DansDeals.com

Update:  Registration is now open, but is scheduled to close on Thursday at 10AM!  If you are considering going on Birthright sign up now and make a deposit.  If you decide not to go the deposits are fully refundable.  There will be a limited amount of couples allowed on each trip!

For 10 years Taglit-Birthright Israel has been offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; an all-expense paid trip to Israel for students ages 18-26.

Yeladim-Netivot has made this incredible experience available to the frum community as well. We send frum, all-male and all-female Birthright trips to Israel every summer and every winter!

This 10 day trip includes learning about Israel, but mostly gives you the chance to see Israel with your own eyes, understand what Zionism is, and experience Eretz Yisrael in a new light. Through visiting Biblical sights, seeing ancient ruins, hiking through nature, living the culture, fun trips, and introspective discussions, Yeladim-Netivot strives to help each Jew find his own personal connection to Torah and Israel.

We would like to offer you this FREE trip to allow you to re-discover your roots in a new way.

Sign up HERE to receive a reminder when registration opens.

For more information you can visit our website or find us on facebook.

Related:
Update #1
Update #2

Thanks to Amigo for being the official sponsor of Dansdeals.com updates while I’m in Israel! I’m using their USB Modem now to update the site. The card runs on Orange’s HSDPA network and the speeds (about 2 Mbps download and 300 Kbps upload) are great for a wireless card. It has worked flawlessly everywhere in Israel where I have tried to use it and it is invaluably useful!

I almost exclusively use my miles for Business or First class tickets. A coach ticket from the US to Israel on continental is 45K miles each way, but can be purchased for about $600 each way, which means that you’re only getting a value of 1.33 cents per mile. A BusinessFirst ticket though can cost $2,500 each way giving you a value of 4.17 cents per mile.

But what to do when there are no BusinessFirst seats for the dates they you need? Well I got our seats into BusinessFirst just days before departure…

Continental’s Plan B for a BusinessFirst award works surprisingly well once you find an agent who knows about it. Credit goes to FT for the details.
It works like this: If there is a standard coach award seat you can call up the international reward desk and ask for a BusinessFirst ticket but be seated in coach and placed on a waitlist for a BusinessFirst seat. For EWR-TLV your account will be debited 60,000 miles for each way.
You will either clear the waitlist into BusinessFirst no later than 24 hours before the flight or the waitlist will expire. If at 24 hours before the flight you still don’t have a BusinessFirst seat then at the airport you have to find an International Concierge or other knowlegdable looking agent and tell them that you are a displaced BusinessFirst customer. If they have no idea what you are talking about tell them to look up “gg onestandby” and review lines 85-89 which spell out the details of this reward. (This is reminiscent of “gg checkpoint line 53″ which you have to reference to show agents how to give you a security pass for you and your guests to access post-security Presidents Club’s if you aren’t flying.) If they need to verify that you have a BusinessFirst reward have them call up the reward desk.
Still not able to get a seat in BusinessFirst? Just call up the reward desk after the flight and they’ll give you a refund of the difference between the standard coach award and the standard BusinessFirst award.

At any rate the flight was very nice. When I flew to Israel 2 years ago in BusinessFirst Continental still had the old video system that cycled through a few movies. The new large touch-screen AVOD system allows to choose from hundreds of movies, TV shows, games, and music. You can pause, fast-forward, and rewind as you please.
For dinner the people who ordered kosher meals got:
-An appetizer bowl of nuts, craisins, and sunflower seeds.
-A first course of a roll and a fish salad.
-A choice of your own personal bottle of kosher red wine or Chardonnay (or both!)
-A main course option of fish or chicken with another roll, fruit, and a chocolate fudge cake.
The kosher Breakfast was cheese blintzes, a roll, J&J reduced fat cream cheese, norman fat free fruit yogurt, a fruit bowl, and a cheese plate.

The seats recline at a 170 degree angle which is fine for sleeping. Continental’s new lie-flat BusinessFirst seats are slated to begin being installed in September.

