One of the world's most isolated countries courts tourists

Today, Farecast, a free online service that helps travelers decide whether they should buy a ticket now or wait and hope that the price drops, has begun to forecast ticket prices for 200 international routes for flights departing within the next six months. Until now, the site only predicted fare trends on most major domestic routes. The website makes its predictions primarily by searching for patterns in ticket prices recorded in computer databases for select routes to Europe, Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. Farecast is the only fare prediction website that tells you in a clearcut way whether a ticket is a fair value, with big bold-faced words like "buy." The site also leads the field in making it clear how confident it is in its predictions about whether fares for your itinerary will rise or fall during the next week. Unfortunately, by limiting its predictions to what prices will do in the next week, Farecast doesn't resolve the question of whether to book now or wait another month (or any longer period of time). It's best for travelers who are ready to pounce on a deal. Farecast, you'll recall, is the winner of Budget Travel's 2007 Extra Mile Awards, and we've blogged before about its airfare prediction tool for domestic flights. Some of Farecast's other new tools include a tab for "Prediction & History details." If you want to know just how expensive it will be to fly to, say, London in July, Farecast will tell you. If you want to know how those London fares compare with the fares for flying to other European capitals, you can click a few buttons and the Farecast will display an easy-to-understand graph comparing fare trends between the cities. You can quickly see if you'd get more bang for your buck by flying to, say, Rome, instead of London in July. Predictions are limited right now to trips lasting between two and eight days in length. Farecast is not offering insurance on its price predictions for international trips—at least not yet. For domestic trips, in contrast, the site sells a Fare Guard option for $10 that guarantees you can buy lowest fare you see today, even if that fare disappears later in the week. (As Laura MacNeil explained this option in a Budget Travel story last year, "If the company is wrong and the price goes up—and you book a ticket within that week—you'll receive a check for the difference between the original quote and what you ended up paying. If the price goes down, your $10 will, you hope, be made up for in the savings.") EARLIER Starting in May for domestic flights, United will only allow you to check one bag free, charging you $25 for your second piece of checked luggage, $100 for your third, and $100 for your fourth.

This March, Canada's Porter Airlines will launch its first flights in the U.S. Starting now, you can book seats on one of seven daily round-trip flights between Newark and Toronto, first departing March 31 at Flyporter.com. Fares start at about $280 roundtrip, after fees and taxes. The airline has connecting flights, via Toronto, to Montreal, Ottawa, Halifax, and Mont Tremblant. Later in the year, the airline may expand to Boston, Chicago, D.C., and Philadelphia. The airline flies into Toronto's City Centre Airport, instead of the city's famously more congested international airport. The Centre Airport is also closer to downtown than the international airport most people use. The new turboprops offer custom leather seats with two to three inches more legroom than the 30 inches of legroom you typically find in the economy-class sections of other airlines. [NOTE: This blog post originally used the description "regional jet," instead of "turboprop," to describe the planes. And it said "30-inch wide seats" instead of "30 inches of legroom. I regret the errors and will now go back to bed.] More at FlyPorter.com.

Budget Travel's February issue includes our list of TripAdvisor's Top 100 Best Value hotels around the world, with quotes from travelers who have actually stayed in them. It's the first major collaboration between a national travel magazine and TripAdvisor, the leading resource for hotel reviews. But what about the rejects, the dregs? What about the hotels at the very bottom of TripAdvisor's proprietary lists? In New York City, the most poorly-rated hotel (according to TripAdvisor's ranking system) would be the Hotel Carter. The 700-room hotel, on West 43rd St. in Times Square. Customer reviews include stories of bedbugs, prostitutes, and disgusting bathrooms. Hotel Carter overcame a second-worst hotel finish last year to plummet to dead last this year. It seems that Hotel Carter earned its "worst-place finish" on the strength of a story of a housekeeper who found the body of a woman under a bed in August, as reported on HotelChatter. You can read the reviews from customers of the Carter at TripAdvisor. Meanwhile in Britain, the worst performer was the Nanford Guest House, in Oxford. Following closely on its heels were four properties belonging to the same company (Britannia Group), which were voted by travelers as among the dirtiest places to stay in Britain. [via the London Telegraph. A local paper has the hotel's dismissive response to the bad reviews.] RELATED 100 Best Hotel Values for 2008: Budget Travel Powered by TripAdvisor New York at a Price That's Right What 99 Pounds Buys in London

Airplane Instrument Coasters! Only $13 for a set of four at Trintec. They feature airspeed, altitude, and compass. [via Future Gringo] [Will someone please buy a set for The Cranky Flier, voted by Internet readers as the best travel blog?]