Australia goes on sale, Oprah tries to help

Buy now or wait for a better price? Cayole.com is a travel agency that uses seven months' worth of pricing records to help you make an educated guess about whether a cruise is likely to go up in cost in the "short- to medium- term." Its predictions are similar to the forecasts that bing.com/travel provides for airfares. For example, the site predicted on Sunday that prices for ocean-view cabins on four-night Bahamas cruises from Orlando, Fla., on the Royal Caribbean Monarch of the Seas are expected to go down in the short- to medium term. That would mean a likely drop from their present prices, which start at $299. Caveat: Cayole covers only about 6,500 cruises, all of which depart from the United States. It's also worth noting that specialized travel agents still have access to more inventory and discounts for cruises than any website. That said, more and more online tools are empowering consumers to make savvier decisions. MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Readers' Choice: Tell us your favorite cruise line! (100+ comments) Should tips be automatically added to cruise passenger bills? (100+ comments) Are we ready for another Titanic? (10 comments)

Talk about cryptic codes. Strange black-and-white boxes—with monster, checkerboard patterns—are popping up on billboards and tourist signs across the U.S. The codes are even more common in England, appearing in subway ads and magazine articles. The most playful example I've seen has been at Rosa's, an excellent Thai restaurant in London's Soho neighborhood, where every server wears a T-shirt with a QR code printed on the back. So what are these QR codes, and how do you scan them? Anyone with a smartphone can scan and read QR, or "Quick Response," codes with the click of its camera. By scanning the codes, you can access images, websites, and text via your device's Web browser. Scanning the code can help you pinpoint relevant information more quickly than by doing a search on your phone's Web browser. Google, for instance, has distributed more than 100,000 of these QR codes to shops and restaurants across the U.S., to be displayed prominently. Scan the code in a shop window, and you can read customer reviews and receive coupons for specials. Scanning a QR code is easy. As Budget Travel explained in its recent QR code guide: First you'll have to download a QR code "reader" or "scanner." There are tons of these available for free download in many of the app stores for different devices. Here's how to find them: 1. For Apple devices like the iPhone, click here. Android users should download the top-rated, free app QuickMark Barcode Scanner. Blackberry users should consider trying the free Code Muncher app. or 2. Check out http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/qr-code-software for a ton of links and reviews for QR code-readers. MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Google's new window decals may help travelers Travel photos: Tools to find the "Golden Hour" Picking the best social network for travel Delta is turning the flight-bumping game into a reverse auction

Years ago, if you wanted to see Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," you purchased a ticket to Florence. Or maybe you studied the painting in a tattered art book left over from your days as an Art History major. But, no longer. Last week 17 museums, including the Uffizi, the MoMA, and the Palace at Versailles teamed up with Google's Art Project to give you the ultimate virtual art experience. The project uses Google's Street View to take you inside the museums so you can "walk" the halls of some of the world's most famous exhibits. The project was conceived when a group of self-professed art lovers at Google decided it was high time to make art more accessible to the public for free. And then, Google being Google, they blinked, snapped their fingers, and magically it happened. The team at Google's Street View, responsible for creating the "last zoom layer on the map," used a "trolley" to capture 360-degree images of the museum interiors and then stitched those images together. The result is a seamless photo-log that lets you tour the museum and zoom in on hundreds of fine paintings and sculptures. Once you select a painting or sculpture to view, a panel provides additional information about the artwork, such as Youtube videos. But if just viewing a painting isn't enough for you, keep zooming. Each of the 17 museums has selected, at its own discretion, one piece of artwork to be featured and photographed in such fine detail (7-billion pixels!) that you can view it at near sub-brushstroke level. Take, for example, Van Gogh's "Starry Night" from the MoMA's art collection. The picture is captured at a high resolution (that's around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera) so that you can see each brushstroke and crack in the paint in microscopic detail. And if that's not enough, you can create your own gallery (because, in this digital era, what's the point if you can't let everyone know what you like?). The "Create an Artwork Collection" feature allows you to select your favorite pieces and create your own collection. You can share it with friends and family, and add comments to individual pieces or the entire collection. Of course, this technology doesn't come without scrutiny. Critics argue that digitized museums may take the place of the real thing, or actually detract from the experience of seeing a piece live and in color. As The Daily Beast says, " at its best, the one-on-one, hours-long, in-the-flesh encounter with a work of art in a museum can be thought of as an antidote to the disembodied, Google-powered rush of laptop-life…the Art Project risks collapsing the two experiences." What do you think? Will you visit these virtual museums? Does technology take away from the authentic experience? —Madeline Grimes See more from Budget Travel: Awesome Art Hotels The Connected Traveler Ten Best Travel Destinations for 2011