They ate at 700 diners, shacks, and joints to find the best

If you find yourself near Milford, Conn. this weekend, shuck (pun intended) your plans and attend the free 34th Annual Milford Oyster Festival. Things get started Friday at 5 p.m. and continue until Saturday at 6 p.m. The schedule is still being finalized, but you can expect lots of the usual festival fare—a classic car show, arts and crafts, live music, and canoe and kayak races. Plus, there is an oyster-eating contest (participants have to eat a dozen in record time) and an oyster-shucking contest (first one to shuck two dozen wins). But the pearl of this event (too easy!) is the aptly named "Pearl Trail"—a treasure hunt for 20,000 of the precious orbs, donated by a local jeweler and hidden in downtown buildings. Milford is about 11 miles from New Haven, Conn. The waterfront town is the sixth oldest in Connecticut; oyster farming was once a major industry. The festival attracts about 50,000 people a year. The festival grounds are located in downtown along Milford Harbor; you can map "High St. Milford, Conn. 06460" for directions. Admission to the festival is free, but there is a Wine & Oyster tasting on Friday night that costs $40 per person. Call the festival hotline at 203/878-5363 for more info.

You've probably heard of couchsurfing.com, a network of travelers looking to crash for free on strangers' sofas. Now we learn that an entrepreneur has taken the idea a step further and created Airbedandbreakfast.com, a site that enables anyone with an airbed (or couch or bed) to rent it out for the night. What makes AirBed & Breakfast.com different from couchsurfing.com (and craigslist.org, too) is that it allows you to make reservations online and pay for your stay with a credit card (or via PayPal). The site charges guests a 5 to 12 percent service fee (above the nightly rate, depending on the type of lodging). If you're hosting a guest, you receive the full rate you advertise. Skeptical of the trend? Don't be. Time reported this spring that Couch Surfing has nearly 470,000 users—up 56 percent since last year. On the plus side, AirBed & Breakfast makes it much more convenient for folks to try a cheaper—and far more culturally authentic—alternative to a hotel. On the downside, this website manages to lower the standard for acceptable cheap lodging to something even lower than a couch: the plastic inflatable airbed. Plus, it introduces an annoying new acronym into the language: "AB&B.;" Perhaps none of the above websites are as truly bargain basement as the long-standing one that makes guests work for their beds: helpx.net Trade five hours of manual labor for a place to crash. Have you tried any of these services? Would you? [Story broken by TechCrunch and picked up by HotelChatter and Travel Weekly in the UK.]

Reid Bramblett was recently on CNN, talking about his BT cover story on medieval and romantic Italy. Reid knows Italy like few other writers do. He learned Italian on a Roman playground when he was 12 years old, he says, and has kept returning nearly every year since. He's written Frommer's regional guide, Tuscany & Umbria and nine other guidebooks, including Frommer's Italy From $90 a Day, Europe for Dummies, and DK's Eyewitness Top 10 Milan & The Lakes. (He also self-publishes free info at ReidsGuides.com.) So what are some of Reid's top tips on making Italy affordable? Look for other lodging besides hotels. "I recently returned from Europe where I stayed in a campground in Venice for $23 and a monastery in Tuscany for $78 a night including all meals. And on another recent trip I stayed in a 13th-century castle on the Rhine River for $125 a night when the hotel in town was charging about $150 for a small room without a river view. Find listings at beyondhotels.net, with info on farmstays, villas, and apartments--and not just in Italy." Renting a car? "Check out all your options on a meta search engine like Kayak.com. But then compare prices with AutoEurope.com, which is a consolidator, meaning they buy rates in bulk from the major rental car chains and then pass along volume discounts to customers like you. You prepay your reservation and then pick up your car at a major brand chain, such as Hertz or Avis, overseas. They'll also arrange for short-term leases which, if you're traveling for about two weeks or more, is the best value." Try an ancient Italian village. Some are being turned into a new kind of hotel, where the rooms are spread out across town and you share the streets with residents. "The National Association of Diffuse Hotels' website (alberghidiffusi.it) is only in Italian, but it has links to 23 so-called alberghi diffusi in the frame labeled Alberghi Diffusi aderenti." MORE FROM BT A Village Is Reborn.

From the September 2008 issue of Budget Travel: Starwood's first Aloft and Element hotels are opening this summer, sporting a trendy design and amenities such as self-service check-in kiosks and a touch-screen concierge. Aloft hotels are in about a dozen cities [Montreal was the first one]; Element is currently only in Lexington, Mass.