Immigration at TLV was shockingly easy, we weren’t even asked a single question!

I turned down an upgrade at Budget for a Hyundai I3 hatchback in favor of the Mazda 3. I’m not sure how every rental car company is Israel gets away with making Liability insurance mandatory. By having a World Mastercard they let you decline the CDW coverage, but even if your personal car insurance covers liability they still force you to take their own liability coverage at $14/day, which effectively doubled the rate.

Israeli GPS systems are very hard to use on the english settings. There are so many ways to spell a city and street name that it is very hard to find what you need. Zefat, Zfat, Tsfat, Tzfat, Safed…every city and street probably has half a dozen ways to spell it and only one will work in the GPS. Nevertheless once you find the place you want to go they do an amazing job at navigating, probably better then an American GPS.

When I was looking for hotels for a base in the North I was shocked at the pricing. I know it’s high season and all, but the going rate was about $250/night. There are no Hilton or Starwood hotels any more in the North so I found a Holiday Inn in Tiberias which is part of the Priority Club program.
The paid rate was $250/night and it costs 15,000 PC points/night to stay there. Priority Club normally sells its points at 1.15-1.35 cents per point, so buying them directly from Priority Club wouldn’t yield much of savings. AMEX MR points transfer to PC at a 1:1 basis and Diners club points transfer at a 1:1.25 basis but that would still be a lot of points to transfer for a Holiday Inn.

The solution is Priority Club’s new cash and points redemption option. With the option you can redeem 5,000 points + $60 for a hotel room. Unlike with Starwood’s cash and points option though what actually occurs is that the $60 buys you the remaining 10,000 points that you would need for the 15,000 point Holiday Inn award. If you can the room you will therefore get a refund of 15,000 points! In effect you are thus able to purchase PC points at 0.6 cents per point by using the cash and points workaround. 15,000 points at 0.6 cents per point would make the Holiday Inn Tiberias $90/night which I reserved.

When I went back to the Priority Club’s website the next week I saw that the Holiday Inn Tiberias was on a PointBreaks special of just 5,000 points/night. So I canceled my previous reservation and rebooked for 5,000 points, or just $30/night!

The hotel is located about 1 mile south of the downtown midrachov, so it’s in a much quieter area than the former Sheraton Tiberias which was right on the noisy midrachov. Upon check-in I was given the option of staying in the Golan wing or the Kinneret wing. The Golan wing room was tiny with barely enough room the bad and a bathroom. The Kinneret wing room was much nicer and bigger with a nice entry-room, decent sized bathroom, a couch, a desk, and even a balcony! There was a box of delicious (kosher lamehadrin) chocolate chip cookies, 2 small bottles of red wine, and 2 bottles of water waiting in the room for us.

I’m holding a few days after this, but that’s all I have time for now, I’ve still got a lot to talk about like using gizmo5, Amigo’s push to talk service, and a report on the brand new Mamilla Jerusalem hotel.  Feel free to post comments with your own thoughts and anything I can do to make these trip reports most helpful!

For all of your cell phone, blackberry, and modem needs while in Israel visit amigo-us.com for the best deal around!

Thanks to Amigo for being the official sponsor of the updating of Dansdeals.com direct from Israel!

I have been busily booking up tickets for friends and family on Delta’s fabulous 25% off business elite mileage tickets sale.

While I don’t think much of the 72,000 mile offering in coach to TLV, the 90,000 mile business elite offering is quite nice. It didn’t take much to convince my father in-law to pay the $100 redeposit fee and an extra 10,000 miles to cancel his coach MCI-TLV ticket and rebook it in business elite.

At any rate on select dates Delta will be flying their brand new 777-200LR aircraft to Tel Aviv which has the brand new lie-flat Business Elite seats. I was just able to snag some seats for my Aunt and Uncle on the lie-flats at the 90k rate!

