BootsnAll's Travel Typepad

Where are you going this Halloween

Halloween is one of my favorite times to travel. Unlike other major holidays - Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving - flight and hotel prices don't skyrocket, most restaurants don't close, and families won't be hurt or angry that you chose to travel rather than spend the holiday celebrating with them. Plus, sampling the Halloween festivities of another place is one more way to expand your horizons and see how other people embrace customs around the world. Though Halloween, in the sense of a holiday dedicated to costumes and candy, isn't celebrated widely outside of the US, many other cultures commemorate similar holidays like the Day of the Dead or All Hallows Eve on November 1. If you'd rather put on your best costume and hit the town, there are lots of great places to celebrate Halloween in the US. The parties in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York are among some of the wildest. And of course, you can't forget Las Vegas. And if you want a dose of true spooky ambiance to go along with your partying, head down to New Orleans. Flights to New Orleans are easy to come by, and fairly inexpensive from most major cities. The economy in New Orleans isn't the strongest and tourism is still not back to its pre-Katrina levels, so cheap hotels in New Orleans are offering added value in the way of perks and extras like free breakfast and parking. Bourbon Street and the French Quarter are the places to party any day, but on Halloween, things get even crazier. Add in the many decrepit cemeteries scattered around the city, the voodoo vibe and history of hauntings in the city, and you've got the recipe for one of the best Halloween parties you'll ever experience! Photo by Little Zey

New Paid Writing Program at BootsnAll

This past Monday BootsnAll launched a program we've had stewing for several months, and we couldn't be more excited about it. Partly, it's just nice to see something we've been working on for so long finally out in the open - and partly, we're giddy about getting people involved in something we think is pretty cool.

We're proud to introduce the BootsnAll Travel Writers Platform, a partnership between BootsnAll and what we hope will be an ever-growing number of travel writers. We're going to start with 5 writers on 5 sites, and then expand the program in the future. It's a paid writing program, and provides not only a base pay for a certain amount of work each month but also profit-sharing as the sites get to profitability.

We know that to begin with these sites aren't going to be pulling in enough money for someone to live on this income and nothing else, but if you're trying to become a travel writer and you're looking for some kind of stable income while you continue to do freelancing outreach this could be a great opportunity for you. And because BootsnAll has a proven track record of producing great content on profitable sites, we're confident we can help travel writers get from zero to sixty more quickly than they could get there on their own.

The Italy travel guide I've been writing for more than three years now is something of a test case for this program, in that we've tested many of the things we'll be putting to good use with the Travel Writers Platform on that site - so we know now even better what works and what doesn't.

We're excited about this program, and we hope you are, too!

Last Minute Hotels by BootsnAll

We launched this Last Minute Hotel section a month or so ago and I totally forgot to mention it.  Why should you care?  Well, if you are looking for a place to stay and it is within 3 weeks of departure you may find suitable inventory for your stay at an even more reduced price than you would normally find on the information superhighway.  The web is just full of tasty deals, isn't it?

Strangely, we do not have any last minute properties for the country I am currently in, Romania.  Good thing there is availability in Germany.  I'm gonna check on this page a few weeks before World Cup and see what the score is.  Will Germany really be totally sold out?  If we are not allocated anything...maybe?

After the jump, see all the countries that we cover with this product.

Free Love from BnA

I love this piece that Brett wrote for our adsales section.  It is also super good to have a full-time "advertising executive" to take care of all the folks who want to advertise with BootsnAll.  I have been a slack arse bitch on that...just not having the time to fully service them as the leads poured in.

Hopefully, as we grow we'll keep our sense of humor with stuff like that.  I frickin' love it.

BnA is on AOL.com homepage

We are linked off the homepage of AOL.com now.  Kinda rad.  See what it looked like here.

Travelicio.us

I would like to here what you folks think of this new site that we are soft launching.  I am interested in some feedback on it - please reply via e-mail or in the comments, don't be bashful - I can take it.

Travelicio.us

In particular:

1) Does the site make sense to you

2) Is there a feature or something else that you would like to see?

3) Do you like it?

4) Do you think this would be a good site to goto when doing some dreaming or researching a place you might be visiting in the near future?

Hostel Maps via Google Maps

I wrote about about our Hostel Map integration via Google Maps a few weeks ago.  We want to do the same thing for the the UK and Ireland - but how do we convert English addresses into longitude and latitude?  We used geocoder.us for the US addresses.

Wildhorn on Why Go

Wildhorn Mountain in Switzerland

Re-Lauching of Why Go

We re-launched Why Go today.  When we originally launched it on April 1st - our design was a bit rushed.  After some user feedback and some more time spent on design - I like it lots more - a bit cleaner and more pleasant to look at.  What do you think?

CEO and Founders Responsibilites

Good article