The No Kissing and Kissing Zone signs that drummed up a ton of press when they appeared earlier this year in a UK train station are being taken down and auctioned off on eBay.

Placed on the walls at Warrington Bank Quay Station in Cheshire, the signs were apparently intended to curb an increase in delays and congestion due to overly amorous passengers killing time on the platform by locking lips. Passengers with insatiable urges were instructed to visit a separate kissing zone in the outdoor parking lot nearby. Even more hilarious, the kissing zone was marked with a sign announcing a 20-minute kissing limit.

The signs are priced at $48, and proceeds will benefit UK non-profit Red Nose Day. The auction ends Friday.

If you’ve been waying the pros and cons of Amtrak vs. airplane for your next trip through the Mid-Atlantic region, here’s a point in favor of train travel: On March 3, the passenger rail service will begin offering lower fares on Acela Express trains running between Washington, DC and New York ($99 one-way down from $133) and New York and Boston ($79 one-way down from $93). The fares will be available through June 26 and require a 14-day advance purchase.

Overnights at hostels are a backpacker’s staple. How else can most young people afford to travel the word for several weeks or months at a time? And while there are some fabulous, fun, clean and affordable hostels out there, there are also plenty that you would do just as well to avoid. The trouble, of course, is knowing the difference. For help with that, consult HostelWorld.com annual HOSCAR awards winners, announced this week.

Clearly, judging from this year’s winners, there’s some good hosteling to be had in Portugal and, stateside, in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest region. The winners were chosen as the world’s top hostels based on guests’ approval ratings from its inventory of over 20,000 properties.

Drum roll, puhlease. The winners:

Top 10 Worldwide Hostels

1. Travellers House, Lisbon, Portugal (pictured)

2. Rossio Hostel, Lisbon, Portugal

3. Lisbon Lounge Hostel, Lisbon, Portugal

4. The Riverhouse Backpackers, Cardiff, Wales

5. Greg- Tom Hostel, Krakow, Poland

6. Sitting on the City Walls Courtyard House, Beijing, China

7. Academy Hostel, Florence, Italy

8. Goodnight Backpackers Hostel, Lisbon, Portugal

9. Flamingo Hostel, Krakow, Poland

10. Mambo Tango Backpackers, Barcelona, Spain

Top 10 Hostels in North America

1. Hostel Seattle, Seattle

2. Pacific Tradewinds Backpacker Hostel, San Francisco

3. HI-Baltimore, Baltimore

4. Green Tortoise Seattle Hostel, Seattle

5. Times Square West Hostel, New York

6. Hostelling International, San Diego Downtown

7. HI – Portland, Northwest

8. USA Hostels, San Francisco

9. Green Tortoise Backpackers, San Francisco

10. Music City Hostel, Nashville

For a complete list of the winners, visit 2008 HOSCAR Awards.

Bargain-hunting travelers know all too well that a hotel deal is not always a deal. Sometimes, it’s a clever marketing ploy dressed up in deal clothing, usually with added amenities that you don’t really need (i.e. the dinner for two or complimentary cocktails that you won’t end up taking advantage of during your stay). Other times, what is advertised as a deal is really more of a small discount, not a great deal that offers a considerable (or meaningful) savings.

So what’s a savvy traveler to do? Well, you could spend all day running the numbers yourself, carefully tallying up the hotel rack rates and comparing them with those offered by each deal. Or you could mosey over to DealBase, a new-ish site that displays and analyzes hotel deals for destinations within the U.S., Canada, Caribbean and Mexico. For any deal that’s displayed on the site, you can use the deal analyzer (pictured in the screenshot above), a feature that breaks the offer down and compares it to the regular price using current pricing information from Hotels.com.

It’s a great little resource to add to your travel toolbox – especially nowadays, when getting a good deal is not only a welcome occurrence, but an increasingly necessary first step along the road towards vacation reality. We also enjoyed checking out the site’s Worst Hotel Deals, a list that includes a $100,000 hotel package for a New York hotel that the site determines is actually $85,857 more expensive than an identical stay without the “special offer.”

Here’s a little-known travel trick that even the most frequent air passengers often forget: if you buy a non-refundable ticket from an airline and later discover that the fare has dropped, you can often secure a refund or credit for the amount, as long as the new fare you find is for the identical itinerary.

As USA Today‘ Gary Stoller explains, many airlines will pay travelers the difference – as long as you discover the price decrease and request the refund or credit before you fly.

What varies is how airlines are willing to compensate travelers. Some – like Southwest – will simply issue a refund for the difference. Others, including United and JetBlue, will only issue the refund in the form of a credit voucher good for use one year from the original date of travel. And some airlines, including Delta and US Airways, will issue credit vouchers, but require passengers to pay a change of travel fee of up to $150 that may cancel out the fare difference.

