You’re probably already aware that in Hawaii, vacation rentals offer outstanding value compared to hotel rooms, especially if you’re traveling with family or friends and need a place with 2 or more bedrooms. Since vacation rentals are essentially homes they offer all the amenities you would expect - fully equipped kitchens, laundry facilities (most often in-suite), high speed internet, and so on. Many even have things like beach equipment, books and other accessories that vacationers find useful.

So by deciding on a vacation rental compared to a hotel you’re already on your way to saving money on your vacation. Another nice aspect about vacation rentals is that the price is often negotiable. All you have to do is ask. Here are some tips when asking for a discount:

• Let them know if you’re not going to use all the bedrooms in the rental
• Are your dates flexible? Can you squeeze into a vacant time slot that would otherwise go un-booked?
• Tell them if you’re a senior or in the military.
• Tell them what your budget is and see what they can do to work with your budget.

The greatest opportunity for discounts is when doing a last minute booking as owners are more eager to fill a rental that would otherwise stand empty. Here however you risk losing out on a great place and you may even struggle to find something in an area you like. If you find yourself scrambling to find a place, remember to also check RedWeek.com’s Hawaii Timeshares. Timeshare’s are rentals that have multiple owners, and the owners often trade or rent out their week of ownership when they can’t travel them self. Like rentals, time shares offer deeper discounts on last minute bookings.

Given how the quality of rentals vary, if you see a place that you like it’s best not to wait. Rather, book as soon as possible and use the above tips to try and manage something within your budget. But if you do find yourself planning a last minute trip you could find some great savings. HawaiiGaga’s Hawaii deals page shows many discounts on last minute travel.

Here are ten travel tips for your next Hawaii vacation:

• Renting a car is a must. There’s too much to see and do.
• Look toward the NE to see what the weather will be like for the next hour. The trade winds blow consistently from this direction.
• Check the surf report before you head to the beaches or ocean so you know what to expect.
• Don’t swim in fresh water (streams, rivers, ponds). They are contaminated with Leptospirosis.
• If you plan on renting a surf board, make sure you can fit in on the roof of your rental car (where is the radio antenna?)
• Coral is living organism. Don’t touch or damage the coral. They also have a lot of bacteria on them, so be careful not to get scratched.
• Invest in good snorkel equipment. Bad equipment can ruin the experience.
• Big waves hit the north shores in the winter, and south shores in the summer. This may affect your snorkeling plans.
• The sting from a blue bottle (portuguese man of war) can be very painful. If you see them on the beach it’s a sign to stay out of the water.
• Surf swap meets are a great place to buy equipment.
• Consider buying an inexpensive camera for the kids so they can capture the vacation from their perspective.

For a 110 more travel tips, try our free Hawaii Google gadget. It’s a fun tool that you place on your Google home page and has all sorts of Hawaii related stuff.

Just like airfare, the prices of car rentals fluctuate dramatically in Hawaii. The average price of an economy sized car is in the $30/per day range during regular season. When the supply is low, typically high season times, the price goes into the high $40 range. The highest we’ve seen is $100/day! That was when the car companies, seeing a huge down turn in tourism, shipped off their inventories. Demand was higher than expected, and prices went up to the extreme. On the other hand, prices in the teens are possible.

Despite assurances otherwise, car rental company web sites do not offer the best deals. Dollar rental car is the prime example.

Dollar has this logo placed at the top of their web site. Isn’t it reassuring? Read the details and you’ll see there are a dozen exceptions, including:

• Does not apply to discounts, coupons, upgrade offers
• Does not apply to pre-negotiated rates
• Does not apply to promotional rates
• Does not apply to member rates such as government, AAA, corporate etc.
• Does not apply to rates found on auction sites, or sites that don’t publish the name of the rental company.

And so on..

Dollar acknowledges that web sites with pre-negotiated rates, auction sites, and sites that don’t publish a brand have the lowest rates. So that’s where you should go to find the best deal.

One of the best “auction” style web sites is Priceline.com. On priceline, you bid on a car by saying how much you want to pay. If priceline accepts the bid, your credit card is charged immediately and they tell you what company you got. If the bid is not accepted, you have to wait a day to place a new bid, or change the type of car you want to rent to bid again immediately.

