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Travel Tip: Never eat or drink something you did not order!

Europe has a little tourist trick that always gets us Americans. They put food (bread, olives, etc) on the table, we eat them, and then they charge us. It is super annoying. In some cases, you might order bread (say, for 3 Euros), eat all the slices, and realize when you get the bill that they charge you per slice.

When I was traveling around Europe, I was pretty good about clarifying costs and quantities. A couple of times, however, I did get nailed with charges for things that I thought were free. It is pretty hard to argue with them, since after all, you did consume the product. To avoid any dispute, just make sure to ask if it is free!

In April 2008, Thomas Kohnstamm wrote a controversial book called “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?”. In this book, he freely admitted that the advice he dished out was less far from professional journalism. This is short excerpt from the New York Times Book Review:
On the take from hotel owners, he received free food, drink, lodging and women in exchange for write-ups in guidebooks.

What’s more, he intimates, many others in his inglorious profession, are just as shiftless. Some, including himself, even wrote about their foreign sojourns from home. A comic rogue who seems to have modeled his life and prose on Hunter S. Thompson’s, Mr. Kohnstamm is a tad smug about being broke and irresponsible. He …

Earlier this month, Brie posted a very helpful article about booking plane tickets. I thought I would follow up with advice from a New York Times article about avoiding holiday delays.

The article offers four suggestions:

Check Flight-Status Alerts - a lot of airlines and websites offer this service. It is used to inform you if there are any changes in your itinerary.
Cut Down on Wait Times - check the TSA’s website for wait times (did you know you could do that?). The website is: http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov/index.html.
Check in as Early as You Can - Get there early or do it online.
Know Your Rights - this is what the Times reported:

The Department of Transportation requires airlines to pay passengers who are involuntarily bumped from a domestic flight a maximum of $400 in cash if they reach their destination …

Budget Travel - Drinking Abroad
Drinking too much. It happens to the best of us. Unfortunately, when you are living or traveling abroad, it can really strain your budget, and may even force you to change your travel plans. I have met dozens of people that have had to  alter their itinerary because they spent too much money partying. Some had to miss weekend excursions, some had to cancel parts of their trip, and some even had to find a job before they could afford to fly home. It is unfortunate, but it could have been prevented.

If you are preparing a trip, or are currently traveling, be sure to check out the four suggestions below. The first three are pretty basic, but the last …

If you’re hard up for money this holiday season and aren’t going to do any traveling, there are some great books on Amazon.com that’ll make you feel like you went somewhere while you stay right at home:

The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World

Make the Most of Your Time on Earth

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas of the Planet Earth

Study Abroad, Travel, & Vacation in College

Eat, Pray, Love

Oh TripAdvisor.com, how I love thee, let me count the ways…

I love thee for thy easy-to-find-everything format, with one giant search feature or several more specific search options for hotels, flights, restaurants, things to do, etc.
I love thee for thy currency conversion search options- Euros, Rupes, Swiss Francs, oh my!
I love thee for thy incredibly accurate user reviews, which allowed me to avoid a disasterous hotel in the Dominican Republic, and allowed me to find a 200 year-old monestary recently converted into a hotel in the heart of Rome in MY price range.
I love thee for thy new search ranges which allow me to search by price, user ratings, hotel class, and neighborhood.
I love thee for thy freebies and games- I finally have a map with pins of all …