Great news for budget travellers!

AirAsia is giving away 1 million free tickets for regional destinations for travel from April 1, 2007 to Oct 27, 2007. Online booking starts today Jan 10, 2007 to Jan 19, 2007. Regional destinations includes Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Macau.

For people hoping to be able to book tickets for the recently announced super low fares of RM 9.99 for long-haul flights by AirAsia X, they might be in for a disappointment.

Last check with AirAsia website showed only its regional destinations. Currently, at posting time, all destinations are still green - meaning seats are still available. I’ve booked mine too!

Oh but of course there’s a catch. You need to pay for airport taxes, fuel surcharges and administrative costs, which comes up to RM 40 for flights within Peninsular Malaysia.

For regional flights, the airport taxes varies, according to the countries’ currencies. You need to check the site for a complete table of breakdown on the charges.

Another catch is that you need to be extra sure of your plans - you are definite that you will be catching the flight to the specified destination on the date you choose.

If your plan changes in the future, you would incur extra costs to change the name of the traveller or the flight date.

Anyway, I purchased a return ticket to Penang for less than the price of a one-way bus ticket from Singapore. Worth it!

One of my favourite discovery today is how to make free long distance calls, without incurring a single cent, with superb quality, as though you are making a normal call using your phone. The whole experience is just like making a normal phone call, mind you!

Oh what’s the big deal, you might say, since you are able to make video calls using msn messenger, skype and yahoo messenger. Oh well, the difference is that you do not have to be confined to the laptop or pc if you uses an earphone with microphone, or have the whole world listening to your conversation if you uses the speaker.

The trick? Get a Wi-Fi enabled phone!

The catch? You need to have wireless internet connection.

The benefit? Talk for hours, limitless, “cook porridge” (oh just the cantonese expression for hanging on the phone) on the phone with just anyone in the world with internet connection, microphone and messengers such as skype.

But, some things to note is that the phone tends to get hot if you are on it for a long time (long as in, at least 1 hour or more)

Also better be prepared with extra batteries if you are away from electricity sources or be prepared to charge your phone more often, because it would use up battery life pretty fast!

For a conversation which lasted between 1.5 hours to 2 hours, about 40 per cent to 50 per cent of battery life was used up, judging by O2 Xda Stealth standards.

Good news for people who needs and wants to be connected with people or loved ones who are miles away and who, at the same time, wants to save on telephone bills, eh? Certainly! *wink*