Ask the Penny Pincher how to travel in luxury at budget prices and make the most of your air miles.
Ask the Fearless Shopper where to find the best global bargains.
Ask the Reader which books are best for your travels: before you go, while you're away, and when you return.
Click on an expert's name for Q&A.
Joel Widzer, The Penny Pincher, logs more than 100,000 air miles a year and he has accumulated more than 1.6 million frequent flyer miles. He has developed the unique ability to view traveling from both a consumer and business perspective. Through his own travel experience and his extensive research of the travel industry, he has developed firsthand knowledge of heretofore-undiscovered travel secrets and an understanding of travel programs. It is this insight that allows him to travel the world in ultimate luxury while paying coach prices. He is the author of The Penny Pincher's Passport To Luxury Travel, and has been heard on syndicated radio and seen on MSNBC, The FOX News Channel Travel Channel, CBS, NBC, and CNN.
Kathy Borrus, the Fearless Shopper, is a specialty retail marketing consultant and freelance writer. She traveled (and shopped) extensively as former merchandise manager and buyer for the Smithsonian Institution Museum Shops. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe and The Business of Crafts, a resource book. She is the author of The Fearless Shopper: How to Get the Best Deals on the Planet and lives in Washington, DC, with her son Josh.
To James O'Reilly, books are as important as water, air, and food. He writes: "I would be a sad fellow indeed without them, and this has been true for as long as I can remember. They are as rivers flowing through a universal mind that doesn't know the bounds of time. I can be with the dead as easily as the living—Homer or Stephen King, Sri Aurobindo or Isabel Allende, Wallace Stegner or Jan Morris, Mary Shelley or Redmond O'Hanlon. Books are the aqua vita of the spirit; they form a kind of background radiation against which I measure my life and my endeavors. They buck me up when I'm down, inspire me out of torpor, galvanize me when I am ready to walk the fire."