Hot Stuff: Gear for Summer
Innovative, stylish, and totally compact tools for meeting your every beach need.
Innovative, stylish, and totally compact tools for meeting your every beach need.

The trickiest part of selecting a new digital camera is narrowing in on which ingenious function you care about most. Allow us to point the way.
The following five sites have proven the most consistently useful for the editors of Budget Travel, who do thousands of searches a year. (Except for BudgetTravel.com, of course.)
Mobile applications for smartphones promise instant travel help, from magically summoning a taxi to acting as a personal translator around the globe. We investigate which apps actually live up to the hype.
Five inventive ways to make the economy work for you, including taking cues from other travelers via new online offerings, renting at the last minute, visiting countries where the dollar is strong, paying on layaway, and bartering.

Frequent-flier rewards are more elusive than ever. Brad Tuttle helps you score.
In an effort to groom a new generation of devotees, cruise companies are now offering shorter sailings at rock-bottom prices—the perfect opportunity for a commitmentphobe to test the waters.
Rental-car agencies are making it harder to get lost by upgrading their fleets with the latest GPS technology. BT editors tried out five units to see which one rules the road.
We've asked you twice to tell us about your favorite restaurant, and nearly 600 of you of have responded. Narrowing the list down is always tough, but here's our second, updated take on where to eat like a local, from sea to shining sea.