Rental cars: Making those highway tolls easier to pay

United Will No Longer Listen to Your Phone Rants The call center in India is being closed down. [Jaunted] Tripper Bus offering $1 fare between NYC-DC area BoltBus and MegaBus have some competition. [Newyorkology] 7 things to leave at home on your next big trip Not much love for the rollie bag… [Gadling] Travel trends in a down economy Travelers are heading to smaller, secondary cities; families are hitting the theme parks; and cruisers want to leave from their home port again. [AP/Yahoo] America's Rip-off Airports Most are in the Midwest and Southeast. [Forbes.com]

Persistent stereotypes paint the French as a bunch of beret-wearing, skirt-chasing smokers who seem to always be on strike. Needless to say, this portrayal is highly inaccurate—French people hardly ever wear berets. But their affinity for la grève—a mass work stoppage—well, that's still pretty spot on. January 29 marked the first French strike of 2009, and it's already being referred to as "Black Thursday." More than a third of flights from Orly were canceled, high-speed TGV trains were running at only 60%, and regional trains, including those that take passengers to both airports, were severely compromised. Service on the Paris Métro (subway) was cut only by a quarter, however—a major improvement over past years. Strikes like this are a regular feature of life in France, occurring at least once every year. As with this most recent one, disruptions are often confined to only one or two days. In November 2007, however, a strike lasted three agonizing weeks. For those who are traveling, this sort of thing can seem like a nightmare. But strikes are actually quite manageable if you know what to expect. Here are a few simple strategies to help you grin and bear a grève, and maybe even catch your return flight home. Plan Ahead Tourists are generally the only people in Paris who are caught unawares by a grève. The locals have been hearing about it for weeks, and have organized their lives accordingly. Before your departure, you can stay on top of the news by setting up a Google news alert. Enter the search terms "Paris," "strike," and whatever month you're traveling ("June 2009," for example). You'll receive an email alert if any potential upcoming strikes are being discussed in the media. Stay in the Loop If you find yourself in the middle of a transport strike, do as the locals and obsessively check the RATP website. The local transport authority publishes regular updates to inform the public of any disruptions. They'll tell you which subway lines are working, and at what capacity. You can use Google Translate to render the page comprehensible, or just glance to see if trafic is normale (great!), perturbé (uh-oh) or très perturbé (forget it). Rein Yourself In If the Métro isn't working, you may have to reorganize your itinerary. Visits to Versailles and cross-town culinary excursions should be sacrificed in favor of alternatives that are within walking distance. You can also plan to use Métro lines 1 and 14—these are automated and will continue to run (albeit with serious crowding) during any grève. As for taxis, all of Paris is trying to catch one, too. Don't pin all your hopes on hailing a ride. Better to roll with the punches and explore your nearby surroundings, rather than straining to reach a "must-see" across town. Use Your Feet Paris is a small and extremely walkable city. Crossing from the Marais to the Louvre requires only fifteen gorgeous minutes. Even Montmartre, way up at the top of the city, is 30-minute stroll from the center. You can also use your feet to pedal a Vélib' bicycle, although these are in serious demand during a strike. Make an Exit Strategy The suburban rail (RER-B) that serves both airports is almost always compromised during a strike. Service could be canceled entirely, or trains might stop at the first Paris station without continuing through the city—from CDG to Gare du Nord, for example, or from Orly to Denfert-Rochereau. Check the RATP website before venturing out with your heavy suitcase. Taxis are hard to find on the street but can be booked by phone in advance. If your French isn't up to it (or you don't want to spend 30 minutes on hold), you can ask your hotel's concierge for help with this one. Other alternatives include the Air France shuttle and assorted private shuttles. Our advice is to get this out of the way early and then enjoy the rest of your vacation. Peace of mind during a stressful strike is well worth that little bit of extra time and money.

