Cheap Tickets & Following The Crowd

From msnbc:

Follow the crowd.

That’s right, stand in that long line at the airport. Book the happenin’ hotel, the popular cruise. Go on, vacation with the masses.

When you’re visiting family for the holidays
Ask travel experts how to have a trouble-free trip around he holidays, and they’re quick to offer the following advice: schedule your flight on the actual holiday, like Christmas Day, when everyone is opening presents, or New Years Day, when half the world is hung over. The roads are quiet and the flights are flying practically empty.

Please! I recently traveled on some of the busiest air travel days of the year, the Friday, Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving. No kidding. When you’re planning a seasonal vacation
Another popular tip is to vacation at a place during off-peak season. Go to Florida during the summer or Europe in winter, they say. Florida during August is unbearable. Here in Central Florida, people lock themselves indoors and turn the air conditioning on “high.” And have you ever experienced a genuine, pre-global warming European winter? It’s a pervasive, limb-numbing cold from which there’s no escape. When you’re traveling with little ones
Here’s a piece of advice that gets dispensed a lot: Avoid those popular morning flights, because they’re crowded and expensive. Take the red-eye instead. I’ve given that advice for years. I’ll never forget the Virgin Atlantic flight from Newark to London with our then two-year-old son, Aren. We learned the hard way that Aren was a “some cases” kid. Red-eye flights are wonderful for adults, and especially for time-starved business travelers. Repositioning cruises, which are cheap cruises on ships that are changing itineraries — for instance, going from Alaska to Mexico — can be a great deal. Likewise, cheaper rates for still unopened hotels (in travel industry lingo, they’re called “soft” openings) can be a find, but remember, the hotel isn’t officially open yet. Buy the real thing, pay a fair price, have a good time.

The bottom line is, sometimes you should follow the crowd when you travel. Mary Huff, a communications consultant from Atlanta, learned that on a recent visit to Paris.

Meanwhile, a crowd of people was running away from the unstable passenger. Now Huff thinks twice before listening to her inner contrarian.