We hadn’t been back from our recent home exchange (our second, to Berlin) for more than a day when the first call came in: “Julie, can you have a coffee with me and tell me how this home exchange thing works?”
Actually, I can do better: travel writer Laura Byrne Paquet has just written what amounts to [...]
Regular TheseBoots readers already know I’m a major fan of home exchanges, and today Brad and I are heading to Berlin, Germany, where we used the services of HomeLink to line up an apartment right in the heart of the city. (Last year, we had a terrific flat in the Le Marais district of Paris.)
We’re [...]
You can tell how old a Canadian is by whether or not they remember waiting patiently for a train to rattle by just so they could have the eventual thrill of waving to the man (and it was always a man) in the bright red caboose–the exclamation point at the end of a long and [...]
July 1 is a national holiday–happy 142nd birthday, Canada!–and I wanted to mark the occasion by offering a quintessentially Canadian prize to one lucky TheseBoots reader. And when it comes to Canadian tourism, the iconic brand–after moose, Mounties and maple syrup, of course–has to be Fairmont Hotels, with its chocolate-box assortment of gracious old railway hotels [...]
Sometimes enough is enough. Sometimes I just can’t bear another cookie-cutter hotel room, no matter how comfortable its beds are (you win, Westin) or how genteel its staff (props to Shangri-La and Fairmont).
Like today, for instance. Today, I’m in Hamilton, Ontario, having flown through the night to get here in time to speak at an [...]
[A week or so back I received a personal email from Tony DiCaprio and Anne Marie Babkine, Canadians who live in France--poor them!--and run a home exchange site called 1stHomeExchange.com. They have some great tips for prospective home exchangers, so I asked if I could post their note here at TheseBoots...]
Dear Julie:
We are Tony DiCaprio [...]
Judging by the huge number of hits on my January post about how to do a home swap, I gather the live-like-a-local trend is real and growing. So for those who aren’t keen on sleeping in cookie-cutter hotel rooms, who think variety is the spice of travel, or who simply need to travel on a shoestring, here [...]
This just in from @fairmont hotels via Twitter (and why YOU should be on Twitter too!):
Twitter Early Access (in advance of Travelzoo launch on 3/18/09) – $101 room rates at The Fairmont Empress -http://tinyurl.com/empress101
Victoria, BC’s most-photographed hotel, the venerable Fairmont Empress, celebrates 101 years this year but in this economy she’s the one bearing the gifts: until March 24, [...]
Sometimes a press release comes across my desk touting some unbelievably good travel deal and then I read the fine print and discover that’s exactly what it is: unbelievable.
So I went looking for the catch in the “20/20 Celebration Sale” that’s getting underway tomorrow at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler……and I kept looking……but there wasn’t one.
Starting [...]
It was about this time last year that Brad and I resolved to spend a month in Paris–in someone else’s home. There are plenty of exchange agencies out there, but we’d heard good word-of-mouth about North Vancouver-based Homelink International, so we paid the $130 annual fee (don’t bristle: it’s less than one night’s accommodation in [...]
