| Sites offer further ways to cut travel costs --SF GATE |
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| 2009-05-15 |
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Arthur Frommer
The technology magazines are always talking about the next big thing on the Internet. Well, two sensational new Web sites have greatly improved your ability to travel at low cost in the United States.
Airbnb.com
Finding a spare room for two or three nights in a costly city is the service offered by a startup called AirBed & Breakfast ( www.airbnb.com). It rents spare rooms, cots, couches and airbeds in the apartments of residents in 831 U.S. cities, sometimes for as little as $20 a night.
It doesn't rent an entire vacation home; that's the stock in trade of, say, VRBO (vacation rental by owner). It doesn't offer to exchange your home or apartment for someone else's during the time of your respective vacations; that's what such sites as HomeExchange.com do. It doesn't offer you free-of-charge hospitality in someone's house or apartment; that's what U.S. Servas, CouchSurfers or Global Freeloaders do.
Nor is it a bed-and-breakfast service whereby people take several guests into their home and often make a business of doing so.
Rather, AirBnB enables people in heavily touristed cities to make an extra buck from rental of a room in their apartment or home to tourists passing through for a night or two (or three). And it's especially useful when all the hotels in a city have been fully booked for a convention or trade show, and AirBnB handles the overflow. It's also of use for the most cost-conscious of travelers who simply want to spend less - far less - on their accommodations.
Until now, about the only easily found sources of such rooms have been the various guides to low-cost travel sold in bookstores. Some of them (like my daughter's series, the Pauline Frommer Guides) place a great emphasis on finding little-known local real estate brokers who rent rooms in private apartments to transient visitors. And the great advantage of such a service is that third-party intermediaries - namely, these specialist brokers or apartment-finders - are there to vet and guarantee the suitability of the room you rent.
As best I can tell, AirBnB hasn't itself inspected the rooms offered on its Web site. But carefully used, it still seems to be an excellent service for cities that aren't covered in the various guides to low-cost travel.
BusJunction.com
A "search engine" for finding cheap buses between cities in the northeast of the United States, the Midwest and (to a lesser extent) the Southeast, it marks the "coming of age" of the new low-cost bus chains. BusJunction ( www.busjunction.com) is the first site that lets you search for bus tickets from all the major discount bus lines, without going to their individual Web sites.
Until BusJunction.com came along, that service was performed primarily for the "Chinatown buses" (pioneers in the operation of low-cost buses from one U.S. Chinatown to another) by a service called GotoBus.com, which deals only with those lines that have a ticketing partnership with the operators of the Web site. By contrast, BusJunction searches all major bus lines, regardless of partnership arrangements (but only deals with the so-called premium cheap buses).
BusJunction searches 12 cheap bus lines, including Megabus, BoltBus, Vamoose, DC2NY and Fung Wah, serving 31 cities in the East and Midwest (of which the most popular are Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; New York City; Boston; and Chicago). While the average ticket price between those major cities on the East Coast is $20 and $25, several bus lines offer a limited number of $1 fares on each bus - and BusJunction makes it easy to find those one-buck fares.
The emergence of comfortable-but-cheap buses between major U.S. cities is a prime development and one made even more exciting by the electrical outlets at each seat and free Wi-Fi services that permit you to surf the Internet and send and receive e-mails during your journeys on most of these lines. That's something you can't do on Greyhound.
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