Five money-saving tips that will make you a savvy traveler in 2015

The best way to find good value when it comes to travel is to become a smarter traveler. So-called "deals'' come and go, or never were really there in the first place. A little inside knowledge, on the other hand, can pay off no matter what the season or destination. 

I learn something new each time I book a trip. Here's five money-saving tips help jump-start your travel planning for the new year:

Rental cars

Reserve a rental car once you know your dates, but recheck prices closer to the time of travel. Prices can drop last- minute, depending on the actual availability of cars vs. what the companies anticipate.  

Example: I booked an 11-day rental through Enterprise on the Big Island of Hawaii last fall for $356. Rechecking a few days before I was about to leave, I noticed the rate dropped to $219. I cancelled and rebooked, easy to do since I hadn't pre-paid, hardly ever a good idea given the chances of prices falling.

Learn the work-arounds

Here's one that's important to Delta Skymiles members who might want to fly on Alaska Airlines, a Delta milage partner, but also a competitor. Delta no longer shows Alaska lights on Delta.com, a move intended to steer customers onto Delta flights exclusively.

Two problems with this: Alaska's flights are sometimes more convenient. It flies non-stop to Tucson, for instance, while Delta makes connections through Salt Lake City or Los Angeles.
Secondly, if you're a member of Delta's Skymiles frequent flyer program, and you can no longer buy a ticket on Delta's website for an Alaska Air flight, it makes it harder to rack up important Medallion Qualification Dollars (MQDs) needed to qualify for elite status. 

As of this year, Delta began requiring Skymiles members to spend a minimum of $2,500 with Delta as well as rack up at least 25,000 miles to earn silver elite status in 2015. For 2016, it raised the ante to $3,000 in spending. 

Now here's the trick: Flying on a partner airline counts, as long as you purchase the ticket from Delta, now impossible to do on Delta.com for most Alaska Air flights.

So what should you do? Book the old-fashioned way - on the phone. I did this recently with the flight to Tucson. The Delta agent agreed to book me on the Alaska flight, waive the usual telephone charges, and let me use by credit card to pay Delta directly, so the purchase would count towards my MQDs. 

I'm not sure how long this work, but it's worth a try next time you want to book an Alaska flight, but purchase the fare through Delta.

And remember, if the amount of Delta MQDs showing up on your statement is less than you paid for your ticket, there's a reason. Taxes and fees don't count in the total. For instance, on a $196.20 round-trip fare between Seattle and Los Angeles, you'll be credited for only $156.28 worth of MQDs, the total amount you paid, minus $39.92 in taxes and fees. 

Widen your search to find the best fares 

Although I buy my tickets directly from the airlines, I shop around first on Kayak.com, a "meta-search'' site which doesn't sell tickets, but rather scans multiple airlines for the lowest fares, then links buyers to airline websites for purchases.

Kayak's searches are generally reliable, but there have been instances where I've found a better fare for the same flights and times on an airline's website than I did using the link from Kayak. 

An example was a complicated itinerary involving travel to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with a stopover, then an onward flight to  Bogota, Colombia and return to Seattle. 
Kayak linked me to a Delta itinerary priced at $838 vs. $736 when I went directly onto Delta's site for the same flights and times. 

The difference was the result of a slightly cheaper set of fare class codes - "buckets'' of different fares airlines offer on the same flights - that Kayak failed to capture.  

Choose your airport carefully

Fares can vary depending on which airport you use, especially when it comes to international flights. Flying out of Seattle to Hong Kong, London and Paris, for instance, is much more expensive than flying out of Canada's Vancouver Internatonal Airport 140 miles north. Yes, you have to get there to snag the bargains, but it's just a 2.5 hour drive. Long-term parking is cheap, and buses and trains link the two cities.

Is it worth it? I'd say it is after checking a sampling of round-trip fares between Seattle vs. Vancouver for mid-November travel. 

*Hong Kong: Delta's lowest round-trip Seattle/Hong Kong fare was $1,037 vs. $827 out of Vancouver. China Eastern offered the lowest fare out of Vancouver- $770 - vs. $830 on Asiana out of Seattle. 

