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The Top Five Tips For Surviving Budget Bus Travel

It's okay to admit that you travel by bus, or even better—by $1 bus specials. The era of cool bus travel has arrived, when it just no longer makes sense to fly between New York and Philadelphia when the bus costs under $20 and usually takes under 2 hours, and it has free WiFi and power outlets. Take that, regional jets!

Not only are there new bus lines springing up every so often, like Megabus, Boltbus, TripperBus, and NeOn Bus, but even Greyhound is getting a makeover with the WiFi and outlet additions on select routes. With stops in 13 states and one Canadian province, Megabus is moving right along as the pioneer of cool bus travel. And with more people opting to take the bus, we feel the need to remind you of the bus code....

After the jump, our Top Five Tips For Surviving Budget Bus Travel

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Tags: Megabus / Bus Travel / Travel Deals / → All Tags

Megabus Unloading 50,000 Tickets For $1 Each

Who wants to take the bus to Albany?! We know, we know; no one really wants to do that. But now you can just for the hell of it, because Megabus has released some 50,000 tickets for $1 each.

The offer covers all of their US routes, with hubs in New York and Chicago, and works for travel dates from September 14 to November 19. Make sure to input promo code HOTDEAL for your best chance at the discounted fares. Atlantic City in late September is still warm, right? Cleveland from Chicago is a good bet for some Italian food and a long weekend away.

All you have to do to score the seats for almost nothing is log on to Megabus.com, choose your departure and arrival cities within the applicable dates (we found $1 fares available all over), and pay the 50-cent reservation fee. Therefore it is possible to score a round-trip bus ride for a total of $2.50 per person. Not bad, not bad at all considering that they've got WiFi now.

Related Stories:
· Megabus [Official Site]
· BoltBus To Baltimore For A Buck: A Success Story [Jaunted]
· Megabus and BoltBus Going Head To Head In Baltimore [Jaunted]
· Megabus Coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Jaunted]

Tags: Bus Travel / Megabus / Travel News / → All Tags

Megabus Upgrades To Double-Deckers

Megabus might be beating out their bus buddy Boltbus when it comes to the competitive New York to Boston route. Starting this week, the WiFi equipped coach service is upgrading all buses on the Big Apple to Beantown route with double-decker buses.

The new buses hold 81 passengers, which is about 25 more than the usual ones. Some of these new buses even feature a 51-inch-wide glass ceiling up top, so try to snag one of those skylight seats. No word on whether the extra availability will improve our chances of scoring one of those $1 fares.

The new double-deckers are also a little bit taller than the traditional coaches. The extra 18 inches in height means that they can’t fit in South Station, so their new stop will be at Back Bay Station. If you’re heading to New York you’ll be dropped off at Penn Station.

At this point, is anyone actually still taking Fung Wah?

Related Stories:
·Megabus Builds Up Buses On Busy Route [Boston Globe]
·Boltbus to Baltimore For a Buck: A Success Story [Jaunted]
·Bus Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Sidddd]

Tags: Bus Travel / Baltimore / Megabus / Boltbus / → All Tags

Boltbus to Baltimore For a Buck: A Success Story

Any day is a beautiful day when one can get from New York City to Baltimore for less than the cost of a can of soda. And indeed it was perfect sunny weather in the Charm City when on Saturday, we took our own advice and headed down the interstate for the weekend.

After boarding the nearly-full bus at West 33rd Street and 7th Avenue, next to a Sbarro's where tourists were, for some reason, eating breakfast, we settled into the bus' leather seats. Immediately we hooked onto the WiFi signal before the bus had even left, and we enjoyed a stable connection all the way down to Baltimore.

In our frenzy to get online however, we made the mistake of opting for an emergency exit row seat with perhaps an inch more legroom (laptop screen space). Why was this such a bad call on our part? Because the middle few rows on Boltbus do not have power outlets, unlike the other rows with their standard-size double plugs. Rest assured that we would not make this mistake again on the return trip.

