A WWOOFer at work in Costa Rica

It snowed for what seems like eternity, your day job is going nowhere, and you’re so ready to grab a one-way ticket outta here. I’ve been there! I don’t recommend my exact plan (read: don’t quit until Starbucks calls you for an interview; it could be a while), I do suggest WWOOFing as an atypical getaway. Forget hostel fees and the thought of surviving on a pastry and coffee till dinner: World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms is an international network of farmers who host volunteers and share sustainable living tips in return for help with chores. For the price of a plane ticket and some manual labor, you could be herding goats overseas and eating leafy greens until your heart’s content.  Once you’ve settled into your tepee on a farm in the south of Portugal, 20 euros could last for weeks: I mostly spent cash on just beer and ice cream.

Last July, I resigned from my full-time writing gig; sublet my apartment and set off for the Alentejo region of Portugal where I stayed with a German family who decided several years ago to trade in the city streets of Berlin and give farming a try. Farm owners Nils and Esta never looked back. They view WWOOFing as a way to connect with people around the globe since it’s nearly impossible to up and leave a farm with animals and veggies that demand full-time TLC.

My take on WWOOFing is that it’s an experience like no other. For better or worse, it will expose you to a lifestyle that is radically different from your everyday routine in Brooklyn, guaranteed.

WHAT TO EXPECT
When you first arrive on the farm, wherever you chose to visit, it feels like day one at overnight camp. You meet the other volunteers and no one quite knows what to expect. The only sure thing is that you’re all stuck miles away from civilization together. My first day, I had to chase a pig out of the camper I was assigned to sleep in. As I shooed my new pot-bellied friend away I couldn’t help questioning whether I was cut out for this. By the end of my two-week stay, I hardly wanted to leave.

I found it refreshing to let go of some things that I’d come to rely on, like electricity. The farm was powered by solar energy, so at night we lit candles and spent hours lingering around the dinner table. As long as the wine held out, so did the stories. I also found it remarkable that my host family, who often cooked for 10 or 12 people, sufficed with a mini fridge in their outdoor kitchen. Yogurt and milk was simply not refrigerated, only the essentials (eh hem): cheese and beer. When you cook what you grow and hungry volunteers clean their plates at every meal, there’s not much to keep cold.

Most importantly, WWOOFing is what you make of it. Itching to make your own wine? Limit your search to vineyards. Ready to give horseback riding a try? You know what to do.

Here are five tips that will help you get started.

Step 1: Visit  the WWOOF website: It publishes lists of organic farms that welcome volunteer help. Most sites are country specific and require a small fee in exchange for a list of contact information for local farms. Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Lithuania are some organizations that do not require a membership fee. Typically, annual fees range from 5 to 15 euros ($14-$20 American).

On a WWOOF farm in Sweden

Step 2: Plan ahead: Arranging a WWOOF stay takes some time. Start reaching out to host families a few weeks, or a month, in advance of your travel date. Also, think about how long you’d like to stay. A minimum commitment of two weeks is standard.  When packing, bring a comfy pair of jeans, some hardy shoes (ladies, this is not a trip for the high heels), and ditch the computer. Chances are your time off will be spent swimming in the local watering hole, concocting recipes for chocolate-coffee pancakes and reading on a hammock.

Step 3: Seal the deal: Like finding a roommate on Craigslist, connecting with the perfect host family can be tricky. Narrow your search. For example, if a family has kids, don’t be surprised if you’re asked to baby-sit now and then. I would recommend breaking up your farm stays rather than farm-hopping from one to another. After two weeks of weeding, painting and collecting rocks for a shower drain, I was excited for a few days of city-life in Lisbon. Remember, a WWOOF stay is work. You will be physically tired from your chores and may want some R&R between farm visits.

Step 4: Get all the info: Key questions to ask your host family include: How can I get to the farm using public transportation? What languages do you speak? Where will I be sleeping? What supplies/clothing will I need? (I was told to bring a “torch,” also known as a flashlight.) How many volunteers do you host at once? What type of chores will I be expected to do? Will there be time to explore the local town/ areas outside the farm? When in doubt, ask.

