The world around us

In all our traveling from early last year, I seem to have become quite a resource on how to book hotel rooms, flights, cars etc all across the world and I am getting requests constantly on finding a good deal for someplace or the other. One of the new hotel sites that I stumbled on was HotelsCombined.com, which works as a price and feature comparison site, using resources of sites such as priceline, hotwire, alphawire, 123hotels, expedia and a host of other sites.

Compared to other hotel reservation sites, Hotels Combined is much simpler and direct, not bombarding the visitor with too much information on the home page, like I found at HotelClub.com and a lot of other reservation sites. What I did like at Hotel Club was the Top Cities Worldwide feature that lists starting prices, which is a feature I have not seen in other sites. I loved the speed of Hotels Combined, it’s way faster than all of the other search sites and makes me stay on the same page, instead of have a couple of tabs open and switching back and forth.

Retailers are taking note of the increasing amount that college students are spending on clothes and fashion accessories these days. Your average college student is not "poor and struggling" anymore, they are out shopping up a storm, spending an average of $2,000-3,000 per year on clothes. According to the 360 Youth College Explorer Study, which was released in 2004, college students have a $122 billion spending power, of which $24 billion is discretionary spending money. Retailers are also realising that not all students have the same spending power. Technical students are said to come from the wealthiest households in the US, with average incomes of $136,698.

Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation, said a handful of retailers began tapping into the college market in the late 1990s with items such as beanbag chairs and mini refrigerators. Others soon followed. "College students aren’t tied down by the same debt and responsibilities as their parents, so college students tend to have higher disposable incomes and can spend that money on food, magazines, entertainment and furniture," Davis said. "College students place a very high value on enjoying their lifestyle, and so, many retailers looking to grow their business have transitioned into the college market because that’s a group of people that really likes to spend money."