Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

Friday Round-up of Good Travel News

1) Outside magazine has stopped including any subscription insert cards in all subscription copies, starting with its March “green” issue. This will save an estimated 1,500 trees, according to the magazine. “We’ve had huge gains online,” Paul Rolnick, consumer marketing director said. We intend to replace our entire business online as this trend continues, and eventually communicate entirely in a paperless way with our subscribers.” Thank you!! What a novel concept to grasp: subscribers don’t need annoying cards asking them to…subscribe!

2) Mexico and Central America are still cheap for those of us getting paid with a currency declining in value. The link is to my latest MSNBC column (via Tripso).

3) From the U.S., April and May are great times to fly south. It’s generally shoulder season in the rainiest parts (meaning you don’t get deluged yet) and everything is green. Plus the spring “escape from the cold” crowds have slowed, so flight prices drop considerably. American Airlines is having a good sale right now for this period and I’m sure the others are matching on some routes. You can get a flight below $300 from some southern gateways and I found flights to Aguascalientes and Cancun, Mexico for $281 round trip from my own airport. Try a meta-search engine like Kayak or a one-stop shop like Booking Wiz to compare prices.

4) Good books keep selling, despite a broken publisher/retail system. That link goes to a post I did about Marching Powder, a spellbinding book that came out in 2003 and still sells well on Amazon. It joins tens of thousands of others that rarely grace the inside of a bookstore, yet keep going and going because people can find them online. At my local B&N last week, I found a narrative travel book section that was all of one shelf and none of the three fiction books I came looking for was stocked. Meanwhile I find everything I want online, even books that are inexplicably out of print. With print on demand technology being so good, why does anything go out of print these days anyway? Thanks Mr. Bezos for changing the game.