Here are some links to give you an idea of the difference between Delta’s old and new Business Elite seats:

Old Business Elite

New Business Elite (777-200LR)

And finally a picture of good ole’ cattle class (where you should never have to sit if you play your miles right)

I see the 7770-200LR aircraft operating on the following dates for example:
JFK-TLV:
05/21
05/23
05/25
05/27
05/29
05/31
06/02
ATL-TLV:
05/31
TLV-JFK:
05/23
05/25
05/27
05/31
06/02
You have to click on “view seats” to see if it is listed as a 777-200LR. If you find more dates be sure to post!

The airlines that fly to Tel Aviv know good and well when they can charge exorbitant prices and block out all “saver” mileage seats. I was just able to land a saver BusinessFirst ticket for a friend to go from Cleveland to Israel for Pesach from 04/10-05/06 for just 100,000 Continental miles and $35 in tax! To buy the ticket would have been about $5,000, so he got an excellent value of 5 cents per mile.

These mileage seats will probably be gone very soon, so book now! You are able to go coach in one direction and BusinessFirst the other. Listed availability is as of the time of this posting only and will change rapidly!

You may be able to book Continental travel on these dates with miles from other Skyteam alliance partners such as Air France/KLM Flying Blue, Delta, and Northwest. Continental tickets to Israel booked via Flying Blue are just 25,000 miles each way (or 20,000 Starpoints), but Flying Blue tacks a fuel surcharge onto award tickets that the US based airlines do not.

Continental non-elite member’s saverpass availability nonstop Newark-Tel Aviv:

EWR-TLV

Coach (35,000 miles OW): 04/02

BusinessFirst (50,000 miles OW) 04/08, 04/10

TLV-EWR

Coach (35,000 miles OW): 05/01, 05/04, 05/05

Continental Elite member’s saverpass availability nonstop Newark-Tel Aviv:

EWR-TLV

Coach (35,000 miles OW): 04/02, 04/03, 04/06, 04/07, 04/08, 04/09

BusinessFirst (50,000 miles OW) 04/08, 04/10

TLV-EWR

Coach (35,000 miles OW): 05/01, 05/04, 05/05, 05/07, 05/08

BusinessFirst (50,000 miles OW) 05/06

20,000 Starwood Starpoints transfer into 25,000 Flying Blue (Air France and KLM’s joint loyalty program) miles.

That is all you will need to have to get to Israel or any other “European” destination in March or April!

S.B.S. previously made an excellent 8 page PDF examining every way of getting to Israel via Starpoints.

In that article he pointed ways of getting to Israel for 40,000 Starpoints or less (Via transferring Starpoints to JAL, British Airways, LAN, or Flying Blue)

Now S.B.S. points out (via fellow Clevelander “Beaubo”) that the Flying Blue program has special reduced mileage awards released every 2 months called “Web@wards.” These awards are 50% off the regular rate.

For March/April there is a Web@ward to/from Chicago or Toronto and Europe Zones 1, 2, or 3.

This is how Flying Blue defines Europe:
Europe 1: Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Netherlands, and Switzerland
Europe 2: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden
Europe 3: Albania, Algeria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Libya, Latvia, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Western Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia

The cost for the round-trip ticket is just 25,000 Flying Blue miles!!!

That’s right, open 2 free Starwood AMEX credit cards and you’ve got a mileage ticket to Israel!

As Flying Blue considers Israel to be part of Europe (zone 3), it qualifies as a valid origin or destination.

Even better, unlike with most carriers, you can book one way award tickets with Flying Blue, so if you want to go one-way it will be just 12,500 Flying Blue miles!

The Web@wards to/from Chicago and Toronto can only be flown with KLM via Amsterdam. Web@wards are not valid on Skyteam partners such as Continental or Delta (although nonstop travel to Israel on those carriers is allowed on the regular 40,000 Starpoints/50,000 Flying Blue miles award to Europe zone 3.)

There is also a March/April Web@ward for Los Angeles to/from London nonstop on Air France for just 12,500 miles OW/25,000 miles RT.

Taxes and fuel surcharges, which can be hefty on international carriers, are extra.