*Paris: Delta showed a low round-trip fare of $1,337 between Seattle and Paris vs. $883 out of Vancouver. My search showed Air Canada offering the lowest fare out of Seattle - $1,103 - vs. a low fare of $717 on British Airways out of Vancouver. 

*London: Delta's lowest Seattle/London round-trip was $1,206 vs. $724 out of Vancouver. Lufthansa offered the lowest fare out of Seattle - $1,143 - vs. $722 out of Vancouver on British.


Watch for hidden fees 

We all expect fees. It's the hidden ones that annoy me. I'm a fan of bidding on Priceline for great hotel rates in cities such as Vancouver, San Francisco and Portland, but I don't use it or any other third-party sites for buying airline tickets. 

Rarely will you find a better price than the airline offers on its own website, and if you have to make a change, you can get stuck with extra charges. Priceline tacks on a $30 "ticket service fee'' for changes on top of the airlines' change fees. Travelocity adds another $40. 

My pal Joe Brancatelli, publisher of JoeSentMe.com, a newsletter aimed at business travelers, has other excellent suggestions in his latest Seat 2B column. His advice: Stop buying the stuff you already get free.  

Sneak Peak: Matera, Southern Italy's "Cave'' City, named European Culture Capital for 2019

The "Cave'' city of Matera in Southern Italy 

Here's a reason to get to Southern Italy sooner rather than later. The Italian city of Matera in Basilicata, one of the poorest and least-visited regions, has been named the European Culture Capital for 2019. This is a well-deserved honor that's expected to boost tourism in an overlooked corner of the country. But preparations leading up to it could mean that the best time to visit might be now. 

Cultural Capital designations are usually preceded by major building and restoration booms that turn the cities into construction sites for several years prior to the big day. Once the date arrives, so do the bus loads of tourists.  Marseille is a good example. The port city in Southern France was the Culture Capital in 2013. The designation sparked a major facelift. Everything - from buses to hotels to museums, restored palaces, pedestrian walkways around the Old Port or Vieux Port - is new. It's a great city to visit now, but that wasn't the case in the two or three years leading up to 2013 when most everything was under scaffolding and reconstruction.

Matera is one of the most fascinating cities in Southern Italy. I visited several years ago on a trip through Basilicata, Apulia and Campagna. Now seems a good time to dig into the archives and republish a report that appeared on my blog and in The Seattle Times. Best advice: Get there soon!

Nicola Rizzi

MATERA, Italy — Nicola Rizzi stands in front of his boyhood home where chickens and ducks used to wander, closes his eyes and smells bean soup and tomato sauce boiling on pots heated by wood fires.

He was 11, a survivor in a neighborhood of windowless caves and damp walls, where animals and humans slept side-by-side and half the children born there died, among them three of his brothers and sisters.

Mostly though, Rizzi remembers the smell of baking bread over olive-wood fires. His father owned a communal oven where people would bring their dough for him to bake into fat loaves big enough to last a week.

"It's a smell," says Rizzi, taking a deep breath, "that I still have in my mind."

It was the smell of home, a home that his family and 17,000 others, mostly poor peasant farmers, were forced by the government to evacuate in the early 1950s after Italian artist and writer Carlo Levi published an account of the squalid living conditions where they lived, not in regular houses, but in thousands-of-years-old cave dwellings called the sassi.

"Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope," Levi wrote in "Christ Stopped at Eboli," a book he authored during his political exile to the rural southern region of Basilicata in the mid-1930s. The title refers to the town of Eboli in neighboring Campania, suggesting that not even Christ could have ventured into an area so desolate as Basilicata, and certainly not to Matera.

"The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front door ... On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in and there they sleep all together; men, women, children and animals." Matera, Levi wrote, was a "schoolboy's idea of Dante's Inferno."

In striped vest and bow tie, Agostino Tataranni dispenses some of the best pastries and cappuccino in Italy from behind the bar at Caffè Tripoli on Piazza Vittorio Veneto, Matera's marbled main square.

Men gather here to talk politics, and couples walk each evening during a community stroll called the passeggiata. There's a university nearby with a lively arts scene. Elegant baroque-style buildings painted in faded pink and yellow line the streets and squares.

