Hotels Combined – Compare Hotels and Prices
Have you ever been in a situation where you’re planning your holiday and you’re trying to look for accommodation but just can’t decide on which one? Your best bet is probably to look for it online and avoid travel agency fees. Why pay fees when you can use it for shopping instead?
Well hotelscombined.com is a hotel accomodation comparison portal that lets you search and compare hotels at your favourite travel destination. You can compare prices, ratings, read reviews and even look at pictures of where you’re staying!
Hotels Combined offers the best deals available with over 900,000 global hotel deals from over 30 merchants and read over 1.5 million customer reviews. Get great insights to what other traveller’s have experienced to ensure that you’re spending time enjoying your holiday and not spending your time complaining about the broken air-conditioning or finding out that the hotel has overbooked on your arrival.
So go and check out Hotels Combined and get the best deals for your next travel vacation!
Australia’s New ATM Direct Charges
The banking and finance industry together with the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has developed how the new ATM direct charges work with aims to provide better transparency and choice to cardholders.
Cardholders will now be shown the ATM owner fee prior to making a transaction at a foreign ATM or a “non-customer” ATM. You will have the option to either accept the fee or reject and cancel the transaction. This will be effective as of March 3, 2009.
A foreign ATM is a any ATM that doesn’t belong to a financial institution. These types of ATMs are usually found in convenience stores, pubs and other random places. Majority of these foreign ATMs are owned by Customers Limited.
A “non-customer” ATM is an ATM that belongs to a financial institution that you are not a cardholder with (i.e. Commonwealth Bank customer withdrawing from a St George ATM).
You may also be charged for a disloyalty fee by your financial institution if you withdraw from a different ATM. Basically, you may be charged two kinds of fees: direct charge and disloyalty fee.
Below are some breakdowns of 4 major banks and their ATM charges.
Australian Tax Bonus: Beware of email scams
We’re expecting tax bonus payments from the government around early April so beware of email scams that will most likely be sent out as we approach closer to the payment date.
Please remember that the Australian Tax Office (ATO) will never send out emails asking for personal details such as credit card and bank details. You also won’t be charged a fee to receive the payment and if you didn’t know, the bonus payments are tax free. If you do receive an email pretending to be from the ATO, delete it immediately. The ATO has released an official statement on this.
You can read on the details of the tax bonus / stimulus package in my other post.
Google Analytics: Does 301/302 Redirect Preserve Referrer Information?
In case you’re wondering whether 301 redirects preserve the referrer information or not and how this may affect Google Analytic’s referrer information, I’ll show you a simple example.
So pretty much what I did was I did a Google search for clothes and found some ads on the right hand side. I used firebug to extract the destination URL as I didn’t want to inflate their costs because I’m just doing an example. What I look for are obvious tracking URLs that track and monitor search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns such as DART (Double Click).
You can also figure this one out by seeing the domain of the URL. If this is different to the display URL, most likely this is a tracking URL because Google Adwords has enforced the policy that the destination and display URL must be the same (it’s ok to use tracking URLs though as long as you land on the same domain as the display URL).
Nokia E71 WLAN / Wifi Connection Problem
I’ve recently signed up with Vodafone on the $49 cap to get my free Nokia E71. Took some photos of it but unfortunately it’s on my cousin’s camera and he’s in Adelaide right now. Will blog about it once I can get a hand on the photos.
So it’s been like 3 days since I’ve gotten the phone and I had some trouble connecting my phone to my home wireless network. Everytime I tried to connect, I kept getting this error message,
WLAN: Unable to connect.
WLAN Network Not Found.
It friggin’ took me 3 days to figure this one out. Was driving me insane.
So here’s a few tips on how to troubleshoot your wlan problem. Continue reading »