If you're accustomed to bidding for hotels, flights and rental cars on Priceline, you may have noticed that in recent months the bidding process has become more cumbersome and time consuming. When your bid is rejected, you need to change some element of your offer before bidding again – the dates, the geographic area, the vehicle class for car rentals or the star level for hotels – in order to bid again. Or you wait 24 hours to submit the same bid.

In the past, if your bid was rejected for say a full size SUV, you could try again for a mid-size SUV, and if you were rejected again, you could keep going right on down the line to full-size, standard, intermediate, compact, economy and so on (same concept for hotels but with stars and geographic zones). But recently Priceline appears to be making a concerted effort to prevent bidders from making more than a couple bids in quick succession.

I'm almost never game to wait in a long line to eat. But I joined a line stretching outside the door at Xoco in Chicago last Saturday because I couldn't stand to hear another rave about the place without experiencing what all the fuss is about for myself. Xoco is a fast food Mexican place owned by former "Top Chef" master chef Rick Bayless, whom my colleague Laurel Miller once memorably described as an "all-around culinary badass."

The place has a whopping 1,662 reviews on Yelp - 897 of them mention the otherworldly churros - and about the only people who pan it are those who can't get a table. (There are only four restaurants in Chicago with more reviews on Yelp: Kuma's Corner (burgers), Hot Doug's (hot dogs/sausages), Girl & The Goat (New American) and Smoque BBQ.) I've been hearing about how unforgettably good this place is since it opened in 2009 – the place is a tourist attraction in itself – but was reminded that I needed to try it after seeing a write-up on it from Grant Martin in our budget guide to Chicago in late January.

Condé Nast Traveler (CNT) released its annual "Hot List" of the world's "best new hotels" this week, featuring 154 newish properties in 57 countries around the world. CNT boasts that 62 of these hotels have room rates that start at $300 per night or less but is that really a realistic threshold for separating expensive hotels from affordable ones? I've been traveling the world for more than 20 years and I very rarely spend more than half that on accommodation.

Obviously there's a huge difference between what $300 a night buys in New York compared to Buffalo, or Tokyo compared to Saigon, but in most places around the world I can usually find a pretty nice place to stay for $100 per night or less – sometimes much less. And I'd rather take a 12-day trip and spend $100 per night on hotels than a four-day trip where I spend $300 per night on accommodations.

I went through CNT's Hot List and was dismayed but not surprised to see just one hotel – the Tantalo Hotel in Panama City, Panama – where room rates start at $100 per night or less. The introduction to the list explains that CNT staff and stringers anonymously evaluated more than 1,000 properties and whittled the list down to 154 of the very best new hotels.

I'm addicted to "House Hunters International," the HGTV reality show that profiles people who are moving to another country or buying a vacation home outside the U.S. Aside from the fact that the program whets my appetite to visit the places that are profiled, I love the way it plants seditious seeds in my head about places that were never previously on my radar.

If you watch enough HHI - and the show is on about 14 times per day - the idea of picking up and moving to Buenos Aires, Bruges or Kathmandu on a whim seems downright normal. As someone who has moved to and from three foreign countries and several U.S. states since college, I find it comforting to learn about people who are even crazier and more transient than I am.

The show is what the network likes to call "scripted reality." It's essentially based on a true story stuff where they take a real situation and jazz it up to make a more cohesive story. Travel writer Matt Gibson, whose move to Taiwan was featured on the show in 2012, wrote an amusing take on his HHI episode entitled, "House Hunters International is Fake, So What?" in which he catalogued all of the details of his story that were changed.

Everyone who can afford it should visit Greece this summer. That was the conclusion I reached after reading a heartbreaking story about malnourished children in Greece on the front page of Thursday's New York Times. According to Liz Alderman's piece, malnutrition is a serious and growing problem in Greece, where the unemployment rate has reached 27 percent and even those who are employed have seen their wages slashed due to austerity measures. Alderman interviewed Greek school officials and others who have seen school kids stealing food, fainting or appearing listless due to hunger and foraging through trash bins for leftovers.

Greece is very near and dear to my heart so I had a difficult time making it through the story. Last year international tourist arrivals to Greece in the first nine months of the year (January-September) declined by 5 percent overall at a time when Greece needed tourists most. Even worse, arrivals from the United States plummeted by 19.2 percent. Images of protests in Athens no doubt scared away plenty of American tourists and some Germans stayed away in part because of a perceived backlash over austerity negotiations.

If you've never been to Chicago, or you've only visited during the winter, which tends to last roughly from early fall through late spring, you have to see the place in the summer. As soon as the weather gets warm, the city's residents flock to the lakefront and the place buzzes with live music, street festivals and places to dine al fresco.