Flying Blue Wab@wards: March/April 2008

Unfortunately, you cannot search online for mileage availability on Flying Blue unless you have the required miles in your account.

The best bet for checking availability will be by calling Flying Blue at 1-800-375-8723

Coming soon: How you can check for mileage ticket availability on dozens of airlines.

Back on 10/01 I posted about rumors of AA and El Al signing a codeshare agreement. It has now been signed.

From the press release:

“American Airlines, a founding member of the global oneworld(R) Alliance, today announced it will apply to the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) for authorization to begin codeshare cooperation with EL AL Israel Airlines. The application proposes that codesharing operations begin on Feb. 1, 2008.

Under the proposal, American would place its AA designator code on EL AL flights to Tel Aviv from New York John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK), Los Angeles, Miami and Newark, as well as on EL AL fights to Tel Aviv from European gateways in London Heathrow, Paris, Madrid, Zurich and Rome.

In turn, EL AL would place its LY designator code on certain of American Airlines domestic flights out of El Al’s North American gateways — JFK, Miami, Los Angeles, Newark and Toronto. El Al would also codeshare on American’s flights between the United States and London Heathrow, Paris, Madrid, Zurich and Rome.”

It will now be possible to earn full AA elite qualifying miles and earn elite bonus miles for El Al flights. It will also be much easier to book TLV travel directly from AA.

Iberia.com

The base fare is just $356, but there are some $300 worth of taxes on the ticket!

You will have to connect in Madrid, but there are some decent connection times.

Use Iberia’s flexible search function to find availability.

Fare is valid for travel through March ‘08.

Random musings about my first trip to Israel for 24 days this past August with 2 of my younger brothers.

Israel Trip Part 1 Linky

Conversion note: When I went to Israel in August the Dollar:Shekel exchange rate was about 4.3:1, it is now 3.9:1.

Planning the trip:

The trip was based around tailoring everything we wanted to see along with where the Starwood hotels were located!

This was where we stayed each night:

08/03-04: Friday-Shabbos: Sheraton Jerusalem Plaza, Starwood category 3. Upgrade: No.

08/05: Sunday: Le Meridian Haifa, Starwood category 1. Upgrade: Yes.

08/06-09: Monday-Thursday: Sheraton Tiberias, Starwood category 2. Upgrade: Partial.

08/10-11: Friday-Shabbos: Rented an apartment in Tzfas for $150.

08/12-08/14: Sunday-Tuesday: Herod’s Vitalis Spa Eilat, Starwood Category 3. Upgrade: Yes.

08/15-16: Wednesday-Thursday: Le Meridian Dead Sea, Starwood Category 1. Upgrade: No.

08/17-18: Friday-Shabbos: With relatives in Rechavia, Jerusalem.

08/19-23: Sunday-Thursday: Sheraton Jerusalem Plaza, Starwood category 3. Upgrade: Yes.

08/24-25: Friday-Shaboos: With relatives in Ramot, Jerusalem.

08/26: Sunday: Boeing 777.

Getting from TLV/Ben Gurion To Jerusalem:

We arrived in Israel on Friday morning, however I didn’t rent a car at the airport for a few reasons:

-You must be 23 to rent at the airport at most agencies (I am only 22.)

-We were leaving Israel just over 3 weeks later, on a Sunday, so the extra 2 days would add a not insignificant sum.

Everyone that I spoke to before the trip told me not to take a regular taxi but a Sherut, or shared taxi, from the airport. With 3 passengers I was quoted a cost of US$75 for the shared ride. With a little bit of negotiating our regular taxi to the Sheraton Jerusalem Plaza was just $47, and we didn’t have to wait for 9 other riders to join in…

Car Rental:

There’s no way around it, if you want an automatic car you’re gonna pay for it! There is an agent called Chayat at 011-972-3570-5102 that has OK rates for Avis and free underage rentals.

Don’t rent a Hyundai Getz-the Mazda 3 is worth every penny for the upgrade over the Getz.

