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Name: Budget Travel LLC
Price range: $

By Sean O'Neill

October 3, 2012

Complaining to Airlines: The Nuclear Option as described by Upgrade: Travel Better.

Delta's nasty bait-and-switch, via the well-respected AirfareWatchdog blog.

How to Score $10 Tickets on Skybus via Jaunted.

Will the Feds intervene, or will JFK be full of flight delays next summer? An analysis by The Cranky Flier.

Plan Your Next Getaway

Keep reading

Where'd all the $10 Skybus fares go?

Many of 'em have been booked up already. Here's this, from the Roanoke Times, a Virginia paper: Within 12 hours of the sale's start, customers snapped up all its $10 tickets for flights to Burbank, Calif., from February to May, said Skybus spokesman Bob Tenenbaum. The $10 fares are disappearing on some routes. Although the fares are offered on each flight, only 10 such seats are available at that price. Skybus' aircraft average about 150 seats on each flight, Tenenbaum said. A reader of this blog, Alejandro Crespi, noted that the final prices of other tickets are much higher than $10: I just went to their web site and tried find a flight from Greensboro to Los Angeles (Burbank) and the first flight is in February, (no flights at all before then) and the lowest price is $75 each way plus baggage fee, taxes etc. Most of the flights are $100 each way, plus extras. In Skybus's defense, a $200-ish round-trip fare is roughly 40 percent what Northwest was offering on that same route (flying, it must be noted, into LAX instead of Burbank) before the discounter appeared. Meanwhile, Skybus may soon announce routes between Columbus and Niagara Falls (about 20 miles from Buffalo), and Columbus and Gary-Chicago airport, about 30 minutes to an hour's distance from key parts of the Windy City. (Thanks for the tip, Lisa!) EARLIER Many budget-conscious travelers don't support the discount airlines..

Inspiration

It's a Texas Yamboree!

Growing up in Texas, I saw some of the world's most inventive festivals. From the Texas Rose Parade to the much less-enticing Mosquito Festival, my fellow Texans will use any excuse for a party. Last weekend, I returned to my hometown of Gilmer just in time for the East Texas Yamboree, an annual festival that draws over 100,000 visitors to an otherwise tiny town of 5,000 residents. One of the oldest folk festivals in Texas, the Yamboree began as annual celebration of the county's Great Depression cash crop. The affair, celebrated with a fiery hometown pride, has grown to a three-day carnival and pageant. The most amusing event of the festival is the Yam-decorating contest. Yams are painted, bedazzled, and festooned by K-12 students to mimic pop-culture icons, animals, and virtually anything else that can be patterned from a yam. With categories such as yamimals and yam-beings, the contest embraces bad puns. This year's crop included a Superyam (complete with the title "Superyam saves Yamopolis")... No small-town festival is complete without a pageant to crown a monarch. Here, it's the Yam Queen. Local high school senior girls engage in a cutthroat competition for the throne. The winner is the young woman who sells the most festival tickets. Recent winners have raised between $30,000 and $60,000... On pageant day, the contestants wear billowing dresses and perform "swivel, swivel, turn, turn" waves from atop community-decorated floats in the Queen's Parade. Elsewhere, I had an entertaining glimpse into the luxury life of show livestock, witnessing cattle and pigs being coiffed with blow-dryers and meticulously brushed for the judge of the livestock show. Near the livestock tents, the fairgrounds also offered an array of local goods from homemade jams to locally grown fruits and vegetables (including raw sugar cane), not to mention oddball items, such as a marshmallow-shooting gun for $5.—Liz McKenzie. RELATED: Slide show of wacky festivals EARLIER: Blog readers swap stories of wacky festivals. Learn more at yamboree.com. .Photos by Liz McKenzie, who last blogged here about Air New Zealand.

Sleepless in Miami

The city of Miami Beach is toasting the end of daily savings time on Saturday, November 3, with a 13-hour party from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Free public transport will connect people to 130 free activities at 80 venues, which will include indoor and outdoor arts exhibits, performances, and fashion shows. The most talked about attraction is the Spiegeltent, under which acrobats and contortionists will dance to music in ways that, um, simulate various sexual positions. The tent can accommodate about 350 visitors. The other headline attraction is the hip hop performance artists of the Miami Light Project. Find a full list of events at sleeplessnight.org. UPDATE: JetBlue has launched a sale on airfares and packages like this one that provides round-trip airfare and three nights a hotel in sizzling South Beach from $395. See the Real Deal. Read more on Miami: My Hometown: Miami Secret Hotels of South Beach Road Trip: The Florida Keys

Inspiration

Picture of the day: Navajo bull-riding

Bull riding at the Navajo Nation Fair on the Navajo Nation. Photo by Randy Allen, picture editor of The Sacramento Bee, from his fabulous portfolio at fotki.com/randypictures. Wanna Be a Travel Photographer? We need readers to shoot not only our cover photo, but photos through the magazine! Show us your skills by posting your best travel images on a photo sharing site such as Flickr or Snapfish, and then send the links to Letters@BudgetTravel.com. You might be one of the several people we plan to send out to photograph stories!

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