When you need to reserve a rental car, where do you check? Do you just pull up your favorite booking app on your phone and go? Or return to the company you usually rent from because you’ll get loyalty points?

Well you may be flushing a lot of extra money down the drain by renting a car by habit or by by being in a hurry.

I’ve got to rent one for a wedding in October, when I’ll be flying into a relatively small regional aiport, in Roanoke, Virginia. First I checked flight prices on Allegiant, which goes direct for a good price (despite all the annoying fees). They helpfully offered me a rental car on their one and only partner Alamo for $138.

Sometimes the airlines offer good partner rates—I once got a car in Puerto Vallarta for $16 a day—but this one didn’t sound so good.

So I pulled up AirportRentalCars.com, which is a division of Priceline. Here’s what they showed for the exact same car from Alamo, with some even better deals from other rental brands.

Could I do better? The next stop was CarRentals.com, which also searches multiple agencies and is frequently the lowest apart from opaque Hotwire. Sure enough, that shaved a few more dollars off. (Kayak came in somewhere between these two by $1-$3 per day difference on every result, so if you’re in a hurry on a mobile phone, that’s probably a safe bet.)

But what about Hotwire? That’s my usual stop when my plans are solid as I almost never see them coming in higher than the sites where you know the company. Yes indeed, a compact car there was only $81— a 20% savings.

Some of the best deals I was seeing on the other sites though were from Avis. I’ve got Preferred status there because of a credit card I have, which could save me some time and hassle, so I figured I might as well go check their rates to see what it would cost to go direct.

And I got…a better rate than anywhere besides Hotwire. A compact came in at $85. Since I can reserve there and not pay until I arrive, and can upgrade to a larger car for the three of us and our luggage for not much more, I’m happy to pay a bit more than I would have through Hotwire. If my flight gets delayed I know I’ll be fine and plus I’ll get a few loyalty points from an airline on top. So I’m paying $99 with taxes and fees for the three days for a midsized/standard car. I can live with that, especially since I can get processed faster upon arrival.

Worst rate: the airline

Best rate: Hotwire

Best value overall: direct at Avis.

Your mileage may—and will—vary. Which is my point, really. You always need to shop around.

It’s not even Spring yet, but you have to set your clock forward an hour on Sunday if you live in most of the USA. This early start (and late finish in Autumn) is a remnant from the G.W. Bush era. It was pushed as an energy saver (hasn’t worked), but was almost surely lobbied through by the golf and tourism industries. To the detriment of parents with school-aged kids everywhere…

But this post is not a rant. Just a collection of useful and entertaining stuff to read over the weekend in case it’s not warm enough to be outside enjoying life where you live.

If you want to get somewhere else on the cheap, Budget Travel has a great rundown on the six best budget bus lines in the United States. These serve a defined area of population centers, so think New York to Boston, not Kansas City to Boise.

Here’s another reason to be annoyed with cruise ships: not one of the lines thought of as American companies pays a cent in U.S. corporate taxes.

I’ve written before about the dangers of being cheap to the point of ridiculous when traveling and BootsnAll generated a hot debate on the subject with this article on cheap vs. budget travel. I like the elegant follow-up on the Vagabonding blog though, from a long-term traveler who gets by on $10 a day by going slower and integrating more with the locals.

Barbara at Hole in the Doughnut has a good rundown on Cusco, Peru at different budget levels, including a $10 a night hotel and two vegetarian restaurants. More importantly, there’s current information on Machu Picchu and Peru Rail that’s probably more reliable than what most guidebooks have in them right now. There have been some changes at both in how/why you get advance tickets.

Want to know what it’s like to climb a volcano in Sumatra, Indonesia? You can see the story and photos on the Vagabonding Life blog by following that link. I actually did this hike many years ago and it’s not a very hard one—so a good place to do your first one to see if you like the experience.

Here’s an article I did for ExpertFlyer on places where the dollar exchange rate is constant.

Should a cough drop be lecturing you to suck it up and quit your whining just because you’re sick? Halls apparently thinks so with the motivational text on their wrappers.

[Photo from the Vagabonding Life blog]

In The World’s Cheapest Destinations book I break down a lot of typical expenses in different countries for recurring items like lodging, food, drinks, and ground transportation. I then provide some rather wide ranges of what it’ll probably cost you on a day-to-day basis for budget and mid-range travelers.

The problem is, I don’t know your money habits or how you travel, so the biggest variable of all is always going to be missing: you. I don’t know how much you need to buy beforehand, how many sacrifices you’ll willing to make to save money on lodging or buses, or how much you like to shop. I also don’t know how much you are going to party. Or whether friends are going to meet up with you along the way somewhere. Or whether you are willing to splurge on worthy adventure excursions or side tours. Obviously your choice of destinations makes a massive difference—three months in Central America will cost a fraction of three months in Scandinavia no matter how you travel—but budgets vary a lot from person to person.

