Enduring Black Friday/most Expensive Travel Tours/greenland Gets An Airport

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

BF Is Not Your Inbox’s Best Friend

Sick of the Black Friday e-mails yet? Brace for another round on “Cyber Monday.” A few points on all this though. 1) There are genuine sales on things you probably pay for anyway, so this can be a good time to change a monthly subscription to annual or upgrade that software from free to pro. 2) It’s a rare company that doesn’t run one of these (REI for instance, with their #OptOutside protest movement), so you can probably delete all the e-mails and go shop where you normally would, like Amazon’s BF page. 3) Numerous studies have shown that the BF deals aren’t all they’re hyped up to be anyway, so you’re not missing much if you ignore them all.

Where do Vacationers Spend the Most?

There’s one group of people not looking at sale prices: those who spend $13K and up per person on their vacation. Travel Pulse recently ran down the costliest vacation destinations in the world, with data from Squaremouth. In cases where travelers are paying for tour packages, the most expensive was…Djibouti. In fact, 7 of the 10 priciest were in Africa, from that top one ($28,594 per person) down to $13,113 in Kenya. The others were all Antarctic lands.

When in Laos, Order Beerlao

In a bizarre and tragic story coming out of Asia, six young foreign travelers have died in Vang Vieng, Laos after ingesting mixed drinks tainted with methanol. Five women, one man, four nationalities. See the details here.

Greenland Opens an Airport

In the past, if you wanted to get to Greenland, you were most likely getting there on some kind of ship experience. The options will expand quite a bit as of today though when Greenland opens its first large airport that can handle international jet flights. It’s not just for show either: Air Greenland will fly to Copenhagen and United will offer direct flights from Newark starting in June. See the details here.