Cozy up to Priceline and bid

I regularly say use priceline.com and name your own price. However, every time I travel I find that the prices through Priceline are phenomenal.

I just wrote about saving money on a Courtyard by Marriott in New Jersey. Now on a trip to Chicago for graduation of a friend’s son at Northwestern, I scored another great deal on a rental car.

Avis rented me the car through Priceline for $20 a day!!! The lowest price through Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity or through the car rental companies was in the mid-$30s.

Think Priceline when you travel.

I don’t use them for airfares because one never knows whether the flight leaves at 6 a.m. or 6 p.m. (For flights to Europe, Priceline works fine, since almost all flights leave in the evening from the U.S.).

With rental cars and hotels, Priceline is an absolute joy and I always save money. Check Hotwire first and then bid about 20 percent lower. Or, go to biddingfortravel.com to see what others have as winning bids. With a little investigation and bidding, you’ll save a bunch of money.

Priceline’s last minute deals

just drove from DC to Boston this weekend and wanted to stay along the way on Friday night. I calculated about where I would be after a 3-hour drive and came up with Somerville, NJ. Eventually, I booked my hotel room on Priceline.com and got what I thought was a great deal.

Previously, I checked with hotwire.com and found places for around $59 and a Hampton Inn for $69 a bit out of my way. Kayak.com and hotels.com showed nothing much different. I decided with listed prices hovering between $60 and $80 that $50 would be a fair bid. I really didn’t care where I stayed, but wanted to only spend $50.

Priceline wasn’t a simple game of bid and get. I tried to get a 3-star property for $50 and was told that I would need to up my bid by another $14 to get that room. (This was a one-time courtesy by priceline according to popup screen.) I decided to keep trying in the vicinity.

I dropped my hotel desires down to a 2-1/2-star category and added Basking Ridge to my geographical selection. Then I pushed “buy my hotel room” and got a confirmation back from Courtyard by Marriott just off the Interstate. Perfect.

I don’t anywhere else where you can bargain with hoteliers like Priceline. I love it.

Tripso is talking about other hotel bargains based on advanced purchase, but I like Priceline.

Musings become reality!

Last week a post on Tripso.com suggested that airport security may begin banning pictures of guns aboard aircraft. This rumination seems to have come true.

A man was just banned from a flight for wearing a cartoon depiction of a gun on his T-shirt.

We reported last week on a woman who had to pack a charm shaped like a pistol in her checked luggage to fulfill the “no guns aboard” policy.

Amazingly, we discovered that a 2″ gun that actually can fire a bullet does exist, so we have to forgive airport security on that count!

Now if we discover a cartoon illustration of a gun that can fire, we have to forgive security personnel again. I don’t think that will happen.

There actually is a 2″ gun!!

The Canadian Air Transport Security stopped a woman wearing a 1-inch pistol pendant and made her stash it in her checked luggage. When they said

“How do you know it wasn’t a real gun?” asked Guy, a security agent with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, who also declined to provide his last name.

“Who knows if there is a gun that small that can shoot bullets? You don’t know that. They followed the rules.”

Bloggers ridiculed them.

Now we find out that there really is small gun (only 2-inches long) that can kill!!

The SwissMiniGun is the size of a key fob but fires tiny 270mph bullets powerful enough to kill at close range.

Officially the world’s smallest working revolver, the gun is being marketed as a collector’s item and measures just 2.16 inches long (5.5cm). It can fire real 4.53 bullets up to a range of 367ft (112m).

Who woulda thunk it.

Senator confirms blogger’s FAA CYA claim

Tripso.com had it right when they said the FAA order that resulted in the grounding of AA’s MD-80 fleet back in April was a CYA operation.

The tripso.com piece noted:

Both the FAA and the airlines know that the airline fleets are safe in the United States, perhaps the safest in the world. But both are now being hoisted on the petards of technical rules that they played loose with or ignored.

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said that the FAA was “chicken” for grounding the 299 American Airlines MD-80s. He went on to say, “FAA inspectors were more concerned about covering themselves than they were about American or its passengers.”

Bravo! But, the only ones that paid the price were the passengers who had to scramble through the mass cancellations, that could have been avoided with courage from either the FAA or AA executives.

