Today's fare sales

Costs for travelers to East Africa have been on the upswing. Take, for example, the costs of visiting Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which is famous for having a volcanic crater with a spectacularly wide diameter. In 2005, a one-day admission fee was $30 per person. Now it's $50 per person. An identical price jump has happened at the nearby Serengeti National Park. Elsewhere in East Africa, admission fees have jumped $10 per person in the past year at the Lake Nakuru National Park and the Maasai Mara Game Reserve. Each spot now charges $40 per person per day. Costs for visas, departure taxes, and accommodations are also on the rise. To stay within your travel budget, you'll need to track down safari bargains. Here are two key options for keeping your safari costs low.... Book an air and lodging package with an established tour company. Many East African lodges sell discounted rooms to tour companies, which bundle them with airfares. The total price hides the lodges' discounts, so their advertised rates aren't undermined. You can save hundreds. A fine example is 2Afrika, whose packages Budget Travel often recommends in its 40 Best Deals and Real Deals sections. The company's vice-president, Michael Kerneklian, admits that it is difficult to avoid increases in accommodations, national park entrance fees, visa costs, and departure taxes in East Africa. But, he says, "by crafting group departures that visit the highlights on everyones safari wish lists, our passengers save hundreds of dollars off of a customized safari." Book locally. If you're a youthful backpacker, you may find safari options that start at $400 per person if you fly to Cape Town, South Africa, and then book a safari with one of the vendors there. Last-minute seats go cheap. Follow the recommendations of well-regarded hostels in Cape Town, whose owners have an interest in steering you straight. For 10 tips on how to get the most out of your safari, click here.

While I was at LAX waiting for my delayed flight to Newark, the Continental agent at the gate announced that because the flight was delayed, some people might miss their connections to Europe. That's life, right? But then he said that the airline, as part of its Customer First program, would put up in a hotel any passenger who missed a connection on an international flight. This was the first I'd heard of it. A lot of frequent travelers I know have been saying that Continental is the best U.S. airline, and I can see why they like it. UPDATE: I should've been clearer. What I found notable was that Continental will put passengers up even if the missed connection is due to weather, something airlines have traditionally taken no responsibility for.

Today, Wired posted a story about the travelers' watch lists kept by various governmental agencies and airlines. The story highlights cases of mistaken identities between legitimate and illegitimate travelers. The article highlights the story of Princeton professor Walter Murphy, "one of the nation's most respected constitutional law professors," who was put on a watch list--even though he is not a threat to the U.S. Here's the good news: In February, the Department of Homeland Security set up a new webpage that allows people to "resolve possible watch list misidentification issues." But the process isn't as effective as many people would like it... It's unnerving to be pulled aside by passport control officials, as I can say from personal experience.... My name comes up on at least one of the U.S. government watch lists. It seems that my name and birth-date are shared by someone on a watch list who is alarming to U.S. officials. Whenever I return from a trip overseas, I'm taken aside by passport control officials. The delays can be inconvenient. My most recent visit with passport control officers lasted more than 80 minutes. Now if an 80-minute per trip delay were the price of liberty, I'd accept it quietly. But I bet that my predicament is due to a bureaucratic snafu that could be quickly resolved. And, as Wired's article points out, thousands of people appear to be wrongly identified as potential threats. One of the travelers quoted in Wired's article says, "It was unnerving sitting in that little room even for a short period of time. You get a sense of what people who are not senators and not citizens go through." How true. When I was pulled into a passport control office this past February at J.F.K. airport, I wasn't the only guy there. One of the other travelers was an elderly man who spoke a foreign language that none of the officials in the room spoke. One of the officials joked that they'd have to detain him indefinitely, and the others laughed. The elderly man may not have spoken English, but he knew they were laughing at him.

I was in L.A. for a conference of travel editors, and at times it was a bummer. Not the editors--they were lovely. But most are editors of newspaper travel sections, and newspapers have been having a tough time lately (in part because so many people are getting their news from TV and the Internet). At the beginning of the conference, everyone got a chance to say how things were going, and many of them had grim reports: shrinking budgets, fewer pages, layoffs and buyouts... It was depressing, and not just because they're good people getting a raw deal. When I got to see the kind of work the various editors were doing--everyone handed out samples--I was incredibly impressed. They deserve praise and support. I'm sure that the newspapers' management think that travel is somehow not as important as so-called hard news, and that's a shame. If you like your local newspaper's travel section, I hope you'll consider sending the travel editor--and the managing editors--a note saying so.