Modern Matera

Perched on the edge of a deep ravine, this is modern Matera, a bustling upper town that overlooks the neighborhoods of Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, the ancient sassi, which are spread out below on the slopes of a deep, rocky ravine.

Dug into the stone cliffs are hundreds of sand-colored caverns carved out of soft volcanic tufa stone, some with built-up brick fronts and elaborate facades and doorways that make them hard to distinguish from ordinary houses.

Layered one on top of the other so that the terraces of some are roofs for others, they're connected not by real streets but by a maze of winding stone passageways starting a few steps away from the edges of the upper town.

My husband and I drove here from Rome with a hunch that we had arrived in one of the world's most unusual cities.

We weren't surprised then that the first person we met was Dorothy Zinn, a social anthropologist from San Antonio, Texas.


Abandoned for more than a quarter century after the government relocated the residents to public housing following publication of Levi's book in 1947, the sassi (Italian for stones) again are drawing attention from writers. This time the stories are focused on the art treasures uncovered in ancient rock churches and the transformation of the caves into luxury hotels, bed and breakfasts, cafes, restaurants and offices for high-tech companies.

Zinn welcomed us to the Locanda di San Martino, a hotel and conference center that she and her Italian husband Antonio Panetta opened three years ago in the sassi after the government began offering long-term leases and subsidies to investors.

Locanda di San Martino

A family of six and one animal used to live in what is now the San Martino's lobby. Chiseled out of stone are rooms on five levels connected to each other by an outdoor network of stone passageways.

An elevator goes to the first two floors, but we climbed the 75 steps to our fifth-floor room. It was a cozy Flintstones-meet-the-future cave with curvy stone ceilings and all the mod-cons, including TV, heat and air conditioning. Three small windows were chiseled out of the bare rock walls, and there were slippers for walking on the bare terra-cotta floors.

Zinn, a university professor who met her husband while doing research on youth unemployment in his hometown, sent us to dinner at a candle-lit cave restaurant called La Talpa.

We sat at a table tucked into a stone alcove and ate the local pasta with asparagus and fresh ricotta cheese. Afterwards, we climbed the stairs back to our room, listening to church bells ringing and dogs barking, the nighttime sounds of a town where people get around mostly by walking.

Looking for Jerusalem

Mel Gibson scouted the world for a place that looked like ancient Jerusalem when he filmed "The Passion of the Christ," and settled on the sassi (recruiting the locals as extras and eating nightly at Antica Trattoria Lucana, where fettuccine alla Mel Gibson is still on the menu).

Locals don't always agree about the various new uses (the latest addition is a swank wine bar with an 18-hole-putting green in the bottom of a public cistern), but the revival of the sassi has been an economic boost to one of Italy's poorest regions and transformed the city an Italian prime minister once labeled a national shame.

Life in the caves, originally dug out by torrents of water, dates back 9,000 years to prehistoric times, making Matera one of the oldest cities in the world. From the eighth to the 13th century, monks used them as refuges, digging out tiny chapels and elaborate churches, leaving behind delicate frescos.

Later, whole neighborhoods evolved with churches, convents, shops and homes with intricate hydraulic systems to keep the water fresh and cool year-round. Healthy and prosperous, the sassi began to decay as the upper town developed, finally becoming homes for poor peasants who used the churches and other dwellings for homes, barns and stables.

"For two or three centuries, people didn't realize the value of the place," said Rizzi, a historian who now heads Circolo La Scaletta, a cultural organization that pushed to have the sassi declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993.

Many, including his father, wanted to see them torn down.

"He looked at me, and said, 'You are a university student. How is it possible that you can defend something so ugly as the houses in the sassi?' "

But where others saw abandoned dwellings, Rizzi remembered a community where his family knew their neighbors, not always by name, but by the smell of the one-of-a-kind yeast each used to make their bread.

"The national shame included not only the houses, but also the inhabitants," he says. Even as an 11-year-old boy, "I started asking myself, why should I be ashamed of where I live?"

Caves go high-tech

"Sixty years ago, if you visited, you would have found horses and chickens in here," says Angelo Tosto, president of Datacontact, the sassi's largest employer.