An alternative to Priceline is to use a web site that has pre-negotiated discount rates. There are some benefits to this approach:

1. No deposit and your credit card isn’t charged until you return the car.
2. You can cancel at any time.
3. The rates are still very competitive, usually much better than what the car rental company’s offer directly.
4. They sometimes include an additional driver for free! Car rental companies typically charge an extra $10-$15/day for additional drivers!

Two great web sites to check for low pre-negotiated rates are Discount Hawaii Car Rental and Summit Pacific’s Hawaii Car Rentals.

Remember when you rent a car, you will get fined for 1) early pick up 2) early return 3) late return. The fines are ugly so be careful. Also, always get all your insurance from your local insurance company as the rental company insurance policies are expensive. Finally, use the gas option that requires you to return the car with a full tank of gas, as opposed to the option that lets you return it empty (you prepay for the tank). Drifting into the rental lot on fumes is impossible - you’ll likely have at least $15 of gas left in the tank, if not more.

If you’ve been using our Hawaii Google Gadget to keep an eye on airfare to Hawaii you’ll notice it also reports what airline is offering the low price:

The gadget actually uses Kayak.com’s flight search technology to discover those low fares. Kayak.com is an excellent web site for researching airfare, but there are many more. So how do they stack up? Recently, we took a look at airfare from Seattle to Lihue, and compared the major players:

Expedia.com - $321
Orbitz.com - $321
Kayak.com - $322
OneTravel.com - $330
CheapOAir.com - $574

Incidentally, the airfare found was with Alaska Airlines, whose own web site also quoted a price of $321.

These results are quite interesting. First, CheapOAir, a major player in the market, couldn’t find the discounted Alaska Airlines rate. As a result it found a much higher rate with a different carrier. OneTravel.com, another relatively new but big player in the market, quoted a rate that was slightly higher. Unlike the other web sites, OneTravel.com uses coupon codes to give people discounted rates. If you know about the coupon, you can get the $321 rate.

Finally, expedia, orbitz and kayak all discovered the lowest possible rate.

What differentiates these web sites is the way they search for low airfare. If you have exact dates, either expedia, orbitz or kayak will do the job. However, if you have flexible dates, kayak.com is the web site to use as it can search a range of dates, which is extremely useful.

Over the last few months Bing and Google have introduced amazing new features to their maps. First, Google’s street view has finally arrived on Oahu. Now you can explore Oahu like never before. This is particularly important for the vacation rental industry because it allows people to explore vacation rental neighborhoods. Here’s an example - dreamy Lanikai:

View Larger Map

Google street view is also available on Maui. The coverage is not as comprehensive as Oahu but it allows one to explore and get a great feel for areas like Wailea and Kihei. Unfortunately Kaanapali resort is not covered yet.

Bing maps has introduced an amazing bird’s eye views to its Waikiki map which allows one to explore the area from the sky. HawaiiGaga.com utilizes these bird’s eye view images for our Waikiki condo guides. For example take a look at our Colony Surf condo page. Note how you can move and spin the map around!

For some time now we’ve wanted to write a guide for people who are new to the process of renting vacation homes. Fortunately we discovered Terry Gronenthal who publishes The Vacationers Guide to Vacation Rentals. Terry long ago discovered the benefits of staying in a vacation rental over a hotel and has put a tremendous amount of effort into writing about the subject. His guide covers everything you need to know about the rental process.

Some excellent advice Terry gives is to write reviews about your experience after your trip. There are three reasons for doing this. First, as a way of rewarding a quality rental. Second, to help out fellow vacationers. But finally, as Terry recommends in the guide, when you go on vacation again and approach an owner to make an inquiry, you can tell them “We’ve used vacation rentals in the past and you can see one of my reviews here.” Quality owners love guests who are savvy enough to write online reviews because it helps build the reputation of their rental. Likewise, an owner who cuts corners will be put on notice that you mean business.

In our Hawaii safety guide we discuss the Portuguese man of war, or blue bottle, one of the sea creatures you want to avoid on your Hawaii vacation. It’s difficult to resist the temptation to enter the water when they’re around, but it’s best to pack up and head to another beach.

A man of war sting can be very painful. Each tentacle contains thousands of tiny spikes that are used to inject poison. The severity of the sting depends on how much of the tentacle brushes against your skin. The sting causes a burning pain and welts, possibly accompanied by muscle weakness, and sometimes also pain and swelling of nearby lymph nodes. Breathing difficulty and chest pain are possible. The pain can be alarming but it’s rare that one would need to see a Physician although some people may be allergic to the sting. If you see a red line forming from the sting to a lymph gland you should see a Doctor.

