So what’s with the “build a village” thing? How can the power of travel make a difference in the world?

From the rocking PwP travel bloggers themselves, about their 2010 beneficiary, LAFTI:

“….Land for Tillers’ Freedom (LAFTI) [is] a non-profit organization that is focused on changing the conditions of the Dalit caste or India’s ‘untouchables.’ ….Passports with Purpose’s goal is to raise $50,000 to build a village in India through the Friends of LAFTI Foundation.

With its home office in the village of Kuthur (Tamil Nadu), LAFTI’s mission is to liberate Dalit women and their families through projects such as land distribution and cultivation, housing construction, adult training and youth housing and education. LAFTI works with the government and financial institutions to purchase land for Dalit families. Each house costs approximately $2,000 to build.”

Wow, seems like a lot, right? US$50,000 to make this happen.

Well, as of this posting, they’re already at US$37,000+ and movin’ on up.

Here’s the deal: you bid on generously donated travel related items and if your bid wins, you get the item AND the satisfaction of donating to a worthy cause. If you don’t win the bid, well, you’ve STILL donated to a worthy cause.

Want some examples of prizes? Here’s the Passports with Purpose prize list and donation page, which includes goodies like:

***  A guided tour of your choice of Nuremberg, Bamberg or Munich from Wandering Family.

***  A Timbuk2 Travel Gear Bundle from Pit Stops for Kids.

***  Two adult and two child 3-day Go Cards from Mother of All Trips.

***  Two weekend nights stay at any Omni Hotel & Resort from The Q Family Adventures.

***  An Xbox 360 AND a Kinect from Chris Around the World.

….and the list goes on and on with tempting items like that.

Only US$10 per bid.

Do it! Do it!  :)

Cheap Flights

• Hotel rooms and other purchases from travel auction sites are generally nonrefundable.
• Be prepared for a walk or dealing with transportation if you get a hotel on the far edges of your desired region.  If you have kids, ensure that they can handle a walk on crowded city streets.
• For the best “bang for the buck,” bid on fairly high-level properties [3.5 - 4 stars.] It doesn’t make sense to get a room at a Days Inn or Motel 6 through Priceline.
• Be flexible. My husband requested a King room but found when he checked in that they were out of King rooms that were non-smoking. He was fine with a room with two Queens.

This time, we needed a hotel room on a Sunday night in north Dallas.

As I’ve said before in my post on how to find the best hotel deals, Sunday is a great time to score a cheap room because the weekend traffic is gone and many business travelers aren’t there yet, so rooms stand empty and hotels are ready to deal.

Sunday night in an area (north Dallas) with a TON of big chain hotels (lots of competition to fill rooms) is prime territory for a Priceline score when you aren’t particularly picky about exact hotel or precise location.

It worked: we bid $50 for a four-star hotel and got the Hyatt North Dallas, normally around $170/night and up.

My son is cavorting in the pool as I type this.  He does not really care that this is a business/conference hotel. A pool is a pool.

Thank you, Priceline.

(Did you cringe the first time that phrase came out of your mouth as a parent?  Did you think, OMG what Old Geezer thing will I say next – “We walked five miles to school through the snow, barefoot, going uphill.”)

As usual, I digress….

Many parents of young children are finding that games and apps (applications) on their iPhone or new iPad are ideal for keeping certain squirmy family members quiet and amused, especially during long trips.

I’ve found a marvelous resource for you:  while participating in the This Week in Travel podcast (go here for our episode – Spirit Air and Ryanair compete to suck the most) I chatted with co-host Jen Leo about her experiences traveling with her first child, daughter Cora.

Jen told me about a site that she runs with Jamie Pearson, called Best Kids Apps - “we play all the iPhone games so you don’t have to.”  Yay!

App games are broken out by age group and by type (Educational, Creative, Just for Fun, etc.)  There’s just a ton of helpful info there for you app-collectors.

More good news: they have a post up on the best iPad apps for kids, AND they’re giving away an iPad for Mother’s Day (details to follow.)

Want to see a how a kid who has grown up in a touchscreen world reacts to the iPad?  Pretty interesting stuff in the video below from Todd Lapin on Laughing Squid; here’s his blog post about this “UI (User Interface) experiment” – A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time

I have rather strong opinions about bloggers who get freebies, including free travel, and then don’t disclose to their readers when content is based on those nice opportunities.

