My favorite online flight search tool - Kayak.com - highlighted some of its flight search features in a recent newsletter that can help you save some money.  On the surface alone, searching kayak to find great flights is great, but there are a host of tools and features that can save even more money for you.

Best fare calendar

Self explanatory - a calendar of the best fares so it’s easy to plan and see if departing and returning on a Thursday is better than a Tuesday.

Better Fare Alerts

Kayak will email you when they find the cheapest fares on your inputed itinerary, and now the alerts include more options like non-stop flights, one way, or cabin preference.  So if you’re not ready to purchase, kayak will track fares and do your due dilligence for your.

Other tools in the Toolbox

In addition to the calendar of fares, an even better feature is the graphs that depict the fares found by searchers for every day of the month, which is good for us visual learners who <3 pictures.

Another very helpful graph is one that helps travelers find out if it’s time to buy.  This image shows the price for the same flight over the last 90 days, so you can interpret the trend and what not to see if waiting is better or worse than purchasing NOW.

Anywho, I still stand by kayak and love its great service to travelers. If you’re looking for more flight search tools, check out my previous Guide to Finding Cheap Flights.

The US State Department funds a lot of travel programs to foster harmony amongst foreigners with Americans and what not, and most scholarships at first glance seem to be targeting foreigners. There, is, however, one really valuable scholarship that I just found. It includes full travel, board, education, etc. for those willing to study ‘critical languages’ intensively during the summer months.  Again, I said free travel, not to mention the free career development and skills. 

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RateYourStudyAbroad.com is a new site making some waves.  It’s a third party site that allows students to rank their respective programs.  Really, I don’t see how this niche hasn’t been satisfied before considering how confusing and diverse 3rd party study abroad programs can be like CIEE, AFS, and the other thousand acronym’d non profit study abraod programs out there.

Where I see Rate Your Study Abroad succeeding is with students from universities that do not have comprehensive study abroad centers.  So if you have to go out and find your own program, reviews, credit info, RYSA could evolve into the place to go.

The site is young so it’s not too packed with ratings yet, but they are putting out some good content and links. Most notably is their interview of ME! I recently answered a few questions in one of their interviews that they’ve been giving to a few other travel bloggers.

But no, just kidding. My favorite article so far is their recent post on 10 Budget Friendly Study Aborad programs, where they feature a Polish program for $1600/semester and a similarily cheap Madrid program. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Stay tuned for some more study abroad coverage. I’ll be highlighting a study abroad scholarships and financing guide amongst a few other future posts. In the meantime, follow Budget Globetrotting on twitter.

Hello all. I have a few social networking updates to connect with me and BudgetGlobetrotting.

Twitter

I encourage everyone to start following Budget Globetrotting on Twitter since I finally got one. My new BudgetGlobetrotting account is Twitter.com/BudgetGlobetrot and Twitter is a great utility to stay up to date with friends and news sources your interested in. I’ll be posting relevant/interesting travel links, commentary, and links via the Twitter, and also be giving updates on blog posts, etc. So follow me, @ me (send me msgs), and watch for BudgetGlobetrotting’s future tweets. (you can follow me personally as well: read about me)

TravBuddy

I’m starting to get a little more into travbuddy as I’m solidifying travel plans, so at me as a friend. My username is nickobgt and profile can be viewed here: travbuddy.com/nickobgt

Facebook

Always open for Facebook as well. See about me if interested.