STA Travel’s Exclusive Tickets are for students, youths under age 26 and teachers looking to save money and get maximum flexibility…

STA’s Exclusive Tickets will always be the most flexible or cheapest tickets available for travel on the world’s leading airlines…

Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here for American Airlines Discounts from STA

Click here for United Airlines Discounts from STA

STA Travel is a one-stop shop for every student’s travel needs. (these offers are for USA residents only)

• Student airfare: STA’s Student Exclusive Ticket provides students with competitive airfare pricing and unmatched flexibility and ease when booking their travel. It’s what sets us apart from the rest!
• Adventures:  We distribute more than 1,500 products for accommodation, tours, work, study and volunteer programs, making it clear and simple for students to plan their trip. It’s easy to organize your ideas and put them into motion.
• Discount cards: The International Student (ISIC), Teacher (ITIC) and Youth Travel (IYTC) ID Cards provide access to over 35,000 international and domestic discounts including airfare, accommodations, tours, shopping, dining and entertainment with partners such as Target.com, Apple Store, Virgin Megastore and The Body Shop.
• Travel insurance: Insurance coverage is offered for trip, baggage, medical and accident protection as well as providing 24-hour worldwide emergency assistance.
• Global cell phones: Provide students an easy and cost effective way of keeping in touch with friends and family while touring the world.
• Online visa application:

“Sending an instant message, watching the latest episode of Lost, listening to the radio or tweeting your lunch are all free online, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Free Long Distance

Sure, you can call someone for free with something like Skype (as long as the person you’re calling is also using Skype), but what if you want to reach out to someone without a computer? There are other services likeTalkster that allow you to call a land line forfree… with a few caveats.  The service supplies their own local numbers that you have to call first, you might have to listen to an ad before your call beings and it’s only free if you’re calling one of some 50-odd countries, but free is free.

Free Faxes

As long as you’re not a power faxer, you can probably ditch the old fax machine in favor of your email inbox. Both Qipit and FaxZero let you send a limited number of free faxes. The catch is relatively benign, the fax cover sheet has the name of the service on it.  Efax Free, a more popular alternative, will let you receive (but not send) a limited number of faxes through their site.” (via moneytalksnews.com ) by Stacy

Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here to read the rest of Free Long Distance, Faxes, Books and Musi

A message from Rick Steves…

Dear Traveler…

Next week I’ll be taping a few new radio shows and I’d love to hear from you…

Take a look at our recording lineup – click link below…
If you have a comment or question you’d like me to answer, please follow the simple instructions on our website… If your comment or question is used on the air, I’ll send you your choice of a free autographed Rick Steves’ guidebook.

You’ll also be able to listen-in on our live, unedited taping sessions this Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (a special audio link will appear on our radio web page when we’re recording).

I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for traveling with me…on the air.

Rick Steves

Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here to get the info for Wanna be on Rick Steves’ radio show? Receive autographed book

“As economy falters, airlines offer premium seats for a fraction of the cost

After spending millions to spruce up their first- and business-class cabins and add premium-economy seats to their planes, airlines are facing huge losses as recession-hit corporations around the world slash their travel budgets.

In fact, the International Air Transport Association reports that premium-class bookings have dipped as much as 18 percent on some long-distance routes — nearly double the slump in air travel bookings overall. In December, premium-class traffic fell 13 percent worldwide. But the airlines’ bad timing is a boon to leisure travelers looking to fly in comfort: Carriers are now offering their premium-class seats at bargain-basement prices rather than see them go empty.

I was able to enjoy this largesse not long ago on a flight from New York to Amsterdam, lazing in a capacious leather business-class-style seat and dining on smoked salmon and beef bourguignon washed down with a vintage Château Margaux.

