HAPPY 4TH OF JULY, EVERYONE!

Have a wonderful weekend, wherever you are.

From your Friends at RickSeaney.com and FareCompare.com

Now we know things are really bad in the airline industry: it’s attracted the notice of gossip website Perezhilton.

If you’re not familiar with it, Perezhilton is one of the internet’s premier celebrity/pop-culture sites (often ranked in the top 20 blogs by Technorati — and that’s out of millions of sites).

Anyway, today Perezhilton featured a post titled, “We Must Avert This Disaster” which includes a link to a Yahoo news report about a possible collapse of the aviation system.

Maybe it won’t get quite the attention his posts on Madonna or Britney Spears get, but it shows that everyone is concerned about the future of our airlines. And with good reason.

Best to you, from everyone at FareCompare…and Happy New Year, too!

Okay, officially we made the list of the 7-Most Influential Travel Bloggers of 2007!

How, you may ask?

Because…well, go ahead and read what travel expert Chris Elliott had to say about us.

I’m blushing.

Better read for yourself.

All I can say is, it had to do with our ability to find cheap airfare sales…before anyone else can.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve tried my best to offer advice and tips that can help you better make it through the hustle and bustle of the Thanksgiving travel season.

If I had to offer one more tip, it would be a simple one: treat the ticket agents and other airline employees as nicely as possible. It could save you a world of hassle, as one passenger recently discovered.

I just wanted to let everyone know that FareCompare is sponsoring prizes in association with the launch of the release of the Spider-Man 3 DVD. Play the Spider-Man 3 DVD game by clicking here, and you can be eligible to win a lot of great prizes including 20-free round-trip airfares from FareCompare!

The Promotion just began at midnight (ET) and ends at 11:59 p.m. (ET) on December 4, 2007, so start playing today for your chance to win!

Arthur C. Clarke must be proud. As reported in Wired, by 2010, the hub of space travel will likely move from Florida to New Mexico, and spacecraft taking off from the desert will be accessible to the public, not just those in cahoots with NASA.

Of course, when I say public, I mean those who have $200,000 and the desire to travel in suborbital space on Virgin Galactic.

Construction on Virgin Galactic’s new spaceport is set to begin next year and flights may begin as soon as 2009. The designs for the spaceport look like a sci-fi movie, but then, I wouldn’t expect anything less from Richard Branson.

I have heard a number of international travelers kick around the idea of buying three coach seats next to each other instead of buying one business class seat.

The thought behind this is that they will have plenty of room to stretch out, and they will still save a substantial amount of money (the cost of one business class ticket can easily be double that of three coach tickets).

OK, at first sight, this might sound like a great idea, and people have pulled it off successfully (check out this NY Times article to get the lowdown on a success story).

I decided to to put the bulk of my first post in the About Section on this blog which discusses a bit about me.

A friend of mine suggested that I read a book on blogging called “Naked Conversations” so I picked it up and read it on a plane ride to New York.

I found it fascinating, I’ll have to admit I am not a web surfer by any stretch although I was familiar with blogs but only at a cursory level and had really never thought much about what blogging was really about.

After reading about blogging I found that I had already been doing it in a low-tech form by answering thousands of emails the past year as CEO of FareCompare.com and sending out a newsletter to a pretty large list once a week.

So I hope to turn those one-way conversations into two-way conversations here. So please feel free to comment and call me out if you think I deserve it.