For myself, I think there are rules about that sort of thing, so I’ve posted my thoughts in a new permanent Page: the Blog Disclosure Policy for the Family Travel Guide.

You can see the link in the upper right corner of the blog Home page, under Family & Travel Resources.

In sum, I say that if I get free stuff to write about, you’ll know it because I’ll disclose it.

I prefer to pay for my own stuff, though, so I can be truly mouthy about it.  But you kind of expected that from me, right?

For more detailed thoughts on the new FTC rules, you may wish to bounce over to one of my other blogs and read: What do new FTC blogging rules mean for press trips and fam tours?

Keeping it real, so you know what you’re getting….

The visitor’s Web sites that belong to the destination where you’re going.

For example, this fall I’m going to be attending the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) conference in Seattle WA, and speaking at the Oklahoma Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Tulsa OK.

Here’s where I’ll be looking around….

***  The Visit Seattle Web site has links to various deals and a lodging booking engine running down the right side of its Visitor Center Page, plus you can follow @SeattleMaven on Twitter for up-to-date local info.

***  The Visit Tulsa Web site has local accomodation deals all on one page, and a free discount coupon book for local attractions that I can order ahead of time  –  it would be nice if it was also available online, though, like the one from Hutchinson, Kansas or these deals from Fort Worth, Texas. Don’t forget @VisitTulsa on Twitter, either.

Be persistent; some tourism Web sites inexplicably bury the links/info for discounts.   Look hard for family packages that combine lodging and tickets to an attraction – SeaWorld San Antonio has these all the time.

Headlines may not be accurate, either – the Travel Iowa Web site has a link for “summer deals” but when I skimmed through it, I could see many offerings that are good all the way through September.

More examples – the Legendary North Dakota site has a bunch of ND vacation packages and the Orlando, Florida visitor’s site is packed with bargains. The city of San Francisco has this family package that includes a bunch of goodies like cable car passes, plus here’s the whole list of “City by the Bay” packages with many tied to their big King Tut exhibit this fall through spring 2010.

(Hint – if there’s a blockbuster museum exhibit in a city, you can often find package deals on city tourism/CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau) Web sites that include lodging and tickets to the exhibit.)

If a site hasn’t been updated and still has “summer deals” up, poke around or even make a phone call, because there are certainly “fall deals” going on right now.

Yes, this all applies outside the US as well - Paris passes and bookings, anyone?

Do you have a tourism/visitor’s Web site favorite that consistently offers good deals on the site?  Please share with us in the comments.

Wendy is the Consumer Travel News Editor at Condé Nast Traveler and the magazine’s resident Web 2.0/social media expert thanks to her excellent Perrin Post blog and active adoption of Twitter.

She’s on business travel in the Caribbean for the June issue of the magazine, but as a typically multi-tasking parent, she has her family along to try to get some quality time with them in between calls to travel writer duties.

Just like Benji Lanyado at the UK’s Guardian used Twitter to help with a Paris trip, and the lively folks over at National Geographic Traveler‘s Intelligent Travel Blog like to talk Twitter, Wendy gave a shout-out to her Twitter stream for family-friendly ideas during stops in Anguilla, St. Barts and St. Martin/Sint Maarten.

She was rewarded with winners like a stop at The Butterfly Farm in St. Martin.

She’s been blogging and tweeting her Caribbean experiences, and she pulls no punches (even about one barfy kid on the ferry from St. Martin, bless his heart) plus I can really relate to those annoying technical glitches that interfere with blogging when you travel.

As I snivel and blow my nose here in Texas, I am somewhat comforted that I am neither a barfy kid nor his semi-harassed Mom on a Caribbean ferry.

I know that’s cruel, Wendy, but thank you anyway for the vicarious Caribbean visit!

Need even more island inspiration? The Traveling Mamas blogged about family spring break in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos.

The Grand Rapids guidebook selection is pretty thin at our local Barnes & Noble north of Austin, Texas, and Sainted Husband had very little sightseeing time, so there was no sense in shelling out a bunch of money for information. I’ve written an article for Education.com — Must-Sees in Michigan for Family Fun (which included the Grand Rapids Fish Ladder) — but we still wanted a little more depth.