With 3,000 people back living in the sassi and property values rising, Tosto is one who is looking ahead more than he's looking back.

Faced with the need to find new office space for 750 workers in his company's expanding call-center business, Tosto, whose father was born in the sassi, acquired one of the long-term leases.

Call center in a cave

He installed 2,800 phone lines and a $3 million computer system in a series of former cave dwellings. Workers sit behind computers pushed up against stone walls as they talk to clients in South America and other parts of Europe.

Around the corner is the rock church of Madonna delle Virtu, where La Scaletta volunteers discovered rooms filled with 12th-century frescos after clearing out piles of straw. Gibson shot his Last Supper scene here, and community groups use the spaces for modern art and sculpture exhibitions.

In between visits to cave potters and olive-oil tastings, tourists can take a self-guided walking tour of some of the ancient cave churches, among them the ninth-century Madonna de Idris, a giant hilltop rock formation decorated inside with colorful frescos.

Frescos inside a cave churche

Except for the wine bar and putting green, Rizzi says he's mostly satisfied with what's become of his old neighborhood, and his boyhood home, now offices for a software company.

"We are proud of Matera now," he says. "The idea is that our roots are more important than building new houses." As for Carlo Levi's theory that Christ ignored Basilicata by going no farther than Eboli, the children growing up in Matera in the 21st century have a different perspective.

Tacked to a paper-mâché parade float on display in the public library recently was a child's drawing of a round stone building with a cross planted on top.

"Gesù nasce in una grotta," the child had written. "Jesus was born in a cave."

IF YOU GO:

Explore the sassi on your own with maps provided by the tourist office, or on a guided walk.

The tourist office sells tickets for a self-guided tour of a half-dozen or so rock churches in the sassi. More are scattered around in parks in the nearby countryside and can be visited by car. Matera Turismo offers a variety of walking tours and day trips. Bascilicata's regional tourist agency has maps and English brochures. 

Explore the modern upper town for its shops, art galleries and excellent food shops, such as Samuele Olivieri's Il Buongustaio, which stocks local specialties such as dried red peppers and ear-shaped orecchiette pasta. The local art museum houses some of Carlo Levi's paintings.

Stroll with the locals during the evening passeggiata starting at Piazza Vittorio Veneto. Have a coffee at the Caffè Tripoli, and see photos and news clippings from Mel Gibson's filming of "The Passion of the Christ."

Gibsons tops list of blink-or-you'll-miss hamlets along British Columbia's Sunshine Coast

Floating garden on Gibsons Wharf

GIBSONS, British Columbia - Sitting on the deck of the Black Bean cafe, I take a sip of my London Fog, a warm brew of English breakfast tea, vanilla and steamed milk. Breathing in the salt air, I close my eyes, and picture myself in a seaside village somewhere in rural England. 

No need to bother with the expense and hassle of a  transatlantic flight. A 40-minute ferry ride across British Columbia's Howe Sound brings visitors to Gibsons, gateway to the 50-mile-long Sunshine Coast.  Part of the mainland, but without roads in or out, access is by water or seaplane, leaving travelers with the feeling of landing on a remote island surrounded by forest and mountains.

No time to do the whole coast? The first of a series of blink-or-you'll-miss-it hamlets along a coastal highway skirting the Strait of Georgia, historic Gibsons Landing, or Lower Gibsons as the locals call it, makes an easy day trip for anyone traveling between Vancouver and Whistler.  

Park the car at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, walk on the ferry for Langdale, then hop a BC Transit shuttle for the two-and-a-half-mlle ride to a waterside village with a rich maritime heritage and lively culinary scene.

Here's how to make the most of a day: 

Coffee on the deck of the Black Bean Cafe

10 a.m. Starbucks Not

Get your bearings over breakfast at the Black Bean Cafe and Roasting Company, 467 Marine Dr., across from a working harbor filled with kayakers, sailboats and fishing boats. Fuel up on locally-roasted coffee, English tea, mango-coconut muffins and panini breakfast sandwiches before beginning your stroll along Gibsons Landing, the waterfront area homesteaded by ex-British naval officer George Gibson in 1886.