A WWOOF in sheep's clothing in the UK

Step 5: Go with an open mind. And shhhh … don’t discuss too loudly. Let’s keep the MTV cameras away.  WWOOFing attracts people of very different backgrounds, but of a similar mindset. I volunteered with Danny, a guitar-toting post-college traveler from Colorado; Linde, a “uni” student from England who grew up in a farming village; and Melanie and Christian, a 20-something German couple. Melanie, an elementary school teacher, had never even camped before.

At the expense of sounding cheesy the people I met were the highlight, hands down. Happy WWOOFing!

Scream over the thrills, not the prices. Photo by Flickr user jasuellr

First thing you need to know about the amusement park in Jackson, NJ: It’s called Great Adventure, not “Six Flags.” This regional permutation of the Six Flags name has always been a fun place to go with your youth group or whatnot, with someone else picking up the tab. But can you, as a broke city kid, satiate your desire for summer thrills and chills of the ultra high-velocity variety that Coney Island just can’t offer? You can, and here’s how:

One slight disclaimer: When we visited the park earlier this summer for the first time in a decade, we found it ain’t the imagination wonderland and cartoon-character forest of the past. Perhaps due to the company’s recent bankruptcy woes, Six Flags has sold basically every square inch of the park as ad space. The Great American Scream Machine? Yeah, those screams are brought to you by Axe body spray. Even the poor summer-job teens announcing ride safety rules have been reduced to shilling for Johnny Rockets.

Still, despite all that, the park does have Kingda Ka, which sends you hurtling 45 stories at 128 mph, which, we can confirm, is pretty freaking sweet.

TICKETS

Regularly priced tickets at $55 a pop?? No deal! Let’s do better:

Buy online
Buy tickets online instead of at the park, and they’re only $35, plus you can print them out at home and skip the line (sooo… do people not have the internet still?).

Scour for codes
Various companies make discount deals with Great Adventure. Right now, if you enter the word COLDSTONE in the “promo code” box in the top right corner of the homepage, you can buy a ticket for the kids’ price of $30. Last month, Discover card offered a four-pack of tickets for $100. It’s worth your effort to Google “Great Adventure discount codes” or “Six Flags coupons” and check sites like these to see what deals are available.

Have a Coke
In perhaps one of the longest standing cross-promotions since Ecto Cooler, Coca Cola has had a deal with Six Flags since we were in Little League: bring in a Coke can for buy-one-get-one free tickets on weekdays. That means bring a buddy, and it’s only $25 a pop (plus soda cost).

TRANSPORTATION

NJ Transit will take you directly to the park from the Port Authority. The ride takes almost two hours, but it’ll save you loads over renting a car: Bus fare is $17.50 each way, which sounds kind of steep until you consider that Great Adventure charges $15 for parking, alone. Three buses leave the station: at 9:30, 10 and 11:20 on the weekends and 9:30 on weekdays, and departure times from the park for New York vary based on the day. Look for Route 308 toward Six Flags Great Adventure.

Also, NJ Transit has a special package rate of $61 for round-trip fare, park admission and safari admission. More on the the schedule and the package deals here.

EATING

Dippin' Dots: Available park-wide!

Under no circumstances save for unrelenting and inescapable zombie apocalypse should you eat any of the food inside the park.  Almost all the dining options have been sold out to corporate franchises, who offer you all the comforts of the anywhere-rest-stop food at a stunning 40 percent markup. Look ma, we’re on vacation and we still get to eat Papa John’s, Coldstone Creamery and Johnny Rockets! All washed down with a souvenir cup of Coca-Cola for just $12.99 (actual price). Just say no, kids.

Instead, if you happen to drive, pack some sandwiches in coolers and throw them in the trunk. You can leave the park and return as often as you like: Just get your hand stamped on the way out and return through the re-entry gate.