I first heard of Offbeat Guides in a Robert Scoble blog post last summer; Scoble is a tech explorer for Fast Company and I was intrigued by his description of the product.

Guides founder Dave Sifry wrote up his own blog post about why he started the company, and you can follow Offbeat Guides on Twitter.

To order a guide, you go to the Offbeat Guides front page, type in your destination, put in some other info on the next pages — when you’re going, where your hotel is located (if you know,) some of your specific interests — then Offbeat Guides takes a few minutes to generate a custom guidebook based on your input.

Our Grand Rapids guide included an AccuWeather forecast for the teacher conference days, restaurants/bars/pubs near the hotel, Google maps, city history because I’d requested it, sites of cultural interest, music concerts and arts events during the specific conference days in July, local transportation (including local street-naming quirks) and even a discussion of the large amount of Grand Rapids public art and where to find it.

The Guide had lots of details, like the fact that Grand Rapids is a center for Christian publishing, and that the surrounding area of Michigan is known for fruit production (apple, peach and blueberry.) Grand Rapids sister cities include Bielsko-Biala, Poland.  I love that kind of obscure stuff in a guide, but others may not care for it.

A nice touch was a list of local radio stations, so that visitors can immediately program their favorite sort of music into a hotel clock radio or rental car radio.  Sainted Husband, the actual user of the guide, was less interested in that feature.

There are a few photos, most of which still need proper captioning; Offbeat Guides is still in beta, so not everything is smoothed out yet.

The Events section was packed with all sorts of activities that were scheduled for the days of my husband’s visit. Here’s my favorite:

“Kuhnhenn Beer Dinner — The chefs at Hop Cat are putting on another of their famous beer dinners with the focus on the beers from Kuhnhenn Brewery. The dinner will be a 4 course meal paired with 4 drafts….The whole event will be graced with the presence of the brew crew from Kuhnhenn Brewery.”

That’s the kind of cool, localized information that made my husband a hero with his fellow high school faculty members. He distributed some PDF copies of his guide to the other teachers at the conference, and they were all impressed with how well he’d gotten ready for the trip, and how many things there were to do in the city during their event.

The primary sources of data for the guide were Wikipedia and Wikitravel, so it’s obviously not edited by any travel experts other than a general “hive mind” of wiki contributors. I’m OK with that when a guide is a nice-to-have adjunct to a trip, not my main planning document.

Would I depend on such a guide for planning an entire family vacation? No, but it’s certainly a terrific starting point. Customers need to understand that there’s no editorial vetting of any of the information, but the hard work of collating it and focusing it on your particular days of travel is a worthy endeavor.

A full color printed guide (mailed to you) is US$24.95, a downloadable PDF guide (our option, we printed some of the pages ourselves at home) is US$9.95 and a full color printed guide AND Downloadable PDF together are US$24.95.

Offbeat Guides offers a money-back guarantee if you aren’t happy with their service.

Anyway, Today, January 7, 2009 at midnight is the last day to send in your blog post, Flickr photo/s or video explaining why you need a $5000 vacation home getaway. We’ll start voting on favorite entries January 8 until January 15.

All the deets are here at the HomeAway Blog.

I’ve written some blog posts on the site as well….

• Get in shape for 2009 with a Fit City vacation

• Finding wheelchair-accessible vacation rentals

• How to take contest-winning photographs (with lots of help from photos expert Pam Mandel at Nerd’s Eye View and BlogHer Travel)

Hope to see your contest entry today!

All of that running around, usually with at least a road trip thrown into the general insanity, if not a flight or two….and traveling with kids through TSA checkpoints = what fun!

What if you really could take a true vacation?

I’ve written here before about finding value in vacation home rentals through Ciao Bambino; depending on the property and the time of year, you can spank those high hotel and food costs pretty well by staying in a residence rather than a bland hotel.

There’s also an excellent article about how to rent a vacation home in a recent issue of Budget Travel: Rent by Number.

Stir up your creative juices and start thinking “escape,” because a new contest just kicked off today (it runs until January 7, 2009) called the HomeAway Getaway, sponsored by the HomeAway vacation home rental site.

To enter, you submit either:

• a blog post, or
• a photo essay on Flickr, or
• a video on your YouTube channel

….explaining why you need a week away and where you want to spend it.

