With the advent of internet, it is a lot easier to find bargains. Just go to th right website, type the term (e.g. birthday gift for friend or vacation in Peru) and, voila, there will be more deals than you would have time to handle.
Let us take the vacation example. In most places the low vacation season starts around late autumn. If you scout the Internet, you will find plenty of bargain deals around that time.
Some of the travel and airline sites advertise bundle deals that include hotel, car, and airfare for two. These deals can be real bargains because airlines want to sell the unused seats in those packages by heavily discounting the seats. Sign up for the news letters of major travel sites, e.g.
Expedia, Price Line or airline travel sites. You will receive plenty of last minute great vacation and airfare deals in your e-mail account regularly. Use another site called Sidestep for comparison shopping of best airfares to your destination.
Go to different hotel sites to look for bargains in the form of one night free for two nights stay. Check out the site BedAndBreakfast for the last minute great bargains. While at bedandbreakfast site, sign up for their weekly news letter to all the discounted bed and break fast gateways.
Many car rental companies will not advertise their unbooked cars at a lower price but they would offer discounts via sites like HotWire and PriceLine. Priceline offers two types of booking, name-your-price or selection from a listed rate. Use the listed rate first to estimate a fair market value of the bargain you are looking for. And then use the name-your-price and offer a discounted price.
Start with a high discounted price to reveal the best price you can get. Many cruise cabins are cancelled at the last minute by early birds - people who have booked these cabins sometimes a year in advance - and they are auctioned off at SkyAuction. It is a auction type site where you bid for all kind of travel deals, including international travel, cruises, etc.
Before you start putting bid, know the fair market value of the deal and refrain from emotional bidding and don't set your mind to the bid no matter what it costs. Here is a great tip for getting bargains that most people searching the web don't know. Some websites will show you only the bargains you have seen already on the site whereever you go on that site. They track this by a text file called a cookie, which is saved on your hard drive. Even if you visited the site next day, you will be shown the similar bargains (not better). By clering the cookies on your computer every time you go to these sites, you can fool them at their own game and dig into even better deals.
To clear the cookies from your coputer, open your windows internet browser, select Tools and then Internet Options. A window will pop up and in the middle of the Window on the left side, you will see a button with label Delete Cookies. Click the button to clear all your cookies before you start a fresh search on the site. Clearing the cookies will now reveal further price breaks on tyhese sites that you did not see before. It is worth a try.
Following some or all of these steps, you can have a quality vacation on the cheap. Where are you going next?.
Dan Sherman has started an information based website to offer advice on topics similar to those discussed above. Visit him at his website by Clicking Here (or go to http://www.cheapuniverse.org).