If you’re on the bus, eat some snacks on the ride down. If you get hungry from all the thrills and spills, go for a walk: There are a few fast-food joints about a half-mile down the road from the park entrance, including Dunkin Donuts, Burger King (BK!) and WaWa. Still corporate franschises, yes, but with prices you can stomach.

OTHER TIPS

Beat the crowds?
Lines will be long (an hour or more) for the most popular rides, and with New Jersey’s tweenster set determined to glob up the park with their Silly Banded, Team-Jacob-shirted masses every summer day, there’s not much you can do about it ’til the fall. However, going on a weekday helps, as does getting there early.

Or go to the park on a rainy day. Even if it’s just a misty drizzle, the precipitation scares off the crowds, and you can get your brain scattered by Batman: The Ride over and over.

Leave everything behind
No phone, no iPod, no wallet, no handbag or man-bag. You can’t bring anything on the rides with you because it will fall out, and Great Adventure no longer lets you store belongings on the ride platform. You can get a locker, but they cost $1 per ride or $11 for the day.

Wear sneakers, not sandals. You’ll have to take off your sandals on many of the rides anyway.

Go the day after an accident
Not to be ghoulish, and we hope this never occurs, but if there is a major accident, the following day may be the best day to ever go to the park. We went to the Louisville Six Flags the day after this happened and the place was empty. We basically walked on to each ride without breaking stride (except for that one ride, which was closed).

Also, this has to be the safest time to go.  Statistics, people. Statistics.

THE OTHER PARKS ON-SITE

Great Adventure claims its Wild Safari is the biggest safari outside of Africa. It’s cool to see. Once, maybe. But don’t sweat about missing it. Hurricane Harbor is a separate admission too. We have yet to check it out, but the $33 ticket price and the mediocre reviews from friends in Jersey mean you can probably skip it.

Six Flags Great Adventure & Wild Safari, 1 Six Flags Blvd., Jackson, NJ

The Estancia Vik in San Jose Ignacio, Uruguay.

We’ve never really understood the whole Gilt Groupe membership thing—it’s a designer-discount site where they say you have to be invited to join, but anyone can just sign up here, and then you get emails about crazy sales on R.J. Graziano jewelry, Ernest Sewn jeans, DKNY shoes, Marc by Marc Jacobs menswear and the like. Sales start at noon each day, and as some of our fashiony friends can attest, they can get a little… addictive. Now they’re rolling out a luxury travel-deal site, jetsetter.com, as we discovered via yesterday’s Gilt Groupe email blast. It’s still in “preview” and still wicked expensive, but we wanted you to know because the places they’re discounting are pretty fantabulous: ranches in Montana; estates in Mustique; resorts in José Ignacio, Uruguay; and even the Hotel Rivington ($249 a night instead of the $375 on the web site.) No, it’s not couch surfing, and you won’t find a place for $500 a week here, but if you send the link to a rich relative, maybe you’ll get invited? Sign up here.

I meet Squirrel during a five-day experiment in couch surfing through Brooklyn, which takes me from a shag rug in Bed-Stuy (not all couch surfing is done on couches) to a plush white sofa with a view of McCarren Park.

The practice of couch surfing—crashing at a stranger’s home for free rather than at a hotel or hostel—is growing among thrifty travelers both here and abroad, many of whom find each other through the five-year-old web site of the CouchSurfing 2.0 Project (CSP). Here some 1.3 million road trippers and prospective hosts (many of them one-time couch-surfers themselves) post detailed profiles listing their occupations, travel experience, personal philosophy and interests, along with action shots from the road.  As on eBay, members review one another, a practice that usually—but not always—encourages good behavior.

While couch surfing is on the rise, it isn’t entirely new. One of the earliest known attempts dates to 1949. While living in Italy, American Bob Luitweilera created Servas, a (still functioning) foreign-exchange home-stay service for adults. Snce 2004, CSP has given anyone with an Internet connection and a good back the opportunity to find a sleeping surface in a willing stranger’s home, and according to Wiki lore it’s now the most oft-visited travel site on the Internet.