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Tags: Bus Travel / Baltimore / Megabus / Boltbus / → All Tags

Megabus and BoltBus Going Head to Head in Baltimore

A clash of the cheap bus company titans is about to play out on the unlikeliest of East Coast soils: Baltimore, Maryland. It's to this seemingly average destination that Boltbus will begin routes tomorrow, throwing a huge wrench into the dominance of Megabus' own 32 trips a day between Baltimore and New York City.

Already both bus lines battle to be called "King of the Expressway" on routes to Philadelphia and Boston, but these cities are both larger than Baltimore and already significantly served by other seedier bus companies, which will remain nameless.

Who will survive the bottleneck of the Charm City, however, especially since BoltBus matches the Megabus promotional starter fare of $1 each way? There is a huge difference between the two already emerging, however: Megabus only offers the buck seats to the first few reservations on each route, while Bolt is stamping every seat of their 14 daily trips with the $1 fare between May 7 and May 10—even the Saturday and Sunday drives. Rest assured that we'll keep our eyes on this developing situation, even though it'd be way cooler if we were talking about high-speed trains.

Related Stories:
· Boltbus Launching Service: Baltimore to NYC for $1 [Baltimore Sun]
· Boltbus Versus Megabus, Round Two [Jaunted]
· Bus Travel Coverage [Jaunted]

[Boltbus photo: Baltimore Sun]

Tags: Bus Travel / Buses / BoltBus / MegaBus / Greyhound / Open Threads / → All Tags

Will You Ever Go Back to Greyhound?

We're pretty big BoltBus advocates around these parts, and when they don't have a cheap fare, we generally go with Megabus or a Chinatown line. Even though we travel between New York, DC, Philly and Boston pretty frequently, it's been a long time since we've been on a Greyhound.

So we're not sure how we feel about Greyhound's new buses—they've got free WiFi, power outlets, and more leg room—basically everything Bolt has minus the $1 fares. We know we shouldn't feel weird about considering taking Greyhound again—after all, they (very quietly) own BoltBus, so what's the difference? But there's something about it that just doesn't sit right with us. Thinking about going back to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and waiting in those cramped underground lines just doesn't seem as cool as picking up Bolt on the curb, even though we know our money is going to the same place.

Has anyone tried the shiny new Greyhound buses yet? Will you go back or are you also addicted to Bolt? Let us know your preferred method for bus travel in comments below.

Related Stories:
· Wanna Ride Greyhound? Tell Them in 140 Characters or Less [Jaunted]
· Handy Search Tool Helps Navigate the Cheap-o Bus Wars [Jaunted]
· Bus travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Greyhound]

Tags: Bus Travel / Buses / BoltBus / MegaBus / Greyhound / Washington Deluxe / Bus Junction / Chinatown Buses / Search Tools / → All Tags

Handy Search Tool Helps Navigate the Cheap-o Bus Wars

We can't decide whether to file this one under "best travel search innovation since Hopstop," or "damn! Why didn't we think of this first?"

The savvy folks over at the new Bus Junction realized the only thing wrong with all these cheap-o Northeast bus lines is that it can be time-consuming for cheapskate riders to browse all of them in search of the cheapest of the cheap fares. So they created a Kayak-like search engine—just plug in your date and destination, and they'll show you all of your options, including the Chinatown lines, BoltBus, MegaBus and Greyhound.

They don't seem to have it worked out perfectly yet. Most notably, there's no Washington Deluxe, one of the most reliable lines for DC to NY rides. But even so, this totally just doubled our cheapskate travel productivity.

Related Stories:
· Bus Junction [Official Site]
· BoltBus versus MegaBus, Round Two [Jaunted]
· Bus travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: kenudigit]

Tags: Bus Travel / Buses / BoltBus / MegaBus / → All Tags

BoltBus versus MegaBus, Round Two

Have you thrifty travelers noticed cheap-o Northeast bus lines BoltBus and MegaBus have been getting a little less crowded (and a lot harder to get those $1 fares on) lately?

Yes, Jaunted's 2008 Best Travel Newcomer and its double-decker competitor are now very much on the MSM radar. The latest to check them out is ABC Baltimore, which ran a BoltBus vs. MegaBus comparison in anticipation of BoltBus' upcoming Baltimore-to-New York service, where it joins MegaBus, already running an astounding 32 trips a day between the two cities.

