A Smaller Travel Shaving Cream

I highlighted this product years ago in passing when I first started using it, but it has been in my bag ever since: Bigelow Shaving Cream with eucalyptus and coconut oil. Most home shaving creams are large, pressurized, and utilize lots of single-use plastic, but this one is in a carry-on-sized metal tube that gets smaller as you use more of it. One tube can last a year of trips, even for frequent travelers.

Europe Got a Third of All Vacation Spend Last Year

Now we know where all those tourists who skipped the USA went last year. The full 2025 numbers are out and Europe pulled in a third of all travel spending worldwide, a mind-boggling $2 trillion in expenditures. This is despite heat waves in high season, overcrowding in famous destinations, and attraction prices that can max out the credit card. If there’s a lesson from that article, it’s to avoid July and August if at all possible and try to get into less-visited areas that will be happy to see you instead of destinations that are wishing you would stay away.

Airports With the Best Flight Deals

When Going.com crunched the data for the most frequent flight deals in the USA, Denver and New Orleans had the most domestic deals, thanks to lots of competition. For international flights, you’re fortunate if you live near Boston, New York City, or Orlando. See the details here. A similar study for Europe found that the most frequent flight bargains are to or from airports with a strong budget airline presence: Dublin, Barcelona, Lisbon, Milan, and the non-Heathrow London airports. If you’re flying business class though, the differences flatten out. Dublin, Oslo, Stockholm, and Madrid offer the best fares, but the variance between them and the most expensive (Zurich) is much smaller than in economy class.

South America Travel Prices

I recently updated and republished this post from a few years ago on the cheapest places to travel in South America because political factors have radically changed the exchange rate landscape in some destinations. The U.S. dollar has lost a lot of its value under the current administration, so articles from earlier than January 20, 2025 are likely to be way off base. Then the local political situations in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia have further influenced what you’ll pay. Same as it ever was in Ecuador though: they use the greenback as their official currency.

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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.

08/27/26