As it happens, Brooklyn is something of a couch-surfing hub, with more than 1,000 registered overnight hosts. I joined the CouchSurfing Project and set off on a surfing trip across Brooklyn to find out who they were.

Couch A, Greenpoint
Modern gray ultra suede, chrome frame futon

Jeff and Jen are a hip couple who came to Brooklyn from Cincinnati roughly a year ago.  Their apartment’s bipolar decor, part West Elm mod and part DIY/flea market, hints at their transition from travel bums to successful creative professionals—he a graphic designer, she a freelance writer. Dog-eared travel guides filled a homemade wood-beam-and-cinder-block bookshelf. They’ve been around. And like most hosts, they surfed while traveling and now offer their couch as a way to keep the practice alive.

They’re not married, but—guessing by the DVD sleeve on the counter—have reached the NetFlix stage of their relationship. We spend a mellow Friday night with beer and a “pro-logically good things” conversation. In some cases, hosts will want you to chip in on expenses, but things like frothy beverages are often offered for free. I repay the favor the next day, which turns out to be Jen’s birthday, by making my breakfast specialty, chilaquiles, a recipe from my time volunteering in Mexico.

Couch B, Bed-Stuy
White shag area rug

James has a wide grin and a bold red-orange goatee. He’s approaching 50, but seems much younger owing to his cheerful disposition and the wiry frame of an admirable metabolism.  He spends his days educating newly arrived foreign high schoolers, a job with ties to his ESL days in South America.

His apartment, listed on CSP as a gay-friendly place to stay, is a clean, cozy dwelling; with the home office, living room, and bedroom combined into one space.  Instead of a couch, he offers me a spot on a shag rug next to his bed, but it isn’t as strange as it might sound. He goes through his morning work ritual and yoga warm-up, and I sleep right through.

Couch C, West Williamsburg
Classic wooden frame with dense tan cushions

My third couch is at an alcove studio sublet tucked among the corpses of half-completed waterfront condos in (West) Williamsburg.  My host Jill, who is finishing up a fine arts masters at NYU, is working late, but another couch surfer will be there for a key with me.

Jill rescued Squirrel from the SOS board, a forum for short-notice hosting to help surfers in a bind.  He said he’d come north to the city, got robbed of everything while sleeping on the docks of the Hudson (to save on a hotel), and turned to the kindness of strangers until his family could send money. She let him stay for a week and a half (2-3 days being the surfing norm) in exchange for an offer to build an online portfolio for her paintings and mosaics. To accomplish this task, he asks to borrow my laptop for a few hours, fidgeting and murmuring as he works.

When Jill returns from her art studio, he unveils an amateurish site that in no way resembles her instructions, and Jill and I wind up spending most of the night discussing the incident. But she’s had worse. Prior to Squirrel’s arrival, Jill hosted a Turkish man who behaved courteously when he stayed with her in a different city. This time he smoked in the apartment against her wishes, dirtied the kitchen, and left the shavings of his thick beard in the bathroom sink. “I’ve had some negative experiences,” she explains, “but very few compared to the over 100 incredibly cool people I have met through couch surfing.

I leave mid-morning, and Squirrel throws his few belongings in a duffel bag and leaves with me. When we part ways, I give him $20 for a MetroCard. Later that afternoon, I open iTunes while returning some emails and receive an alert from a defeated virus scan, remembering that only after I loaned him my computer did Squirrel boast about his virus-building prowess. When I try eradicating the virus, it triples.

Couch D, East Williamsburg/Bushwick
Twin air mattress

Ginny is deep into preparations for going abroad for a few months and wants to acquire hosting references. (Some hosts won’t even consider surfers unless they have opened their own homes to travelers.) The encounter is dutiful rather than social, but the accommodations are comfortable.

