Save with these travel deals

Europe: Use 1800flyeurope.com in October, and you'll enjoy one-week air-and-land packages to Europe for less than what anyone else is charging. The cost-cutting airfare subsidiary of Auto Europe is currently leading the market in trans-Atlantic travel. All the other packagers (like Go-today.com) require that you wait until November to enjoy one-week trans-Atlantic bargains for under $1,000, including fuel surcharge, but 1800FlyEurope (its telephone number as well as its Web site address) is offering bargain rates throughout October as low as $709 from New York to London (and from other U.S. cities for slightly more), including a few hotel nights and including also the dreaded fuel surcharge. Other packages charge $749, but only starting in November, and not including fuel surcharge, which adds another $250 or so to the price.

• Club Med: On departures through Oct. 18, Club Med Columbus Isle in the Bahamas will charge you only $999 per person (based on double occupancy) for a seven-night vacation with everything -- roundtrip air from Ft. Lauderdale, all meals, drinks, entertainment, transfers. That's at the single most elegant Club Med in all the Western Hemisphere, a high-priced resort. Yet divide the price by seven, and you're paying only $142 a night for everything, including air. (And they'll arrange connecting flights into Ft. Lauderdale for only slightly more.) 800-CLUB-MED

London: The biggest bargain in Britain is a recently opened and centrally located London hostel in a brand-new building. It's one of the newest of all the hostels of Britain's capital city, an official member of the nonprofit Youth Hostel Association (but accepts guests of all ages), and is only a 15-minute walk from Piccadilly Circus. The London Central YHA ( charges as little as 17.95 pounds (about $36) per person per night, an average of 19.95 pounds ($40) and 21.95 pounds ($44). An associate of mine reports that it's a quiet and proper place, entirely suitable for mature people and families.

Cheap sleeps: A recently launched Web site called www.roomorama.com will get you an inexpensive room in an otherwise occupied apartment or home (the apartment or home owner remains in residence) in New York, Boston, Chicago or Toronto. Add the feisty Roomorama to your list of sources for low-cost accommodations in those increasingly expensive cities.

Loaner phone: For the first time, a large, mobile-phone company has launched a service to ''lend'' you a cell phone that will work overseas as you travel on vacation. Reader after reader has been alerting me that numerous offices of Verizon (whose normal phones work only in the U.S. and Canada) will now make available ''loaner'' phones for foreign use, at rates competitive with, and sometimes lower than, those charged by the several cell phone rental companies that deal with travelers leaving the country. The good reputation of Verizon should make this a popular and cost-effective service.

Source://miamiherald