If you are planning a trip to New York city and you are heavily limited on your budget, rest assured that you can still have a meaningful trip. The only thing is you will need to sacrifice on some of the luxuries and save on other expenses such as food and souvenirs. One thing you can do to minimize expenses is to stay in a cheap New York hotel.

Cheap does not necessarily mean a bad thing especially when we are talking about a New York hotel. You will just have to be extra careful because some establishments abuse the word cheap and they would offer horrendous services. A stay in a New York hotel need not be expensive and while you may want to spend a little on it, you can still get at least the basic accommodations and necessities anybody would expect.

A recent survey conducted by boo.com found that 91 percent of British people still plan to travel this year despite the financial crisis. However, with 67 percent saying they have modified their travel arrangements, they will be looking for more creative ways to save money.

Furthermore, 58 percent of British consumers report that they save specifically for travel for at least 6 months of the year.  To help consumers make the most of their travel savings and ease the hassle of holiday travel, boo.com's travel experts offer the following holiday travel tips:

By running an environmentally responsible operation with cost-effective procedures and facility improvements, hotels and motels can demonstrate leadership in ecological sustainability and enhance competitiveness. The benefits of a green hotel program include: lower operating costs; increased customer and employee satisfaction; reduced environmental impact; and increased marketability as an environmentally friendly business.

That has been the case for the Hilton San Francisco, which is now in its twelfth year of recycling discarded supplies. Through the San Francisco Hotels/Nonprofit Collaborative, hundreds of thousands of tons are harvested each year and redirected from landfills to the surrounding community. The program has raised the property’s profile as a good corporate citizen and saved an enormous amount in trash removal costs.

Let’s face it, as much as we love camping, hostels, and eco-lodges sometimes a hotel is the most reasonable option.

Luckily, even when staying at the least environmentally-friendly hotel you have a lot of control over your environmental impact. Here are 11 of our favorite tips and tricks for being a little friendlier to Mother Earth during your next hotel stay:

Unplug, unplug, unplug. The first thing you should do when you walk into a hotel room is unplug. 5 lamps? Unplug 4. Mini-fridge? Unless you’ve brought a turkey and mayo sandwich, unplug. Coffee maker? Unplug. Hair dryer? Unplug. Appliances drain energy even when they’re not on. If you just spend 2 minutes unplugging items you will already have made a difference.

Hotel guests and clients are driving the greening of the hotel industry, they are encouraging and supporting greening programs at hotels throughout the world. 

They are participating in hotel linen programs by reusing towels and not having sheets changed every day. 

They are turning off lights and TV as well as closing drapes when they’re out of their hotel rooms to reduce energy usage.  They are using less water while at hotels.  They are participating in hotel recycling programs.  They are choosing to help protect the fabulous destinations we all love to visit.

Along with the rest of the economy, the lodging and hospitality industry has reason to be concerned with the current financial crisis. When times are tough, one of the first things that gets cut from personal and business budgets is travel expenses.

Some hotels are already feeling a pinch from the tight economy. And as a sign that things might get worse before they get better, an analyst from Goldman-Sachs recently lowered expectations on the entire hotel sector for 2009 and through 2010, based on the growing supply of hotel rooms and weakening business travel trends — estimating that revenue per available room will drop 4% in the U.S. during 2009 and dip another 1% in 2010.

I'm strapping myself in for a ride to the edge of the sky. Outside my porthole, the ground crew is preparing the vehicle for launch. The entry hatch is sealed, the mobile gantry pulled away. All systems are go. Soon, powerful thrusters will accelerate us to more than 500 miles per hour. At the peak of our trajectory, we will soar above about 80 percent of the atmosphere. The view of Earth will be panoramic.

Then the person behind me kicks my seat. Somewhere in the cabin a baby starts to cry. The college kid next to me slouches in her seat and flips through a magazine. Okay, so maybe a morning flight from JFK to Chicago isn't all that glamorous. But think about it: At a time when people are lining up to pay $200,000 for suborbital rocket rides, I can soar to thirty or forty thousand feet for a fraction of the price -- with beverages and pretzels thrown in for free. Now that's a deal.

I didn't used to care about looking out airplane windows. Like a lot of people, I stuck to aisle seats and spent most of my time wishing I were back on the ground. Then I took an introductory flying lesson and got hooked on small planes. Working toward my pilot's license, I learned pilotage, the art of figuring out where you are by studying what you see on the ground.

It's surprisingly hard: things don't always appear quite like you expect them to. But once you learn to understand the view from on high, the once-incomprehensible jumble becomes infused with meaning and, by extension, beauty. After learning how to interpret the landscape, flying wasn't just transportation anymore. It was a real-life IMAX show.

The view from above, in seven easy steps

CHOOSE A WINDOW SEAT. And avoid sitting over the wing! When you're making reservations online, keep a tab open to SeatGuru, a Web site with charts on every type of aircraft operated by every major carrier, including details on wing location.

DO A LITTLE RESEARCH. The more you know, the more you'll see. A superb reference is "America from the Air" by Daniel Mathews and James S. Jackson, which includes annotated aerial photos of topography across the United States and explanations of the predominant landforms. The book also comes with a CD-ROM of the major continental air routes. T+L.com: Top 10 vintage airline ads

PLOT YOUR COURSE. Type your route into Google Earth for a virtual flyover, and you'll get a rough idea of what's in store. The Web site fboweb.com generates Google Earth views of exact routes using up-to-the-minute FAA flight-tracking data. If you zoom in and tilt at the right angle, the view of the virtual globe looks just like what you'll see out the airplane window.

PACK YOUR LAPTOP. For the sake of knowing exactly what I'm looking at, I like to bring a computer with flight-planning software that electronically plots a route from origin to destination via the navigational beacons that airliners follow. One such program is Golden Eagle FlightPrep.