10:30. History lesson

Fishing, logging and agriculture supported early pioneers, but it was the popular Canadian television show  "The Beachcombers'' that put modern-day Gibsons on the map. The series was the longest running ever made for English-language Canadian television, airing from 1972 to 1990. Twenty-four years later, it still generates fans who make pilgrimages to former set locations. Among them is Molly's Reach, a cafe with a bright yellow facade and red umbrellas built in 1926 as a grocery store, and a logging tug called the Persephone, preserved as a museum piece in a park in the center of town. 

Beachcombers headquarters

Visit the Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives, 716 Winn Rd.,  to view a small display of Beachcomber relics and learn about early village life. Among the archives  focused on the area's First Peoples (Squamish Nation), maritime and logging industries is a 1923  "teachers contract,''  laying out 13 rules for women including prohibitions on getting married, wearing bright colors and loitering at downtown ice cream parlors.

Noon: Waterfront walk

Take a stroll on the sea walk skirting Gibsons Harbor.  Keep an eye out for boats selling fresh seafood. Peak inside a privately-owned three-unit house boat that's been turned into a floating garden, and log a bucket-list wish on a community "Before I Die'' chalkboard wall. Stop at Smitty’s Oyster House, 643 School Road Wharf, and join the locals at the large plank table outside for a sampling of fresh oysters, then walk back into town to browse through the Gibsons Public Art Gallery, 431 Marine Dr. and Daffadowndilly,  426 Marine Dr., offering work by local artists in a 1928 apartment building that once housed loggers and fishermen.

Add your own bucket-list wish

1:45 Taste of the Landing 

If it's Saturday, book a food-focused walking tour with Catch Our Drift,  a local company run by Gibsons residents Sheila and Mark Cameron.  Other times, it's easy enough to go grazing on your own, sampling everything from olive oil to ice cream at locally-owned cafes and food shops along Marine Driver and Gower Point Road.

 "Taste of the Landing'' tours start on the wharf where the smell of smoke mixes with the salt air at Smoke on the Water, an American-style BBQ shack. Owner Chris Van Nus bathes his brisket in dark beer and espresso, pairing it with a jalapeno-infused "watermelonade" and a side of corn flan.  

Other treats include a sampling of gourmet olive oils from Peru, Australia and Chile at the Sunshine Coast Olive Oil Company, 287 Gower Pt. Rd. and Greek-style calamari at Leo's Tapas & Grill, 274 Gower Pt. England meets South Africa at the 1902 Tea House, 453 Marine Dr. where South African native Su-Mari Hill and her British husband, Tim, sell more than 100 loose teas; make their own kombucha, a refreshing fermented tea drink; and stock jars of colorful penny candies (think fizzy cola bottles and jelly babies) Tim Hill remembers from his childhood.

4:30 p.m. Farm-fresh beer

Take a taxi two miles out of town to Upper Gibsons, and find the Persephone Brewing Company,1053 Stewart Rd., an 11-acre farm-based brewery that grows its own hops and sources its barley from B.C. farmers. 

Tasting room at the Persephone Brewing beer farm

High-back upholstered chairs, old sofas and a long wooden bar decorate a tasting room inside a barn where visitors can sample craft beers with names such as Killer Pilsner and Wee Heavy. Sip by the glass or flight, then pick up a growler of your favorite before heading back to the ferry dock.


If you go:

Ferry information: BC Ferries connect Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island to the Sunshine Coast. Crossing time between Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver and Langdale on the Sunshine Coast is 40 minutes. Find schedules and fares at www.bcferries.com/schedules/mainland.

Transit information: The Sunshine Coast Transit System runs regular bus service to Gibsons and other towns along the coast. 

Taste of the Landing tours: Tours available on Saturdays from 1:45 p.m.-4:15 p.m. Cost is $30 for adults and $15 for children ages 3-12. Wheelchair and stroller accessible. Call 604-740-2179 to book. 

Tourism information: Contact the Town of Gibsons, or stop by the Gibsons Visitors Centre, 417 Marine Drive. For information of visiting other towns along the Sunshine Coast, contact Tourism British Columbia.