Couch E, McCarren Park
Plush white three-cushion sofa

When Kimberly opens the door, I’m taken by her unexpected good looks.  She has dark, Mediterranean features and a worked-out physique whose virtues are evident in her exercise clothes. The apartment is also attractive, in a stylishly modern way, and the whole package feels like a carefully crafted presentation, all aspects casually at their best.

Kimberly is a professional publicist who invites me to join her at dinner with two of her friends. She’s a one-time surfer who’s just starting to host. It speaks to the Couch Surfing Project’s strong sense of community that a beautiful young woman—seemingly the least likely to participate out of safety concerns alone—is willing to open her home to a stranger. On the way to dinner, she describes one of the creepier surfer requests she’d received (and declined) since joining the site two weeks ago.

“There was this guy, he was talking about some really strange stuff,” she said. “His name was Squirrel.”

She brings me to a barbecue at a friend of a friend’s house, and we laugh watching wealthy white kids blast gangster rap music, bastardize Ebonics, and shoot dice against a graffitied living room wall. Someone even uses the word shizzle.

There are never any romantic efforts on either end, but when she goes to bed I hear the clicking of a lock. At first, I can’t help but wonder if I seemed “rapey” or something. But I understand the impulse, since I’m her first surfer, and still a stranger.

The duality of sharing an intimate experience with a random person requires some social dexterity.  It’s part of the appeal of surfing, but for others it’s the biggest challenge. That and the occasional computer virus.

Villas near Puerto Vallarta, $266/week and up.

My challenge was this: to figure out how to get a group of four out of town for a week, with a $500 budget for lodging. It was a tall order, even for this frugal traveler. Most choices at that price were slim, and they tended to look like they were furnished for our budget—several decades ago. But a bit of sleuthing uncovered rustic cabins in magnificent park settings and appealing homes advertised at higher rates but available to the skilled negotiator for less. There wasn’t a Sun Valley chalet or a Bora Bora bungalow in the bunch, but I did find some nice getaways for little more than the cost of a staycation.

I started by reaching out to vacation home renters across the country and got pretty much the same response everywhere: they’re flexible. One of my first calls was to Crestone Area Visitor’s Agency in Colorado, which serves a region that’s home to hot springs, Sand Dunes Monument Park, varied wildlife, ashrams and numerous spiritual retreats. “Good news is that we are able to offer a nice two bedroom home near one of our creeks,” said a helfpful man named Cal. “Normally the price is higher but we have had a downturn in tourism over the past year and the owner will honor a rate of $495 for the week.”

At homeaway.com, the largest of the vacation rental sites, there are over 176,000 vacation rental houses, condos, guesthouses, cottages, and cabins in 118 countries, including plenty within our budget (including the 1-bedroom cottage in North Truro, Cape Cod). As is typical of most vacation rental sites, this one connects you directly with the homeowners or property managers, and accommodations can be rented by the night, week or month.

I found some gems amid the offerings at vacationhomes.com’s under $500 section, which listing bargains in the U.S., Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Spain, Ecuador, Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, and Italy. Deals abound in Florida and Mexico, and a beautiful home in a new complex called Playas de las Palmas in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, including a large swimming pool and Jaccuzi is only $80/night. (If you assumed air travel was out of the question, read my article on how to get cheap fares.)

For lodging within driving distance, I spoke to Chris Fotache at nyvacationrentals.com, a web site that offers free listings to any vacation home owner in upstate New York including the Catskills, Adirondacks, Finger Lakes, Hudson Valley and many other 
popular destinations.

There, the under-$500 choices included a lovely 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom guesthouse in the Catskills with 110 acres of meadows and private woods that ordinarily rents for $750 per week. There was also a cabin for $400/week (left) in Walton, NY, while the innkeeper at a  B&B in a historic estate on the Finger Lakes wine trail of Livingston County  is also offering accommodations for a family of 4, with breakfast, for $500, well below the weekly rates quoted on the web site.