LOOK FOR LANDMARKS. If a river is so big that its width is discernible from 30,000 feet, the chances are good that you've heard of it. Shorelines are easy to decipher. Flights between Berlin and Stockholm, for instance, pass over a large and very striking lagoon on the coast of the Baltic Sea. This is Szczecin Bay, at the mouth of the Oder River on the Polish-German border.

ASK THE CAPTAIN. When you see something remarkable and can't figure out what it is, flag down a flight attendant, who will probably go ask the captain, who will probably be thrilled to show off his or her geographical expertise (even if all it involves is checking the GPS system). One time I was flying north from Phoenix and noticed a gaping pit in the desert floor. A helpful flight attendant went up to the cockpit and came back with a positive ID: it was the famous Meteor Crater, formed by a cosmic impact 50,000 years ago.

WATCH THE CLOUDS. You don't just have to look down. Some of the most interesting sights are meteorological. On any flight of more than a few hours, you're bound to witness at least one complete frontal system, and a range of cloud formations. To keep track of the vast menagerie of clouds, get a copy of "The Cloudspotter's Guide" by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, with extensive (and effusive) descriptions and photographs.

Wilma Smith was vacationing with her grandchildren in Orlando when she met a maid on a mission. When she returned from one of the theme parks one afternoon, she found the door to her room at the Days Inn propped wide open.

"We had cameras and laptops in there," says Smith, a retiree who lives in Darby, Montana. "The maid had been there. Nothing was taken, but we were a little put out by it."

Hotel guests today are facing off against increasingly zealous and indifferent housekeeping staff. Sometimes, these maids on a mission don't even wait until you've left the room before they start cleaning.

Talk about adding insult to injury.

When a natural disaster strikes -- like the recent earthquake in China or Myanmar's devastating cyclone -- travel companies like to play the God card, unless everyone is looking.

The God card -- technically, the Act of God clause, a legal term for "circumstances beyond our control" -- basically means your airline, cruise line or hotel owes you nothing. After all, the tragedy wasn't their fault.

Miss your flight? Sorry, nothing we can do about that hurricane. Couldn't get to the port on time because of a wildfire? Hey, don't look at us -- we're not arsonists. Couldn't make it to the hotel because your house was flattened by a tornado? Not our problem, and oh, P.S., you still owe us for the room.

Taking a deep breath just doesn't work anymore. Not this summer.

No, this summer calls for voodoo planes.

Alan Fiermonte owns a collection of them -- "one for each airline," he says -- against which he unleashes his frustrations about silly fees and nonexistent customer service.

"I recommend a well-stocked pin cushion," adds Fiermonte, a Conshohocken, Pennsylvania-based travel agent.

If that sounds a little extreme -- and I'll be the first to admit that it does -- then let me acquaint you with a few facts about traveling during the summer of 2008. Gas costs an astounding $4-plus per gallon. Several airlines are charging $15 for the first checked bag -- the most outrageous in a deluge of outrageous new surcharges. Customer service, meanwhile, is circling the drain.

Oh, the terrible things we come home to from vacation.

While everyone else seems obsessed with how we will -- or won't -- spend our summer, does anyone care what happens when it's over?

Well, I do. I've experienced almost every non-Hollywood ending to a vacation you can imagine. They feature death, destruction and a couple of pink slips from my clients. I'll get to those in a second.

But first, let's hear about your unhappy endings.

Cliff Woodrick returned from a four-week vacation in Quebec to a gruesome sight and an even more unpleasant smell: the corpses of more than two dozen fish bobbing up and down in his algae-coated aquarium.

"We had a storm that knocked out the power while I was gone," he remembers. "The three pump filters went offline, and some of the electrical connections in the house were fried."

Flying solo? Prepare to pay up.

Janet Rahn, a software test analyst from Oakland, California, was shocked when she recently asked for a single rate on an Overseas Adventure Travel tour of Kenya and Tanzania. "As part of the package, they offered a layover in Amsterdam for about $125, based on double occupancy," she remembers. "As a single, I'm being charged $270."

The dreaded single supplement -- charging solo guests up to twice a couple's rate -- isn't new. If you travel by yourself, and stay in a room or cabin meant for two, you'd expect to pay a little more.

Shorts. High heels. Cologne.

Even if you're just an occasional air traveler, you probably know better than to wear any of those on board. Heavy perfumes can permeate the cramped aircraft interior, sickening your cabin-mates. High heels? Uncomfortable on longer flights and unusable on those inflatable emergency slides. As for shorts, once the cabin door is closed and the air conditioning is cranked all the way up, you'll be sorry.

What to wear on a plane -- or more to the point, what not to wear on a plane -- is a hot topic today for a number of reasons. Not only are we heading into the warm summer months, when air travelers commit a majority of these sartorial slip-ups, but the gap between what we should wear on a commercial flight, and what we do wear, appears to be widening.

Take Kyla Ebbert, for example. She was almost tossed off a Southwest Airlines flight last summer because attendants claimed she was "dressed inappropriately" in a revealing outfit. Since then, there have been a string of too-skimpy-to-fly incidents, including one in Burbank, California, and another in Tampa, Florida.

No one knows better than the police which tricks criminals are using to prey on unsuspecting tourists.

BARCELONA You're pretty safe walking anywhere in the main tourist areas, but be wary of strangers who are a little too friendly, says a police spokeswoman who was not authorized to give her name. If someone asks how you like Barcelona or tries to hug you, hold on to your valuables tightly: Pickpockets use techniques like these to throw people off guard. The police department has a special unit that roams crowded areas like La Rambla disguised as tourists, right down to the maps and cameras, to watch for thieves in action.