Only the World Mastercard covers CDW in Israel. As far as I could tell no other AMEX/Mastercard/Visa that covers CDW in Israel.

Driving:

I hate to downplay the risk factor, as I know the statistics for Israeli car accidents are among the highest in the world. However I honestly didn’t find driving in Israel to be much worse than in NYC. Yes, driving in Jerusalem is not easy (and parking is even harder) but overall it wasn’t too bad.

Getting around Israel-Maps:

I came to Israel equipped with 2 great maps that I bought from Amazon:

Streetwise Jerusalem

and Globetrotter Israel

Both were very good, but not quite good enough for navigation in unfamiliar territory.

Being in Israel and having a rental car for nearly a month coerced into buying a GPS for Israel.

GPS:

Yes, I do own a GPS, the excellent Nuvi 680 courtesy of Sam’s Club. Unfortunately Garmin apparently does not make Israeli maps, and the Nuvi can only use Garmin maps…

So on our first day in Israel we went to the Office Depot in the Kenyon Malchah shopping mall in Jerusalem. I bought a small Mio GPS on my Starwood AMEX. It is light-years behind the Nuvi. The satellite lock took forever and the maps were passably accurate at best. It didn’t know that many of the streets in Jerusalem are one-way or only for taxis and buses. (We learned the hard way that the yellow arrows mean taxis and buses only. We were flagged over by 4 cops before we finally got off of the offending road)

However without the GPS we wouldn’t have accomplished half of the things that we got done. It was very helpful in many places where signage was spotty and best, but the most helpful part was the POI section. By just typing in “Tomb” we were instantly informed of the final resting place of every tzaddik ever buried in Israel. We always knew where the nearest gas station was. Best of all you could just search all POI’s and it would spit out tons of neat places that we didn’t even know existed!

All in all, the GPS wasn’t perfect, but I can still strongly recommend it.

To be continued…

The internet is abuzz with rumors of an upcoming announcement of an AA-El Al partnership.

El Al’s current codeshare agreement with Delta is ending due to Delta’s launching of non-stop JFK-TLV service that will directly compete with El Al.

The agreement would allow AA to sell AA-coded flights from the US to TLV.  Additionally it would allow for award redemptions and elite-qualifying miles to be earned on the carrier of your choice.

AA does not fly directly to TLV due to the threat of having their plane repossesed in TLV to pay off debt obligations that TWA left unpaid when they declared bankruptcy and were bought out by AA.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the heated debate on whether or not I should post about my trip. In the end of the day I think that one of the advantages of this site over other deal sites is that there is a live person finding and posting the best deals, and working through the problems together with everyone else, so it only makes sense for me to write down my own experiences and share the lessons I learned with my readers.

Guidebook:

As any friend that I’ve ever traveled with will attest to, the first thing that I do before going anywhere is buy a guidebook, and read as much as possible in advance in order to plan the trip.

While planning a trip down to every minute detail was much more critical for past 48 hour trips to Hawaii and Florionopolis, Brazil, or even 1 week jumps to Japan, it is still very helpful when trying to squeeze everything possible out of 23 days in Israel.

In general my favorite guidebook’s are the ones published by Lonely Planet, as they are easy to read, and have really great info.

For this trip, being that I had 2 of my brothers as trip planners to help out, I went all out and bought 5 guidebooks.

Lonely Planet ($14.95 from Amazon, published March 2007): I was extremely disappointed to read the blatant and repetitive anti-Israel rhetoric spread throughout this book. However this book does deliver on its usual great suggestions, and is a must-have if you plan to do some hiking in Israel.

Frommers ($14.95 from Amazon, published November 2006) A good compliment to Lonely Planet.

Fodors ($14.93 from Amazon, published July 2006)

Let’s Go ($14.03 from Amazon, published December 2002) Intended for low-budget travelers

Israguide ($5 with rental of Amigo cell phone) Was very helpful with finding restaurants and kivrei tzadikim (graves of righteous people)

Short of hiring tour guides for hundreds of dollars a day, there is no way I could’ve accomplished all that I did without buying at least a few of the guidebooks, so they were a great investment.

