Some Last Minute Summer Travel Tips

Good Morning America at ABCNews.com offered some last minute travel tips. Let's check them out and see how useful they are:
1. Travel after the kids go back to school. We all know we have to pay more during peak travel seasons. The question is whether we will have time to travel after the summer or major holidays.
2. The best time of searching cheap tickets include Saturday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Usually airlines put new deals during those days.
3. Follow airlines and resort destinations/hotels at Twitter.com. They often tweet exclusive deals.
4. Consider the option of bus travels. Excellent example is $1 fare between NYC and Boston or between NYC and D.C. I know http://www.megabus.com/ offers $1 deals between Syracuse and NYC, but I have not found these deals for myself yet. However, a ticket of $28 each way between NYC and SYR is still a great deal --- I need to pay about $50 for gas alone if I am driving.
5. Check out http://www.hotelchatter.com/ and stay in a newly open and renovated hotel. Often these hotels offer better rates to fill the empty rooms.
6. Search for a cruise vacation a week before the ship sets to sail because a cruise line needs to fill its empty rooms.
7. Use airline credit cards wisely. For example, open two accounts of American Express Gold Delta credit card. Then, after you make a purchase and pay it off, you can earn a free round trip ticket between the U.S. and Europe.

I, myself, often use the following tactics to save some money:
1. Use http://www.kayak.com/ to compare hotel and airline prices, but http://www.hotwire.com/ to check out rental car price. For some reasons, hotwire often gets very good deal of rental cars.
2. Leave Thursday and return on Monday, especially when I am renting a car.
3. If my days are flexible, search three days before and after my desired travel days. Also, search nearby airports, especially for top travel destinations.
4. Book my hotel and air together as a package and make sure to compare the same package in different websites. I often see $300 differences between different websites for a 5-day trip. The websites I often compare the websites of http://www.travelocity.com/, http://www.expedia.com/, and http://www.orbitz.com/.
5. I often try to stay in a hotel that offers complimentary hot breakfast. It could save up to $20 a day for two persons by doing that.

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