Cheapflights.co.uk Takes the Sting out of Roaming

Unplanned costs can ruin even the most budget-wise break, but Cheapflights.co.uk's latest tips page on Travelling with your iPhone reveals the smartest ways smart phones can save travellers a fortune.

London, UK (PRWEB) May 30, 2009 -- According to Cheapflights.co.uk (http://www.cheapflights.co.uk/?source=WPR), the country's leading flight price comparison website, ticket price is misperceived as the costliest element in a travel budget, when it is increasingly becoming a minor expense. This 'flight-trap' (fixation on ticket price above other considerations) has fused the tight relationship between the internet and the travel industry, creating new behaviours and a slew of recession-driven lingo to describe them: 'Netsetters', for instance, are those more interested in taking holiday snaps to torture friends with than in seeing touristic sights, and 'Recession-runners' take advantage of being laid-off to travel the world.

"The slow economy has definitely changed the way travellers plan their trips," says Cheapflights.co.uk's General Manager, Francesca Ecsery. "People are spending longer online searching for great deals, and are far more willing to add stopovers and connections to their routes if it means cutting costs."

Though ticket price is a very important element, shock expenses - like the £31,000 Vodaphone roaming charge faced by a visitor to Portugal last year - are the true death knell on travel affordability. And while the European Parliament has voted to cap the costs of sending text messages and downloading data for those roaming within the European Union from the 1st of July, Cheapflights.co.uk's top tips can meanwhile reveal 'smart ' ways to protect holiday bliss:

• Ditch data roaming for Wifi

Most smart phones include a Wifi option that allows piggybacking on local connections. The trick is finding a free hotspot, which is where the Global Wifi Finder application comes in. This nifty utility maps the locations of more than 250,000 Wifi locations in 140 countries, so you'll never be far from free internet access.

• Turn off automatic updates

For those who refuse to switch off data roaming, streamlining the iPhone's update facility is an absolute must. This stops the handset from checking for emails every few minutes, which would otherwise run up a hefty bill over the course of any break.

• Travel prepared with virtual backup

Why not use the smart phone camera to back up vital documents such as passports, credit cards and luggage tags? And use the screen capture facility to save relevant images from Google Maps, or other online resources.

To find out 'how to' perform the above and see all seven money-saving tips, visit Travelling with your iPhone (http://www.cheapflights.co.uk/travel-tips/travelling-with-your-iphone/?source=WPR).

Notes to Editors

Cheapflights Ltd.: www.cheapflights.co.uk was launched in 1996. It pioneered the concept of online flight price search and comparison and has been consistently profitable since launch. It was the first UK dotcom to introduce pay-per-click in 2000, which helped to transform online advertising. Cheapflights does not sell tickets but publishes flight deals from airlines, budget airlines, online travel agents and the long tail of other specialist flight deal providers. It launched its US site www.cheapflights.com in May 2003, which has rapidly grown and which now provides half of Cheapflights' millions of monthly visits by consumers. Its Canadian site www.cheapflights.ca which was launched in April 2007 is already enjoying traffic of over 300,000 monthly visits. The first non-English language site www.cheapflug.de was "light" launched in Germany in October 2008. Cheapflights' main European and North American sites each provide consumers with rapid, easy to use comparisons of about 1 million flight deals daily from the broadest online selection of travel operators. The sites are valued by travel industry advertisers as a neutral, high-traffic source of quality high-conversion consumer leads. Cheapflights' status as an independent online travel price search and comparison and travel news site, together with its free opt-in subscriber newsletters makes it a natural starting point for finding travel deals and up-to-date travel industry information on both sides of the Atlantic.

###