Having been stung many times, we’ve developed the following treatment plan.

1. Remove tentacles with a stick or something similar. Don’t touch or rub!
2. Rinse with salt water.
3. Go home if the pain is severe. The victim will likely be out of action for the afternoon.
4. Rinse affected area with hot water. This helps neutralize the poison.
5. Apply ice to help soothe the pain.
6. Take at least 3-5 Grams of Vitamin C. Vit-C is excellent at neutralizing toxin.
7. Crush vitamin C, baking soda and water to create a paste. Apply the paste to the affected areas to pull the poison from the stings.

The old vinegar treatment is no longer recommended. It’s said to work for jelly fish but may actually worsen this type of sting. The key to this treatment is the high dose of Vitamin C which we have found can stop all sorts of venom/toxin/poison in its tracks. Taking very large doses is safe, and you can spread it out to help with absorption. For example, 500mg every 15 minutes for several hours.

The above treatment seems to work quickly, usually taking about an hour for pain and symptoms to be reduced by 90%.

Fortunately blue bottles don’t infest the waters very frequently. They’re most common on east facing shores and won’t affect an entire island.

Google themes are background pictures that you can add to the Google home page. It’s a colorful alternative to the standard white Google page. We like to set our Google background to a Hawaii theme. It’s a way to remind you, no matter where you are, you’ll always be searching for Hawaii.

Kauai Google Theme

Big Island Beach Google Theme

Kauai Beach Google Theme

To add one of our Hawaii themes click on the above image. This will take you to the Google page for the theme. Now just click the “Add it Now” button (don’t worry if no screen shot of the theme appears on the Google page).

The Hawaiian monk seal is an endangered species. Researchers estimate there to be roughly 1300 seals alive today. Fewer than 100 live around the major Hawaiian islands, the remainder around atolls and islets in the vast 1500 mile stretch of ocean that technically compromise the Hawaiian islands. Spotting a monk seal on vacation is a rare treat but the seals are not at all shy of humans and will beach themselves on any spot of sand no matter how crowded. Being endangered species, the seals may not be approached, but you can watch them take a nap on the sand from a distance (100ft).

Take a look at all the places we’ve spotted Seals around Hawaii. Click on the thumbnail to start the photo tour.

Mahukona, Big Island

Larsen's Beach Kauai

Kuilei Cliffs Beach, Oahu

Sealodge beach, Kauai

As you’ve hopefully noticed, HawaiiGaga.com features hundreds of Hawaii pictures including panoramic photos and virtual tours. We’ve literally taken thousands of photos of the islands (at least 10,000). Photographing Hawaii’s scenery is especially enjoyable and the biggest perk associated with working on a travel web site.

We’ve been asked about the process of creating a 360 degree picture. The most important component is the software used to “stitch” and blend the series of photos together. We use a package called Autopano.

For outdoors scenes one simply stands in one spot, rotating around and taking the photos, making sure that there is some overlap (maybe 20%) between each image so that the software can figure out how to “connect the dots.” The number of pictures one needs to rotate all the way around depends on your lens - typically it’s about 8. Autopano stitches the pictures together to create a single very large photo.

Movement in the scene, like a car driving past, will confuse the process because you’ll have a picture of a car in more than one photo in different locations. So scenes with little movement, like nature scenes, are the easiest. Otherwise you’ll have to use Photoshop to correct distortions.

You can take a 360 photo with any kind of digital camera, although using a DSLR is much preferred over a point and shoot digital camera because of the ease of use, speed of taking photos, ability to accurately frame the scene through the view finder, ability to use filters, and possibly an improvement in picture quality. Ken Rockwell maintains an excellent photography web site that will keep you busy for days.

For indoor 360 photos one would normally use a tripod with a special attachment called a pano head. The purpose is to ensure the camera swivels around a fixed point. You could just stand in place and rotate around as with outdoor scenes, but when the subject matter is so much closer to the camera the stitching software has a more difficult time putting it together and matching the scene - there’s less room for error. The use of the tripod and pano head improve the accuracy of the process.

There are other ways of taking 360 degree photos as well. For example, motorized pano heads, or special lens mirrors that take a 360 degree photo in one shot. Start by using whatever equipment you have and learning how to best use AutoPano before investing in new gear.