwaukee, Nashville, Omaha, Raleigh/ Durham, St. Louis and several Florida destinations. The total round-trip fare will be about $195.

The $120 fare applies to multiple destinations in the Southwest, including Texas and Las Vegas, as well as New Orleans, but does not extend to the West Coast. The round-trip fare will come out to about $280.

These are competitive fares in the current market. And remember — you can check two bags on Southwest at no charge.

Some Airlines Are Hated More Than Others

It seems that we customers hate airlines generally but we don’t hate all airlines equally. According to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, airlines are at the bottom of the ratings chart when it comes to customer satisfaction but there’s a huge spread within the industry.

Delta Air Lines came out at the bottom with a 56 percent satisfaction rating and Southwest Airlines on top with 81 percent. This is dramatic, but not surprising. Southwest has consistently been the best-run and most profitable corporation in the industry but, contrary to conventional Wall Street wisdom, that doesn’t mean it has been the most ruthless and cheap.

Quite the reverse. Southwest has some of the highest pay rates in the industry. It has never laid off an employee. I believe the mutual respect between its management and unions translates into better treatment of passengers. It also helps that Southwest has never instituted checked bag fees and that it charges no fees for changing a ticket.

The no change-fee policy came in handy for me lately. I recently changed my return ticket from Las Vegas and paid only $5, the difference in fares. When I booked a trip to New Mexico as a gift for my husband, I chose Southwest even though its fares were not the lowest because I knew I could change the tickets if the timing was inconvenient for him.

If Southwest didn’t exist, we might believe that poor customer service is necessary for airlines to scrape out a profit. But we know better.

Citi Mastercard Bites The Dust

I got a call this morning about fraudulent charges that began to appear this week on my Citi Mastercard, but there’s really no way to tell whether this is related to a recent massive hack of Citigroup computers.

Citi has insisted that the hack didn’t reveal enough information to allow the thieves to make fraudulent charges, but the timing here is at least a little suspect. Perhaps my card was compromised in some other way, cloned by an unscrupulous retailer or stolen in an insecure online transaction. Hard to know.

Of course Citi is doing the right thing — closing my account, removing the fraudulent charges (including one for $257 from Macy’s) and issuing a new card. It will be a bit of a hassle for me to modify some automatic debits but it’s not a big deal.

Still, I’m troubled by the way Citi handled the larger security breach, regardless of whether the fraud on my account was related to it. The Los Angeles Times reported this morning on how slow Citi was to realize or acknowledge the extent of the breach and The New York Times reported earlier this week on how easily the hack was committed.

The lesson for travelers is certainly more clear. If you rely on credit cards,  you need to carry more than one. You don’t want to be left financially helpless far from home when something like this happens.

Hankering For A Cave Breakfast

For some reason, I’m suddenly hankering for the breakfast buffet at the Gamirasu Cave Hotel in Ayvali, Turkey. The photo doesn’t do it justice:

The oranges were incredibly sweet, and so was the orange juice. There was also pure, fresh cherry juice.  Seriously. Cherry juice.

Lost and Found at Disney

I visited Walt Disney World on Saturday with my husband and our friend Tom, who lost his sunglasses somewhere at Epcot. I wish I had taken a photo of the bin of sunglasses that Guest Relations produced when we stopped on the way out of the park to ask after Tom’s missing pair. There were easily a hundred pairs of sunglasses in there, which the Disney staff told us were the ones found on that day alone. Sadly, none of them were Tom’s. But I guess it’s fair to say that Disney takes the lost and found thing pretty seriously.