If you regularly fly an airline with customer-friendly refund policies, it’s not a bad idea to get in the habit of browsing current fares for your itinerary a week (or a few days, even) before you fly.

[Source: Ever an airplane ticket and the price later fell? Get a refund.]

Over the weekend, Phoenix celebrated the grand opening of its new Light Rail metro train system, a $1.4 billion project that’s been under construction in the Southwestern city for the last four years.

If you happen to be visiting Phoenix before the New Year, you can ride the train for free until 3 a.m. on Jan 1, 2009. After that, it’ll cost you $1.25.

For travelers and visitors to the city, the new line means a car-free transportation for trips between north-central Phoenix, downtown and the eastern suburbs of Tempe and Mesa. There’s also a stop along the line for shuttle transport to and from Phoenix Sky Harbor airport.

If you’re going to be in New York this weekend and you love travel, consider checking out the New York Times Travel Show, a veritable smorgasbord of travel information from resorts, hotels, spas, cruise lines, tour operators, tourist agencies and adventure travel companies from around the world. Along with vendor booths and live entertainment performances representing a vast array of cultures, the show features a Taste of the World Pavilion filled with international cuisine and cooking demonstrations, a Spa Pavilion offering sample treatments and discounted packages at spa resorts, travel author appearances and special travel deals offered to folks brave enough to book their next vacation on the spot. And with travel experts Rick Steves, Arthur Frommer, Ian Wright and Stephanie Abrams – among many others – leading seminars, the show offers a rare chance for face-to-face learning from leading peeps in the industry. Cost: $15.

If you spy a scary looking dude with a semi-automatic weapon pacing around the platform the next time you hop an East Coast Amtrak train, don’t be alarmed. The company announced a series of new security initiatives today, but not in response to any specific threat.

Rather, Amtrak hopes armed officers patrolling train platforms, bomb-sniffing dogs and random checks of carry-on luggage will be the preemptive strike necessary to thwart terrorist activity and other acts of violence. While trains have been prime targets for terrorist activity abroad, we statesiders have been lucky to escape any similar incidents thus far. Knock. On. Wood.

The new Amtrak security measures will be put in place along the Boston to Washington corridor.

Amtrak Beefs Up Security

Amtrak Launches New Security Procedures

At the risk of sounding like a traveling germ-phobic nutjob, I’ll admit I rarely get anywhere near an airport, bus or means of public transportation without fishing my trusty hand sanitizer out of my bag. And while I sometimes find myself wondering what happened to the free-spirited traveling self who would most certainly scoff at the more uptight version that exists today, I can say this: once you hit 30, getting sick starts to suck more. Way more.

While most hand sanitizers kill germs right when you apply them to your skin, SkinWear claims to continue killing pesky germs for hours and moisturize your skin at the same time (good for use during flights, when my skin starts to feel nigh on reptilian). The product is also non-toxic, biodegradable and vegetable-based. Once applied correctly, which requires rubbing the product into the skin for 60 seconds, SkinWear will do its thing through four rinses at the sink.

Not being scary germs ourselves, we can’t personally vouch for the product’s effectiveness. But not getting sick is good enough for me.

Yeah, last minute travel can be cool. But it can also leave you cash poor, especially when you’re talking high-season travel in major vacation destinations. But as with most things in life, a just little edumuhcation can go a long way. Case in point: Kayak.com’s Fare Alerts.

Create a Fare Alert (or 12) on Kayak.com or SideStep.com for the summer getaway(s) currently sequestered in your noggin by clicking on the “Get fare alerts for this trip” link on the top right-hand corner of the flight results page. You can track fares for specific dates, a flexible span of time (e.g. summer weekends or, say, the month of June) or an entire region (e.g. Europe). When your daily or weekly Fare Alert (you choose how often it arrives) touches down in your email inbox, you’ll be able to make informed travel decisions.

Depending on what you ask it to track (specific dates, flexible span of time or even top cities in a region), each Fare Alert can show you:

- How much the fare for specific dates has increased or decreased in dollars since the last alert

- The airfare history for your trip dates based on searches made by Kayakers over the past 90 days

- A snapshot of prices in Kayak.com’s matrix view, so you can quickly compare prices by carrier and number of stops

- The lowest fare available during a specific span of time (e.g. the next four weekends)

- The best fares available for popular destination cities in a region you want to visit (e.g. Africa)

Who knows, maybe you’ll still pay craptons to travel to the most expensive resort on the hottest island right in the middle of the high season. After all, it’s high season for a reason. But at least you’ll be pimping it out with full knowledge of your unbridled American excess. Just remember the wisdom of G.I. Joe.

(**Editor’s note: Yeah, Kayak.com owns us. You wanna make something of it? I’ll have you know I was surreptitiously using Fare Alerts to aid in making my personal travel plans long before Kayak.com bought our parent company SideStep.com in December. Nepotism, bias, blah, blah, blah. Fare Alerts just make good travel sense.)