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2009 Travelzoo Awards Give Top Honors to American Airlines

A photo from the 2008 Tzoos

Have you ever had a fantasy where several skimpily-clad flight attendants try to get you drunk on cocktails named "Zoo-tinis" and then hand you a giant letter "Z" as a reward for being awesome? If you were lucky enough to be British Airways or Royal Caribbean Cruises on Wednesday night, then it wouldn't have been a fantasy at all.

At the Travelzoo Awards 2009 at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, the "Top 20" email travel alerts newsletter reached into its bag of deal providers and picked the best of the best to bestow with a "Tzoo" award.

Looking at the list of winners, we can't help but wonder "WTF" for some, and utter a "hip-hip-hooray" for others. We've listed the most interesting of the awards for you below, and we're sure you'll recognize some of the major deal players who grace more than just Travelzoo with their low, low prices (we're talking about you, Megabus and Qantas).

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Tags: Philadelphia Travel / Budget Travel / Bus Travel / Megabus / → All Tags

How To Spend a Weekend in Philly for Under $100

The Betsy Ross House

Taking a cue from guidebooks like Europe on $80 a Day, we set up a challenge to see if taking a weekend trip from New York City was feasible for under $100. Unlike those guidebooks, this amount was to mean everything from accommodations to transportation for one person on a quest to enjoy the city.

Utilizing specials like the Megabus sale and dining seasonally, which in Philadelphia means cheesesteak, we managed to make it in well under the mark at a total of $93.81. It's just more proof that the recession can't suffocate wanderlust if travel brands continue to offer discounts. So what did we do in Philly, anyway?

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Tags: Buses / Megabus / Bus Travel / Travel Deals / → All Tags

Our Megabus Success: NYC To Philly For 50 Cents

When Megabus announced back in November that they'd be giving away 100,000 free seats to anyone who could book them fast enough, we were quick on the button and managed to nab the deal. It's a travel deal fairy tale with a happy, economical ending; a 50-cent reservation fee is all it takes to get us from NYC to Philadelphia and back for the weekend. We know we should have gone farther, but we played it safe booking in November for a random trip in January.

Deals this hot, with so many free trips at stake, have us wondering if most of Megabus' seats for the next few months will be full of other escapists hip to online travel alerts. When you book a bus trip, if you occasionally forgo airplane travel, are you more motivated by the need to be somewhere or the desire to take advantage of the $1 specials?

We hope Megabus gets a kickback from some of its destination cities, because it seems that they benefit the most from these random visitors and their tourist dollars. We'll withhold a final judgment until after this weekend, when we see how much of our money Philadelphia demands.

Related Stories:
· Free Tickets All Around [Jaunted]
· First-Person Bus Reviews: Megabus [Jaunted]
· Buses coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Stagecoach Group]

Tags: Three Is a Trend / Travel Trends / Travel News / Ryanair / Vivaaerobus / Megabus / Travel Deals / → All Tags

Free Tickets All Around

Now this is a trend we can get behind: In the face of a recession, companies are giving away tickets to keep people traveling.

In Mexico, VivaAerobus is giving away seats on certain flights to its hub in Monterrey. You'll have to pick up taxes and fees, but your flight from Austin, Cancun or Puerto Vallarta will be fare-free. And even if you want to connect in Monterrey to another flight, you won't be spending much: One-way tickets start at about $30.

In the US, Megabus will be giving away 100,000 free seats starting today for travel January 14-March 18, 2009. Just type in the promo code "greenbus" to see if your dates and routes are eligible. We randomly picked a trip between New York and Baltimore on January 15 and found six trips with free seats out of 14 daily departures. (Of course, the other trips were priced at $1 and $4, but still!)

And in Europe, Ryanair's 1 million free seat promotion continues until Friday. As usual, you'll cover the taxes and fees--and might get slapped with additional fees if you're not careful about the weight of your luggage--but the upside is a "free" flight. Even better? The carrier has a handy PDF of all the current availabilities so you don't waste your afternoon digging through city pairs and departure times.

Related Stories:
· Free Seats to Mexico [Airfare Watchdog]
· Megabus [Official Site]
· Ryanair [Official Site]
· Travel Trends coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Megabus]