It's a surprising trend. Within the past six months, most of the major airlines have offered "coupons"—or promotional codes you type into their websites—to claim the cheapest fares. To get the codes, sign up for the airlines' frequent flier programs and e-mail newsletters. Or use Google to search on the phrase "promotion code" plus the name of your airline, only looking for the most up-to-date results. Airfarewatchdog's blog is another source. This morning, for instance, Air France is snipping $75 off of round-trip fares from the U.S. to several European countries for departures in March if you enter the promo code MARCH442 at its official website airfrance.us. The discount must be redeemed by Feb. 17 and is only valid for March travel. Airfarewatchdog, which has been tracking the coupon code trend, says this is the first time AirFrance has offered a code. It also says that its "researchers tested several routes covered by this coupon code discount to see if, even with the discount, the fares we found were lower than what other airlines were charging without the discount. And in most cases, we discovered that Air France had the best fares when the discount was applied, especially on nonstop routes to Paris, but also to other destinations such as Prague and Zurich." As a rule, coupons (or "promo codes") can be used once per customer. (You can't keep buying different tickets using the same code. When you book you reservation, you won't see the discounted price until the very end. When you get to the page where you enter your personal information, there will be an option for "do you have a promotional code?" or "do you have a coupon code?" Enter your code then, and the discount will be applied to your transaction. JetBlue has a current coupon code offer, too. Book a flight by Feb. 8. and you'll receive a voucher for $50 off a flight between May 4 and June 17 (except for Memorial Day weekend).

It's becoming a bit easier to figure out if a vacation package is actually a deal. DealBase.com is a recently launched metasearch site that helps you filter more than 15,000 hotel specials and resort packages in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico to find the best deal. For example, you could recently find 275-plus Las Vegas hotel deals, 275-plus Orlando hotel deals, and 600-plus New York City hotel deals. Choose your dates of travel and your preferred neighborhood or hotel, and DealBase fetches the best deals available. DealBase was founded by industry veterans from SideStep, Expedia, and TravelPost. The site's most innovative feature is its Deal Analyzer, which lets you compare whether you would save money by booking the package's components (such as the resort rate, meal credit, and a spa treatment) separately. In other words, the site crosschecks the "deal" rates against the best rates on Hotels.com, prices out the market rate of the additional perks, and then tells you the percentage and dollar savings. Consider this posting I saw this morning: Chicago's Westin is offering a promotional rate of $99 a night for weekends through the end of March. The base room rate, from Hotels.com, is $110 higher a night. So you'll save about 53 percent, says DealBase. Here's some highlights from my recent interview with Sam Shank, DealBase's CEO. Back in 2004 you founded TravelPost, a hotel and resort review site (kind of like TripAdvisor). It quickly became a cult favorite among travelers, drawing 700,000 monthly visitors and about 50,000 reviews of resorts and hotels. You and your partners then sold the site to SideStep, which in turn was bought by Kayak. So what's DealBase, your latest project? Unlike the best known vacation-package websites, DealBase lets you filter through more than 15,000 deals to quickly find the best one for you. That's 100 times more deals than you can find on Travelzoo or Sherman's Travel. We're a metasearch site in the sense that we gather deal information from hundreds of websites. And unlike many other sites, we don't do "pay for play," which means that we don't give prominent placement in our search results to any particular hotel deal in exchange for money or advertising from the company. Has anything surprised you about the reaction from travelers? I had thought that the comprehensiveness of our listings would be the hook, and that our Deal Analyzer would be the "nice to have" part, just the gravy, but it's been the reverse. Even though we're aggregating more deals and displaying them in an easy-to-compare, apples-to-apples format, that's not what is impressing people the most. It's our Deal Analyzer instead that is seen as the more innovative and helpful feature. What's the Deal Analyzer? It sounds like something out of an Austin Powers movie. We demystify the deals in explaining the savings or lack of savings, compared with if you booked the parts of the deal separately. In the past month or so, we've found that when it comes to about 10 percent of the vacation packages out there, you'd save more money by skipping the package and booking the components independently. [Editor's note: I verified this claim for the search results in several cities.] What if someone finds a better deal than the ones posted on DealBase? You can post your own deal you've seen. Or you can leave a comment at the bottom of any deal, saying if you think something else is better somewhere else. We have 10 people on staff doing quality control, vetting the deals posted on our site. They review what's posted by people outside. They're also posting deals and making sure that they're up-to-date. Where are travelers most interested in visiting right now? Las Vegas. It's twice as popular as our next most popular destination. What's next for DealBase? By this summer, we hope to add international destinations. Right now, we're focused deals close to home.