Top 5 ways to save on your summer vacation

2. Be alert for airfare deals

Gary Cameron/Reuters/File
Porter Airline ticket agents check in a family at Dulles International Airport in Virginia last month on its inaugural return flight to Toronto. For the cheapest fares internationally, sign up for travel alerts from a travel website.

Look for deals on domestic flights between Tuesday at 3 p.m. and Thursday night, when fare sales typically occur, says Rick Seaney, who heads the travel website FareCompare.com, based in Dallas. Experts say many travel websites also provide alerts, which broadcast special deals, often within a short window of opportunity. Typically, such alerts are good deals if, on a US domestic flight, they cost (with taxes and fees) less than $150 for a flight lasting less than 90 minutes; $200 or less for a flight of two to three hours; and $300 or less for flights longer than three hours, Mr. Seaney says.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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