After dinner, I drifted off to sleep, for once arriving in Europe without feeling I’d spent the prior eight hours on a rack. The fare for all of this cosseting was $1,100 round-trip, just $320 more than what I was quoted for a cramped seat in coach on another airline — and thousands less than a conventional business-class seat would have cost.” (via msnbc.msn.com/ ) by Barbara S. Peterson

Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here to read the rest of Get the comforts of first class for cheap

Save up to 80% on Former Bestsellers, Books for Kids, Barnes & Noble  Classics, and More in their bargain book section.

Plus reduced prices on cd’s and audiobooks

and

Fiction Under $5
Nonfiction Under $5
Audiobooks Under $5

Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here for Barnes & Noble Bargain Bin – up to 80% off (no end date)

Click here for DVD Sale: 40% Off Hundreds of Art House DVDs (ends Apr 6,2009)

“First things first, you may be thinking: What is a fiction travel book, anyway? Well, here’s what we think: It’s a book in which a place is as important a character as the protagonist; it’s a book so informed by the writer’s culture that it’s impossible to read it without uncovering the life of the author behind it; it’s a book that has shaped the way we see a certain place; it’s a book whose events and characters could be set nowhere else.

So for everyone who, like Michael Ondaatje, got his first glimpse of Japan through Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country; or, like Nathan Englander, found India in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance; or discovered the world through Homer’s Odyssey—this is the list to have. Read on.

Absurdistan
Gary Shteyngart (2006)
“It’s probably the best contemporary travel novel,” says Darin Strauss. “Certainly the most fun.” The Russian immigrant’s second book tops his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, in screwball inventiveness, with a gluttonous character in the slothful tradition of Oblomov who (sometimes literally) flies over the Bronx and hails from an autonomous ex-Soviet republic that could exist only in Shteyngart’s mind. “The sweep,” Strauss says, “is matched only by the humor and exuberance of the prose” (Random House, $14).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain (1885)
Huck and Jim’s “downstream education,” as Jonathan Raban puts it, is important for numerous reasons, but alongside its lessons in the American vernacular and the history of race, there is the canonization of the Mississippi. “The idea of the river as America’s first great interstate arterial highway, at once a place of magical solitude in nature and of fraught encounters with society, survives even now,” says Raban (Bantam, $6).

The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)
These four novels come as a set, with different perspectives on essentially the same forlorn story. They “play with time and point of view like a Charlie Kaufman script,” says Darin Strauss, but “are worth reading not for their gimmickry—supposedly based on the theories of Einstein and Freud—but for their lush descriptions of Egypt. Durell was more famous as a poet than a novelist, and his pointillist evocations of Alexandria are breathtaking” (Penguin; set, $45).

Arcadia
Jim Crace (1992)
Inspired by London, the unnamed city of the master novelist’s morality tale about a self-made millionaire and his utopian dreams almost upstages the Dickensian struggles at its heart. “There is so much life and strife and detail,” says Amy Bloom. “An entire world has been conjured up, street by street, an imagined city with every cobblestone and desire and character made real” (out-of-print).

The Baron in the Trees
Italo Calvino (1977)
Imagine John Cheever’s swimmer traveling via tree instead of suburban pool—for his entire life—and you have Calvino’s fairy tale of an eighteenth-century Italian boy who climbs a tree one day and never comes down. Michael Ondaatje calls this world “a thrilling, unforgettable universe, beautifully evoked, completely real and believable—a landscape where there are great adventures and love affairs and politics and wars” (Harvest, $14).

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler (1939)
This caper redefined the city that W. H. Auden called “the great wrong place” and which Phillip Lopate dubs “the city that didn’t want to be a city.” Lopate loves that, contrary to its bright reputation, Chandler’s Los Angeles is “portrayed as a very occult, secretive place.” “Don’t expect sunshine and palm trees,” seconds David Ebershoff. “His L.A. is a shadowland—damp with fog, dark with night, and peopled with killers and cons” (Vintage, $14). ” ( concierge.com ) by Boris Kachka

Pointswizard.com Spin: More titles click here – The 69 Greatest Fiction Travel Books of All Time