Though the site has few properties worth recommending that are listed within our budget, Fotache advised aiming higher. “Many owners are willing to come down,” he said. “Wait just a little bit. As the summer season proceeds, many owners will start to panic and offer big discounts. But don’t wait too much, or the best rentals will still be gone.”

The other option, beyond vacation homes, are cabins in picturesque settings—often with fully equipped kitchens, bathrooms and fireplaces—at very inexpensive rates. Though none would be characterized as luxurious, the incredible surroundings activities often make up for the more spartan accommodations.

Just north of the city in Westchester, there is a web of beautiful parks with a wide range of activities and accommodations. Croton Point Park  offers a pool, beach, boat launching, playing fields, hiking trails, and so on. A “deluxe cabin” for four rents for $350 a week.

A little farther afield, check out the state parks of West Virginia. With its serene yet rugged beauty, Babcock State Park offers 28 cabins (left) for rent ranging from deluxe to economy. In addition to a swimming pool, paddle boating, row boating, canoeing hiking trails and horseback riding, Babcock’s fully operational Glade Creek Grist Mill provides freshly ground cornmeal and buckwheat flour. Weekly rates for a cabin for a family of 4 during the summer season are only slightly over budget, at $532.

South Dakota advertises its state parks as “the largest outdoor museums in the state.” Your family can learn about American Indian cultural history or the Lewis and Clark expedition while renting a cute camping cabin that sleeps four for $35 a night. Though each dwelling comes with heating, electricity and air conditioning, they do not have indoor bathrooms, kitchens or running water. Doesn’t sound like much of a vacation? Think how happy you’ll be to come home.

The owners of this Scotland house want to swap it for a place in NYC. How about yours?

Camping out or staying with relatives don’t have to be the only affordable ways to escape the city this summer. If you live in New York, especially in Manhattan or Brooklyn, your own home just might be your ticket out of town, even if it’s a studio apartment.

The idea of home-swapping is simple: You make your home available to other would-be-vacationers around the world. They stay in your place, you stay in theirs, and you save a bundle on the now-eliminated cost of a hotel or B&B. “You get to know a city in a different way,” says Beth Haskel, a Sunset Park resident who has successfully traded homes with families in Copenhagen and Florence through  Home Link International. “You learn to commute like they do,” she adds.

The owners of this artsy loft-style house north of Paris seem as though they'd like Brooklyn.

Lou Howort and his wife, Ann, have swapped their Ditmas Park house at least 15 times in the past 23 years for places in Amsterdam, California (El Toro, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz), the French Alps, Paris (several times), Spain, Hawaii, and others. “The advantages are obvious and not so obvious,” says Howort. “Not so obvious is all the advice you get from a native—on things like which are the best restaurants, places to shop, things of interest in the community, things to be avoided, etc. You also get directions, short cuts around town, things of local interest that you would never find in a week or two as a tourist, etc.”

Jonathan Kalb, who lists his Park Slope townhouse on the same web site, says his home is constantly in demand. Kalb has successfully swapped for homes in Scotland, London and Berlin. He even has swapped cars, which saves another fortune on rentals. “When you have zero cost for hotels, it opens up a world of possibilities,” he says.

Though you might  worry about having a stranger in your house, most house-swappers say that after a number of email interchanges, you get a good sense of who you’re dealing with.  “I was nervous at first,” said Kalb, “but we have found people to be very honorable. Each time we came home, we found the place spotless.”

This Barcelona apartment is available for two-week trades from July 15 to August 30.

The internet has made house trading easy. Homeexchange.com, one of the larger home swapping sites, lists thousands of properties from around the globe, complete with a step-by-step guide for how to go about the process, from listing your property, to finding the right partners to creating a contract for the home exchange. Members can communicate personally with others posting homes pretty much anywhere in the world. The site has a “Notify Me” feature which informs you when new listings come in from places you might want to go. Another of the biggies, Home Link International,  has been in existence since 1953 and is run by Karl and Katie Costabel. “This business is recession-proof,” Katie Costabel says. Both sites offer membership for around $100 per year, guaranteeing a free second year’s membership if you don’t get a successful exchange in your first year.