Cell Phone:

I rented 3 cell-phones from Amigo US (MIRS in Israel) They run on IDEN, the same technology that powers Nextel in the US. Under the “short-term student” plan that I chose the phones were $20/month each including insurance, and included unlimited walkie-talkie minutes between each other. Minutes to the US were a hefty 25.9 cents/minute, and minutes to Israel were 15.9 cents/minute. Incoming calls were free. Internet usage is shockingly usurious at a whopping 9 cents/kilobyte (over $90 per megabyte!!!!!!) so stay far, far away from browsing the web on your phone. Shipping for the 3 phones to me was a flat $7.50 each direction. The main reason I rented from Amigo was for the free walkie-talkie feature, which we used extensively, and came in handy on many an occasion.

Calling Card:

Being that incoming calls to our phones would be free, it only made sense to find a good way for my parents to be able to call us from the US.

The most convenient, gimmick free international calling card that I have found is the Sonico Green card from Cloncom.

It offers no connection/maintenance/monthly fees, it never expires, and it has 1 minute rounding. Best of all it can be set up for pinless dialing, so you can just dial an access number from your home/cell phone, and then dial straight to your international number, without entering in any kind of pin/password! Additionally, the card can be recharged easily online, and they even accept payment via Google Checkout, so they won’t even have any of your credit card info! To find the card just type in Israel, and it is on the 2nd page of cards (click “view more cards”)

Rates to Israel via local access numbers are 3.4 cents/minute to landlines and 10 cents/minute to cell phones.

To be continued…

My grandfather often reminds us that the weather that you see in forecasts is measured in the shade.
We had a reinforcement of this lesson while hiking down waterfalls and natural pools of water in the Yehudiyah nature reserve in the Golan Heights.

And yes, that does say 120.1 Degrees Fahrenheit!

I will be going to Israel with 2 of my brothers for the first time next Thursday-We will be there for 3.5 weeks!

If anyone has any helpful travel hints or any past itineraries that have worked out well, please send me an email!

Thanks!

In the recent Starwood post an anonymous commenter asked about the Starwood branded hotels in Israel.
Less than 20 minutes later another anonymous commenter answered,
“Israel is one of the best places to use the starwood points (since they dont categorize them properly) – Le meridien dead sea 2-3000 points and the Herods Eilat which usually costs around 350 Dollars (cat 3) is only 7000 points in America it would be a Cat 6 – The Jerusalem Sheraton is also only 7000 points but not such a great hotel – still a unreal value.”

Now that is how the comments system is supposed to work-other people answering questions that they know about!

Since I have a planned trip to go to Israel in August for the first time since I was an infant, I have been looking into this issue as well!
P.S. If anyone has any other Israel tips (cell phones, car rentals, GPS rentals, etc.) please leave a comment!

There are 13 Starwood hotels in Israel.

Category 1:
Le Méridien Dead Sea
Sheraton Moriah Dead Sea
Le Méridien Haifa

Category 2:
Sheraton Moriah Eilat
Sheraton Moriah Tiberias

Category 3:
Sheraton Jerusalem Plaza Hotel
Sheraton City Tower Tel Aviv
Sheraton Moriah Tel Aviv
Herods Forum Eilat
Herods Vitalis Spa Eilat
Le Méridien Eilat
Sheraton Herods Palace Hotel Eilat

Category 4:
Sheraton Tel Aviv Hotel and Towers

Again, here is the cost in starpoints by category,

Unrestricted:
Category 1: 3,000 points (2,000 on a weekend)
Category 2: 4,000 points (3,000 on a weekend)
Category 3: 7,000 points
Category 4: 10,000 points

Restricted Cash And Points: (Tentative-Launching June 28th.)
Category 1: 1,200 points + $25
Category 2: 1,600 points + $30
Category 3: 2,800 points + $45
Category 4: 4,000 points + $60