TravelDuties

If you’re a discount traveler or simply looking for the best travel bargains, you should try to plan your vacation on the off-peak travel times for the destination of your choice. Weather is mostly the main reason for certain off-peak and peak travel price increases and decreases. As the snowbirds flock to the south in the winter and head back home in the summer, many tourism destinations along the Atlantic coast are affected by this switch in population and season.

Hotels try to lure guests in during the off-peak seasons for various reasons, revenue and occupancy numbers. Hotels in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana are discounted in the summer months and you can spot great deals on hotels, attractions, or airfare. If you call the hotel directly, they can point you towards some activities that are no available in the peak season that are available in the off-peak season for the dates you are traveling. Package deals are generally offered through the main travel websites for the off-peak season and often include a free car rental or dinner gift certificate at a nice restaurant.

Interest in airline careers are on the rise as people are showing more and more desire to get involved with the travel industry. Fresho.com offers an online classified directory of jobs in the airline industry. Their listings are free and cover all of the states in America (as well as D.C.). You can also submit your resume to the site for free as well.

The site has a lot of great tools for people looking for a new job. Their search is fast and simple and lets you look through the entire site by job keyword, city and/or zip code. The site also comes with interactive maps, email notification services for new job postings as well. Included with the job listings are information articles and career profiles for those of you who want to get involved with the airline industry but don’t know exactly where to start.

If the free listings aren’t good enough for you, Fresho.com also offers another form of listing (called a Featured, or Premium listing) that highlights your listing above others on the site. This is entirely optional and the rest of the features on the site are totally free to use for all visitors.

Are you a thrill seeker or looking for a winter vacation filled with ski slopes and warm hot chocolate? Visit Keystone. Located in the Rockies of Colorado, Keystone is world renowned for its warm welcoming atmosphere, helpful locals, and awesomely smooth slopes. Keystone is situated around other skiing villages with the likes of Breckenridge and Copper Mountain. The village of Keystone has all types of activities such as skiing, snowboarding, bar hopping, fine dining, snowmobiling, and lots more.

A typical vacationer will either stay in one of the various villas or lodges that border the mountain. There aren’t very main brand name hotel chains such as Marriott, yet the villages can be anything from a warm lodge atmosphere to a 4 bedroom vacation villa that has its own fireplace and full luxury of amenities. Most of the restaurants, bars, and local hangout spots are in the center of Keystone as they are all at the base of Keystone’s main mountain slope. You can have a guide give lessons on either skiing or snowboarding for various amounts of time.

As someone who worked in the hotel industry for a few years, I gave out some of the best deals to people calling our hotel directly. The major websites such as Orbitz and Expedia charged 15% more on average than the general hotel rack rates. Rack rates at the rock bottom profit price that hotels charge. The allotments given by a certain hotel to the online travel websites are the rooms they plan to sell outside of the general hotel reservations system and are given to theses websites at a rack rate, then the websites up the price for these rooms.

To negotiate the prices, simply call the hotel. Ask for a reservations agent or possibly the reservations manager and simply tell them you have the rates of the major websites and would like to see if they have a lower price available. Explain to the hotel agent that you have been looking at the less expensive prices of some hotels in their area and some of their main competitors. You can expect to see some discounts of over 30-50% if you ask enough times about certain special VIP or Repeat Guest discounts.