You can zero in on your dream location and time frame—Homelink lists Canadian hosts for the winter Olympic games in Vancouver—or open up your search to anywhere in the world. Each member posts photos, a description of the property, areas that the owner is interested in visiting and a variety of other details, like whether the home has WiFi, a swimming pool, security. Intervac claims to have pioneered home swapping some 56 years ago,  and like the other services, it allows you to take a look at member offerings even before posting your own.

The owners of this 3-bedroom Sardinia home didn't specify NYC, but they're "open." Try 'em.

Even some of the smaller sites, like Digsville.com, boast thousands of listings in dozens of countries, and with lower membership fees (Digsville’s is $44.95 per year). As the practice becomes more popular, there are a wide variety of sites cropping up that offer home exchanges:  Iexchangemyhome.com allows you to post your property without any membership fee, while Homearoundtheworld.com is geared specifically to the international gay traveler.

Craigslist and Facebook are also fabulous forums for house swapping. You will find postings for any length of time from a weekend to a year, and for accommodations ranging from studio flats in Paris to luxurious beach homes in California. Researching this article, I stumbled upon a Vermont family with a beautiful home looking for a Brooklyn swap this weekend. Though the timing will not work for me, I wrote to the owner and we decided to try for a different long weekend this summer.

As New York continues to be an extremely desirable and costly vacation location, tourists are thrilled to swap homes, and they’re often perfectly happy to trade down just to be in or near the city. “People are so excited to be able to come to New York,” Haskel says. “They are not terribly picky about where they stay.”

Once you’ve lined up a house swap, make sure to read Ellen Bari’s piece on how to fly there cheaply.

Photo by Tamar Ashdot-Bari

The other day I scored a $38 round-trip flight to Ft. Lauderdale—the fourth time this year I will be flying to visit my dad there for under $40. One time both my daughter and I flew together for under $70 roundtrip—total. While Spiritair’s $9 Club  consistently has the best deals for those who can act quickly and Kayak.com is still one of the best places to get a baseline read on the fares, there are a host of great new (and newish) web sites geared toward budget travelers.

E-Newsletters: Sign up to get info on the best deals, many of which require immediate action. One of the new sites on the scene is www.Airfarewatchdog.com, recently named “Best Cheap Flight Finder” by Money Magazine, which has actual humans scanning the field for otherwise unadvertised deals. Then there’s www.InsideTrip.com, which also offers trip quality ratings, based on 12 elements like number of stops, lost bag rank, percentage of filled seats, etc.

Gaming the airfares: While conventional wisdom had it that booking early is always better, this no longer the case. Now there are a few sites that can help you decide the best strategy for purchasing your ticket. Websites like www.Farecast.com predicts the direction of airfares on a particular route. Then there’s www.Yapta.com, which monitors fares on flights, even after your ticket is purchased, allowing travelers to cash in on airline refunds. The site also lets you know when Frequent Flier seats have opened up on a flight of your choice.

Maxmizing your miles: You should join every Frequent Flier club you possibly can—all have had amazing offers lately, but they usually require a quick decision as the seats, dates and availability are generally very limited. New sites www.Milemaven.com and www.Pointmaven.com list all the best FF deals including hotels and airline offers, while sites like  www.Milecards.com and  www.Mileagecards.com offer information on which credit card offers yield the highest free mileage results.

Bidding sites: Most travelers have heard of bidding sites like www.Hotwire.com and www.priceline.com (thank you William Shatner), but don’t realize they can bid a lot lower than the recommended 50 percent—I know people who have had success at 25 percent.  There are also some new web sites that offer bidding on specific packages like www.Luxurylink.com, which can get you truly luxurious deals at fantastic resorts and  www.FloridaVacationAuction.com, which might sweeten the trip if your Florida sojourn has become limited to visiting with family.