Whether you feel like Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love or you’re just ready to quit the rat race, it’s time to start thinking about your next adventure.
If you’re ready to make those travel dreams a reality, then you might be interested in signing up for a series starting September 14 that will show you how to start getting on the right travel track.
Created by the founders of Briefcase to Backpack and Three Month Visa, websites that specialize in planning for career breaks and sabbaticals, Meet, Plan, Go has seemingly touched a nerve: seven of the 13 seminar locations are waitlisted. But would-be escapees can also sign up for Career Break Boot Camp, an 8-week online class and seminar series launching in January.
With only 43 days left in summer, it’s high time you get your travel butt in gear and this weekend is the perfect excuse to visit many of the US National Parks.
On August 14 and 15 you and yours will be able to visit many of the US National Parks with free entrance! This is a great deal since many of the parks can be up to $25 to enter.
Even parks such as Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and the Everglades are offering free admissions. For a full listing of the gratis parks this weekend, click here.
For those of us lucky enough to have a US passport, we’re going to have to pay more for it in the next week.
Starting Tuesday, the fees to renew or apply for your first passport will be increasing. The fee to renew your passport is going from $75 to $110 and to apply for your first US passport you’ll have to fork over $135, up from $100.
There’s even a new fee if you’d like formally to renounce your U.S. citizenship — it costs nothing now, but the price tag will be $450 starting Tuesday.
Fees for passport book and cards for children also are set to rise. (See chart for fee increases.)
Officials recommended the hikes after a study found the current fee structure wasn’t covering the government’s costs for the services, the State Department said in the proposal outlined in the Federal Register.
The agency received 1,797 comments about the proposal during the public comment period this spring, with about 70 percent of the messages expressing concern about the increase in the fees.
The commenters included AAA, which suggested delaying the hikes until the country showed more signs of an economic recovery, according to the Federal Register.
On Wednesday the U.S. Department of Transportation will be amending their airline passenger bumping rules as overbooking and bumping has become much more prevalent in the airline world since the economic downturn that made seat prices cheaper than ever before.
Wow! Check out this recent statement from the U.S. Department of Transportation, if you’re bumped involuntarily from an airline flight, you could be paid as much as $1,200 per incident, this is up from $400 to $800.
The new bumping rules will be released today from the department and we can’t wait to read through what else may have changed. This new bumping increase comes as airline overbooking has gotten much worse since the economic downturn and cheaper flight costs. The worst offenders by far of bumping passengers has been American Eagle, US Airways and Continental.
Anyone else feeling tempted to try and get bumped?
Right smack in the middle of high summer travel season, the U.S. Department of State has issued a warning not to visit the popular resort destination of Jamaica at this time.
Due to escalating violence in Kingston, Jamaica and surrounding areas, the State Department has issued a travel alert warning of possible violence.
With thousands of heavily armed police and soldiers clashing with defenders of a gang leader sought by the United States, access to the Norman Manley International Airport has been blocked on an intermittent basis, the alert said. Some fights have been canceled. A Delta spokesman said the airline is “monitoring the situation carefully,” and would likely make a decision Wednesday on rebooking policies.
“The possibility exists that unrest could spread beyond the general Kingston area,” the State Department said. The government has canceled official travel into Kingston, and warned U.S citizens in the country to monitor local news and radio reports before leaving their homes or hotels.
The offices of the U.S. Embassy in Kingston were closed Tuesday. Only essential staff were told to report to work.
Hopefully the situation will get under control quickly so we can all go back to partying in MoBay soon enough.
On Thursday Expedia.com finally launched their new openly gay sites. Fifteen different cities have been chosen for a gay-friendly makeover and you can now more easily search for “LGBT-welcoming” hotels and the like.
Expedia has partnered with the International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association to find and identify “LGBT-welcoming” hotels. Now, along with air conditioning and courtesy breakfast, you can search for hotels that welcome gays.
Some of the listings seem a bit arbitrary. In New York City, for instance, the Hilton New York makes the gay cut, but not the Bowery hotel. In Miami, the Standard makes the list but the new W doesn’t.
Still, where Expedia’s new gay store really distinguishes itself is in far-flung destinations. In the United Arab Emirates, there’s only one gay-friendly hotel listed, Aloft Abu Dhabi. There are no gay-friendly hotels, according to the site, in Africa.
Next time you’re staring into a French menu with a blank expression, you’ll remember that you so cleverly download the new Google translation app so you don’t have to eat snails ever again!
That’s the ultimate vision behind the weirdly named Goggles Translate—an app that turns your phone into a point-and-shoot translator. It’s a free download for phones that use Google’s Android operating system, such as the T-Mobile G1 and the Motorola Cliq. It’ll eventually be available for other phones, too.
I tested the app this weekend at a French restaurant in New York. I was interested in trying andouillette, so I took a pic of the word. On the phone’s screen, a blue line appeared and moved across the image of the menu. About 20 seconds later, Google let me know that andouillette is sausage made from pig intestines.
Sign me up!
We’re willing to bet that you can’t read the following post and not want to whisk away to Paris, France on the next flight. So put your money where your travel mouth is!
We are talking about Paris’ Eiffel Tower today, in all its majesty, so buckle in for a good history lesson!
Located on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France, the 1889-built iron lattice Eiffel Tower is one of the most recognizable structures in the world and the tallest building in Paris. Another noteworthy fact about this tower is that it is the sigle most visited paid monument in the world with millions of visitors ascending its lattice work every year.
Getting her name from designer and engineer Gustave Eiffel, the tower was originally built as the entrance arch for the 1889 World’s Fair but was kept on by the Parisians as a landmark which stands 1,063 feet tall.
You’re booking that French flight now, aren’t you?!
You go, Mexico. It’s extremely rare that Mexico issues a travel advisory for their citizens visiting the States, but with Arizona recently passing one of the most strict immigration measures in U.S. history, it’s no wonder that Mexican President Felipe Calderón felt obliged to warn his people.
Calderón warned Mexicans against visiting Arizona, given the newly approved law, which may have a huge impact on tourism in the US state.
Some 24 million Mexicans visit Arizona annually, contributing nearly $2.7 billion to the state’s $18.5 billion tourist industry. On any given day, some 65,000 Mexicans cross the border to work, shop, visit, and inject $7.35 million into the state’s economy. If Mexican citizens were to follow Calderón’s warning in the roughly 90-day span before the law takes effect, Arizona could lose more than $500 million dollars in revenue.
The potential economic fallout from Mexico’s travel advisory is one more marker of the fact that the U.S. desperately needs emerging-market business–and that developing countries know it. Getting slapped with an “instability” warning is the last thing the U.S. needs right now. But as more emerging markets turn sour on America’s leadership potential and its politics, Mexico’s warning may be just the first of many to come.
To lend a helping travel hand to tourists and travelers alike, Lonely Planet has announced their Volcano Relief Sale.
The Volcano Relief Sale lets you download your choice of 13 city-guide applications free of charge. Each app usually runs around $16, but to help you and yours survive being stuck in Europe during the volcano ash clouds, Lonely Planet is giving them up completely free.
You can download the apps via iTunes free until Thursday, April 22. Check out the cities up for offer below:
Amsterdam
Barcelona
Berlin
Budapest
Copenhagen
Istanbul
London
Moscow
Munich
Paris
Rome
Stockholm
Vienna