The typical tourist itinerary includes stops at the Art Institute, Navy Pier, a boat ride on the lake or the river, Wrigley Field, the Magnificent Mile, and the Willis (Sears) Tower, among other places. If you've already been to these places, or you'd rather dig deeper and go further off the beaten track, here are ten more under the radar things to do in America's Second City.

10. Jam Sessions at the Old Town School of Folk Music

When you're lying in the shade of a towering palm tree on Playa Espadilla Sur, a glorious, often empty beach backed by thick forest in Costa Rica's Manuel Antonio National Park, the temptation to remain inert can be irresistible. But it would be a shame to travel all the way to this fascinating corner of Central America and do nothing but lie on the beach. Costa Rica has a whopping 26 national parks, so travelers can find adventure in every corner of the country. But Manuel Antonio, the country's smallest yet most popular park, is probably the most accessible adventure hub for active travelers who are looking for more than just great beaches.

Manuel Antonio is an easy 2.5-hour drive from San Jose on a recently built highway. The park itself is a 15-minute drive from the town of Quepos, which also has a small airport. A huge variety of hotels and adventure tour companies line the main road between the town and the national park. It isn't a pedestrian friendly place but thankfully you'll have plenty of opportunities for exercise in and around the park.

One could spend a month in the Manuel Antonio area and not get bored. You can hike through rain forests and beachcomb, take a canopy tour, go horseback riding, take a nighttime boat tour, snorkel or scuba dive, mountain bike, go on a bird watching and wildlife hike, kayak, go white-water rafting and more.

I'm a cheapskate and a risk taker, so Priceline's "Name Your Own Price" bidding tool was made for me. Over the years, I've bid on and gotten three- and four-star hotels in cities all over North America and Europe for an average of about $75 per night and as little as $35 using the free-re bid system outlined here. I love the deals but for me, part of the fun is the serendipity of seeing William Shatner, the Priceline spokesperson, pointing at me on my computer screen, watching the page spin and then seeing it spit out a result. It's a hell of a lot more fun than playing the slots but sometimes the Priceline gods give you a baffling selection.

Before I bid, I usually use the site Bidding for Travel to do a little research and develop a bidding strategy and I often use Priceline's ordinary hotel search just to see what pops up and what the star level and geographic bidding zone is. For example, if I'm thinking of bidding on three-star hotels in downtown Cincinnati, I'll look at their search results and take note of what three-star hotels there are downtown in the search results because, chances are, you'll get one of those. And if you know how to bid, you're likely to get the room for a lower price than what you see advertised in the search function.

If you want to feel better about your job, take a tour of the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in Beckley, West Virginia. On a recent tour of the vintage mine we learned about the extreme dangers and hardships miners faced a century ago when hundreds of thousands of people in Appalachia eked out a living mining coal underground.

On a brilliant Saturday morning in March, I took a seat next to my wife and two small boys, ages 3 and 5, in an open-air tram referred to as a "man car" for our tour and our guide, Marvin Turner, a retired coal miner, noticed that my sons had scowls on their faces.

"They're mad that we didn't buy them replica coal miners helmets in the gift shop," I explained.

"Uh-oh," he said. "There's nothin' worse than dealin' with angry coal miners."

Marvin asked our group of about 30 people if there were any coal miners on board and when no hands went up, he said, "Good, then if I don't know the answer to your question, I'll just make somethin' up."

Americans have long associated Nicaragua with the Cold-War era Iran-Contra scandal but as prices rise in Costa Rica and safety drops in Mexico, more and more savvy travelers are discovering that Nicaragua is a safe, cheap and interesting place with great beaches, reliably warm weather and a vibrant cultural scene.

Travel writers have been hyping Nicaragua for years. In 2005, Frommer's called it "the next big thing" and glossy magazines like Travel & Leisure and Condé Nast promoted the country as a budget friendly alternative to Costa Rica. Until recently though, Nicaragua was still considered more of an off-the-beaten track backpacker destination than a place for American families to vacation. That tide is starting to turn, as The New York Times recently illustrated by naming Nicaragua one of its places to visit in 2013. On April 1, the country's first super luxury resort, Mukul, opened. If it succeeds, others will surely follow.

For the moment, Nicaragua is still a delightfully budget friendly holiday destination. According to the Wall Street Journal, foreign visitors spent an average of just $43 per day in Nicaragua in 2011. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, next to Haiti, so travelers should be prepared to experience heartbreaking poverty. Many who come for a vacation in Nicaragua end up staying to volunteer and even those who don't are often changed by their eye-opening experience in the country.

In checking out our recommendations below, please note that save Mukul and a few other ritzy places, nearly every hotel, restaurant and attraction in this country could qualify as "budget" or "value" by American standards. Our recent scouting trip didn't operate on a strict backpacker's budget, but according to Tim Leffel, author of "The World's Cheapest Destinations," savvy backpackers can by on as little as $15 per day in Nicaragua.