Now that half the travelers on RTW trips seem to be bloggers as well, you can get a peek into the process of how much people are actually spending during their round-the-world trip—and what has driven up expenses beyond what they expected. Follow your favorites for a while and you’ll get an idea of what they’re spending. Here are some good posts and tools with real numbers though to get you started.

In Living the Dream, this guy spent far more than he had expected, even though he was in Southeast Asia: more than $16K over 152 days. He breaks down the reasons in the link above.

I like perpetual traveler Nora Dunn a lot and she even did a 5 Things I Always Pack guest post for me at Practical Travel Gear, so I’ll trust her incredibly detailed advice on traveling the world for a year for $14,000.

I wrote this article close to five years ago for Transitions Abroad, but it still holds true: fly to the cheap country clusters and save.

This Budget Your Trip Widget looks promising, though I have never given it more than a cursory test. Plus my Cusco is not your Cusco—once again—but it should help you get a rough idea. Plus you can track expenses through there if you’re so inclined. Here’s the associated blog, with more advice.

For years and years of budget breakdowns for shoestring traveler Andy Graham, check out the HoboTraveler site. He’s at the ascetic end of the scale, typically getting by on less than $500 per month, so it’ll show you what’s possible if you can cut a lot of things out of your life.

There is also a lot of good specific advice on message boards from the likes of Lonely Planet and BootsnAll. But do your homework before you post a question on there: people don’t take kindly to lazy people just looking for quick (and probably wrong) guestimates.

Flickr photo (a hostel room in Paris) by Fierce Powahs.

I’ve gotten a few dozen new blog subscribers in the past couple weeks (it’s up to around 1,000 in case you care) and I’ve gotten a dozen interview and guest post requests for other outlets. Those two things are probably related, so it’s time for my semi-annual or so answer to the question, “Who is this Tim Leffel guy and why should I listen to him?”

It’s a valid question. When I started this blog I could count the other good budget travel blogs out there on two hands. Now there are five bazillion of them fighting for your attention, sometimes quite aggressively, while I kick back and keep doing my thing three days a week. Sure, you can follow me on Twitter, but I’m seldom on there more than two minutes a day and I’m only on Facebook to update the pages for Perceptive Travel and my travel gear blog.

I hope I stand out by knowing what I’m talking about. I’ve been around the world three times as a backpacker, then visited a couple dozen countries as a travel writer, and have done family travel stints in Canada, Belize, Guatemala, and many places in the U.S. and Mexico. I have lived in Istanbul and Seoul teaching English and I am currently living a location independent life in central Mexico.

I’ve got a few travel books out, including the popular one in its third edition, The World’s Cheapest Destinations. I get quoted in the media on a regular basis as a travel destinations expert and I write a whole bunch of travel articles for a whole lot of publications. I am editor of the award-winning and respected webzine Perceptive Travel, so I’d like to think I know good travel writing when I see it. (So I just put out a book called Travel Writing 2.0. )

Hopefully this makes me trustworthy enough to be worth listening to. Thanks for subscribing, for buying my books, or spreading the word about a blog post you found useful. Let’s hit the road!

Budget Travel magazine, like any commercial magazine publishing enterprise, needs to please its advertisers as much as its readers, but more than most they’re willing to give us the real dirt and expose the travel industry’s worst excesses.

Their “Confessions of a…” series is especially jaw-dropping as it’s the kind of material you only expect to hear from someone sitting in an adjoining barstool, not from a print story. The latest is Confessions of a Tour Guide in Rome and it’s another winner. As an insider, I’m amazed at how many people can’t believe it when I say that TripAdvisor is easy to game. Or that everything a $10-an-hour part-time tour guide tells you is not necessarily grounded in well-researched history.

“I know of tour guides in Rome who pull facts out of thin air whenever they’re stumped by a question. Travelers seldom check, for instance, whether Vatican City has only 232 residents as their guide says. They simply nod. (In case you were wondering, Vatican City has 829 residents.) Myths and authoritative-sounding details are often more entertaining anyway. One classic ditty passed along by guides has it that the tyrannical emperor Nero played a fiddle while Rome burned in 64 A.D. But the fiddle wasn’t actually invented until centuries later.”

Sure, not all tour guides pull things out of their butt when stumped and not all tour companies (or hotels) engage in creative ballot-stuffing to pump up their positive reviews, but enough do that it matters. Trust the guidebooks as much as online user reviews (or more, especially if the book has been revised multiple times by the same author), and consider the source when hearing advice first-hand or online. (Does that person share your tastes? Does he/she travel as much as you do? Are your budgets in the same ballpark?)

We’re drowning in information, but that doesn’t mean it’s all good information. Be a healthy skeptic no matter who is talking, including your guide. Or me. But be polite: otherwise you could show up in the next “Confessions of a….” article!