Voyage Of The Odd Essay

Wired News is carrying an interesting article about Tracking Air Fares and systems to predict ticket prices. It’s a fairly interesting read and highlights the key things to do in order to get cheap flights, but it doesn’t offer much more then the common knowledge that is already circulated around many travel resources and blogs.

Personally, I’ve been using Kayak to search for tickets as they have some very handy features that make repeated searching easy, and in the search results offer a chart of pricing history which you can use to help pin point when the cheapest times to travel are.

The two most important things to keep in mind when looking for cheap flights are simply be flexible about when you travel, and when you see a cheap flight, book it right away as it won’t stick around for long.

Even using Kayak’s email alert system to get emails about cheap flights I find a lot of the tickets I get told about have raised to a higher price by the time I get to them, so if you are planning on traveling, just looking for tickets isn’t enough, you need to be ready to grab the bargain when you find it.

Midsummer has been and gone, and it’s Glastonbury weekend and even though I won’t be there this year – mostly due to other Festival commitments, but in part due to Jay-Z headlining – I will be sitting at home watching it on the TV with friends, having some pear cider, cooking falafels for everyone, and of course wearing out Glastonbury Hats. Maybe I’ll go crazy and crack a couple of glow sticks!

While I’m still waiting for my festival season, I have booked my ticket to Thailand in December and will be leaving one way on November the 30th with Qatar Airways, to arrive in Bangkok on the 1st of December, so if anyone is in that neck of the woods and fancies a Singha on Khaosan Road let me know. It’s a day earlier then I planned, but means I don’t have a 8 hour stop over in Doha, so worth it.

Further to my travel plans I have decided to sell my Canon DSLR, since I’m focusing on writing a lot more these days, I figure the £400 or so I can get for the camera are much more useful then the camera would be. It’s a shame, but when I got the DSLR the plan was to learn to drive, and travel around locally to take shots, maybe getting a bicycle as well, but that’s all out the window now and I could last a month on that money.

Brave New Traveler

I can’t recommend reading Brave New Traveler enough, while many of the blogs I have in my reader I just read the articles as they come, I will specifically look for new items from here daily.

Sample Article: Travel Is About Who You Meet, Not Where You Go

BackPackers.com

I haven’t been reading BackPackers.com for that long but came across it following a recommendation on Ask Meta Filter, there are some interesting articles from time to time, and if you’re interested in festivals around the globe they do mention a healthy number of them.

Sample Article: Doer, Watcher, or Wanderer: What’s You Backpacking Style

Vagabondish

One of the first travel blogs I started to read at the same time as Brave New Traveler, regular postings and some really good information keep me coming back time and again to read the articles in this blog.

Sample Article: A Practical Guide to Vagabonding and Long Term Travel (Part 1)

The Travelers Notebook

There is more of a commercial slant to some of this blogs posts, dealing with aspects of photography, bloging, podcasting and such, but that doesn’t mean it’s not got some interesting and useful entries for anyone interested in travelling.

Sample Article: Five Rules for Recognizing and Avoiding Travel Scams

Other Blogs

Gridskipper: The Worldwide Travel Blog

I actually came across this one while sorting out the links for this post, but it looks interesting so I’ll be following it from now on.

The Life Less Traveled

While not just travel related, this new blog focuses on people doing extraordinary things, and shows a lot of promise which I am following with interest.