Supreme court: Unlock cell phones

The U.S. Supreme Court, by not taking action, has let stand a lower court ruling that says cell phone companies, namely, AT&T and T-Mobile, must allow their customers to unlock their cell phones.

The specifics of the rulings and the repercussions are not finalized yet. However, Verizon and Sprint, both have decided to unlock their phones after the initial contract period. AT&T and T-Mobile, however, operate GSM phones that are far more mobile than the Verizon and Sprint CDMA technology.

This makes a world of difference to travelers. If our GSM phones are unlocked, even after the two-year original contract, we would have freedom to slip new SIM cards into our phones when traveling and save a load of money on basic calling, especially on receiving calls while overseas — its free to receive.

There are going to be far more questions that will be wrestled with by the companies and lawyers regarding the iPhone because of its relationship with AT&T, but in terms of basic calling, GSM phone users will be eventually be free to use any SIM card they desire.

Free pot at Tokyo Airport

Tokyo customs agents managed to lose around four ounces of marijuana during a training session with drug-sniffing dogs. It seems that the dog didn’t sniff so well and the customs agent forgot into what bag’s side pocket he slipped the testing packet.

According to the BBC:

An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan’s Narita airport has received 142g of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.

A customs officer hid a package of the banned substance in a side pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase in order to test airport security.

Sniffer dogs failed to detect the cannabis and the officer could not remember which bag he had put it in.

Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials.

Right. Maybe, they could use some of those RFID chips I spoke about last week.

Embedding passengers with ID chips

Discussions have been swirling about tagging checked luggage with small chips that will help keep them on the right flights and eliminate lost luggage. But now, tagging has been proposed for passengers at airports to keep them from missing flights and helping to find lost children.

A British site, carrentals.co.uk, notes

University College London electronic engineer, Paul Brennan is leading work on the EU-funded Optag system. He said it combines high resolution panoramic video imaging with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to enhance airport security, safety and efficiency. According to Brennan; “It would work if each passenger were issued with a tag, which could allow location to about one metre accuracy,” he said. “The video and tag data can be merged to give a very powerful surveillance capability.”

Embedding passengers with computer chips has been suggested before and some companies are now working on bluetooth systems that will track passengers through airline terminals.

It’s coming. That’s for sure. Now we need to figure out how to make it work to make life easier at the airport.

Hotwire deals without bidding

Just got this from Hotwire. Normally, I’m a Priceline guy because I love bargaining, but these are some great deals with which to start naming your own price. Heck, with prices like this, there is almost no need to bid. Buy and hit the road.

Have you ever thought it would be fun to take a last minute trip over the holiday weekend but thought you couldn’t afford it? Well, there’s no time like now to make it happen.

For example, if you live in driving distance of Las Vegas, you could jump into one of these car rentals from Hotwire:

• Los Angeles (LAX) — $9.95/day – weekend rate
• Seattle (SEA) — $10.95/day – weekend rate
• San Diego (SAN) — $11.95/day – weekend rate

Then, book a room in Las Vegas:

• 4 Star, Downtown, $99
• 4 Star, Near Strip East, $129
• 3 Star, North Strip, $66

And you would still have enough mad money for a show, gambling, or even a visit to the Elvis-A-Rama museum.

FAA – AA tit for tat

It was only a matter of time for the bureaucracy to strike back at American Airlines for their claim that the inspectors and executives at the FAA reneged on a deal that would give the airline more time to fix the wiring problems with the MD-80s.

The Washington Post reports that

Maintenance work by American Airlines on hundreds of jets was so sloppy that it posed a safety risk — a lapse that forced the carrier to ground many of its planes and strand hundreds of thousands of passengers last month, according to a report by federal regulators released yesterday.

The truth is somewhere in between. Heck, AA was the one that originally wrote the service bulletins that caused the whole stir. They followed their own guidelines, but didn’t quite manage to follow the tweaks that the FAA inserted later.

There is argument about the chaos caused by the mass cancellations of flights. However, the hiccup is still reverberating through the airline this month’s on-time stats are still some of the lowest in the airline’s history — around 50 percent!