Starting January 8, 2009, the entries will open up for voting by anyone until January 15. The winner will be announced Friday, January 16.

What does HomeAway get out of such a Web 2.0/social media-based outreach effort to digitally-creative types? Here’s what they say:

“First and foremost, we want to introduce more people to the benefits of vacation rentals–especially for family and group travel…..We have run traditional sweepstakes in the past, but we chose to create this contest specifically for bloggers, vloggers and new media mavens because (a) we are beginning to adopt social media to communicate the value of vacation rentals; and (b) we noticed many of you are already talking online about your vacation rental experiences, so this contest is a small way to thank you for sharing.”

Where could you spend such a getaway vacation?

Consider five family-friendly winter escapes or these top 10 vacation rentals for families.  Or, fire up that keyboard/camera/video camera and escape with just your sweetie to 10 of the most romantic vacation rentals.

Locations are available worldwide, from beachfront homes in Key Largo, Florida to waterfront homes in London.

Sure, you deserve that getaway, so tell us why – click here and give it your best shot!

Note: unfortunately because of assorted legal restrictions, the contest is only open to residents of the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Canada (but not Quebec.)  We did TRY to argue with the lawyer-types….

(Disclosure: Austin, TX-based HomeAway is a client of mine through Every Dot Connects, a social media consortium through which I offer consulting and workshops.)

I like to reach those niche readers

My husband Chris needed a cheap room midweek in November in Reno, Nevada for a teacher’s conference.  It was late-breaking news that his school was sending him to the event, so we were looking for a room only ten days beforehand.  Admittedly, tourist-heavy places like Reno, Las Vegas and Orlando have zillions of hotel rooms, so this wasn’t a terribly strenuous test of Priceline.

The driving factor was location; we needed the hotel to be close to the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, but of course travel auction sites only give you general areas/regions to choose from.  Chris’ school would have paid for his room at the conference hotel, the Atlantis Hotel and Casino, but only if he doubled up, and he decided that he wanted the privacy of his own room.

Hey, if you had to deal with high schoolers all day, then me plus two kids and four cats at night, you’d want your own room, too!

Our favorite Kayak cost comparison site had OK prices at the Atlantis, but we wanted to experiment with Priceline.  We checked out the how-tos ahead of time on the Bidding for Travel Web site, and read Wendy Perrin’s blog post on the best ways to bid for travel. There are also good Priceline tips at About.com’s Budget Travel.

Budget Travel magazine’s 105 supersmart strategies said this about Priceline:

“While Priceline is now a full-fledged booking engine, it’s most valuable for its bidding system. We like it for hotels in cities, but be wary of two-star hotels and below, and research neighborhoods in advance. BiddingForTravel.com has examples of successful bids. The law of supply and demand means you’ll do better at business hotels on weekends, at resort towns on weekdays, and anywhere off-season.”

Before buying, Chris chose the section of Reno that has the convention center. He requested a four-star facility, indicated he wanted a non-smoking room with a King-sized bed, and put in a bid of $45/night.

After a few seconds, Priceline said “Bid accepted” and revealed that he’d be staying at the Peppermill Reno Hotel Casino, about a 10 minute walk from the Convention Center. He also got a follow-up email saying that his bid was accepted.

He was given options of adding a rental car and/or airport ground transportation, but he used Peppermill’s regularly scheduled guest bus and didn’t need it. He also declined options for various area guided tours like skiing at nearby Heavenly, or a Lake Tahoe helicopter tour.

Chris was happy with his hotel, which appeared to be pretty full. He joined both the Peppermill and Atlantis casinos (free) and used their member cards to log into a slot machine which gave him a few starter dollars for gambling.

For $45/night (breakfast not included) he got a nice room and a brisk walk to the conference each morning.

Key takeaways:

• Hotel rooms and other purchases from travel auction sites are generally nonrefundable.
• Be prepared for a walk or dealing with transportation if you get a hotel on the far edges of your desired region.  If you have kids, ensure that they can handle a walk on crowded city streets.
• For the best “bang for the buck,” bid on fairly high-level properties. It doesn’t make too much sense to get a room at a Days Inn or Motel 6 through Priceline.
• Be flexible. Chris requested a King room but found when he checked in that they were out of King rooms that were non-smoking. He was fine with a room with two Queens.

Any other good tips, readers?