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The travel industry is ripe ground to till for smart operators - from airlines to hotels to car or vacation rentals. It has long been a standard that one would pay more in season for anything from an airline fare to a houseboat rental. The smarter operators never said they charged higher rates at certain times, only that they were granting tremendous discounts for OUT of season bookings. Cheap hotels never had to say anything - they are simply always cheap as a rule. Expensive hotels had to have a game plan however to account for the tremendous swing in rates.

Presently, airlines are adding fuel surcharges, extra baggage fees, overweight bag penalties and are now even charging for you having the audacity to take one bag on your trip! All to be blamed on high oil prices - as well they should. But hotels have a new source of rate gaming themselves - the internet. Smart operators use it fully to their advantage, having many different rates for the different sites or ways someone might contact them to book a room.

What the consumer needs to do is educate themselves on the possible ways to save money. Simply realizing there are different rates for different sites is a start. Knowing whether to book early or wait to book last minute is a strategy some use to their advantage. Whether to even make a reservation or just take your chances is a choice one can make. The wrong choice will cost you $30-$50 per night. The right choice can save you hundreds on a four or five day stay.

Where you are going and when you travel will account for much of the decision. If you are planning to go to Hawaii in July, you aren't going to wait until June 30th to start looking for bargain fares and discount hotels. Nor are you likely to go there with NO reservation and assume you will just wing it. If you were going to the Grand Canyon in November, I don't think I'd book a room on a discount site and pay for it in April either. Rates will likely plunge after the high season ends, so this is a decision better put off until October.

Once you begin to understand the dynamics of rate plans and use the one that works with your needs best, you will learn to save money almost automatically. But if you are the type that isn't aware of what is going on in a given city, you may find yourself trying to get into New Orleans at the last minute only to find out the Super Bowl is in town. I doubt I need to tell you how much a hotel there will charge at the last minute but I suggest you should just bring it in bullion and forget the paper bills.

David C. Reynolds is a longtime veteran of the Hotel business who has seen a drastic change in the hotel environment once the Internet became a fixture. He offers common sense, money saving advice about how to find rooms, booking hotels as cheap as possible, travel and ground transportation tips, understanding reviews and occasional destination 'specials'. His blog can be viewed at http://www.bookhotelscheaper.com

For success on your CCNA 640-802 and CCENT exams, you need to understand how and why Frame Relay LMI messages operate. You need to know this for real-world networking as well, since Frame Relay is prevalent in today's networks - and without LMI, you have no Frame Relay!

The Local Management Interface (LMI) messages are sent between the DCE, typically the service provider, and the DTE, the Cisco router. LMI Status messages serve as keepalives for the frame connection. If keepalives are not continually received by both the DCE and DTE, the frame connection will drop. The LMI also indicates the PVC status to the router, reflected as either active or inactive.

The LMI types must match on the DTE and DCE for the PVC to be established. There are three types of LMI:

Cisco (the default)

ansi

q933a

The LMI type can be changed with the frame lmi-type command. Before doing anything with the frame relay commands, though, we have to enable frame relay on the interface with the encapsulation frame-relay command. Remember, the default encapsulation type on a Cisco Serial interface is HDLC.

R1(config)#interface serial0

R1(config-if)#encapsulation ?

atm-dxi ATM-DXI encapsulation

frame-relay Frame Relay networks

hdlc Serial HDLC synchronous

lapb LAPB (X.25 Level 2)

ppp Point-to-Point protocol

smds Switched Megabit Data Service (SMDS)

x25 X.25

R1(config-if)#encapsulation frame-relay

R1(config-if)#frame-relay lmi-type ?

cisco

ansi

q933a

We can hardcode the LMI type as shown in that example, and there's another way to get the LMI to match with the remote DCE. LMI Autosense has the router send out an LMI Status message for all three LMI types.

The router then waits for a response for one of those LMI types from the DCE. When the router sees the response to its LMI Autosense messages, the router will then send only the same LMI type it received from the DCE.

On rare occasions - such as your CCNA exam, perhaps :) - the Frame LMI may not match. We'll take a look at such a scenario in the next installment of my exclusive Cisco CCENT / CCNA 640-802 certification exam tutorial series!

Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage, home of free Cisco CCNA 640-802 certification, CCENT tutorials, The Ultimate CCNA Study Package, and Ultimate CCNP Study Packages.

You can also visit his blog, which is updated several times daily with new Cisco certification articles, free tutorials, and daily CCNA / CCNP exam questions!

For a FREE copy of his latest e-books, "How To Pass The CCNA" and "How To Pass The CCNP", just visit the website! You can also get FREE CCNA and CCNP exam questions every day!

Take the CCNA Mastermind Webinar Boot Camp with The Bryant Advantage!