My glamorous assistant Simon and I like to try and bring you little snippets of exclusive info we can glean from the friendly STA Travel team, and our insider mate Tom has just given us a juicy nugget to share. Apparrently this year, for the first time, the big boys British Airways, American Airlines and Virgin Atlantic aren’t putting out ’sale’ prices on their direct flights to the USA.

You may be able to find lower prices with small carriers going indirectly, but for direct flights in June, September and October, STA are now pretty much untouchable on their fares, and Tom assures me that their flexible ticketing option still applies. This means that for a direct flight to New York in those months, you’re looking at £363 from STA with the closest Expedia quote being £427.

For details of all the STA USA direct flight special sale prices to cities like Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Miami and Washington, click here.

STA travelbuzz, bringing you second-hand exclusives, every so often. This is what we call unmissable bloggery.

Quick alert for any of you students and youths out there. STA Travel have just posted up a bunch of exclusive British Airways travel deals for students and young people travelling from the UK - and their website is the only place you can get hold of them, here.

You have to have one of those ISIC or Youth cards to qualify. They cost £9 and get you a host of other discounts from other national and international organisations - definitely worth getting ( you can buy them here). If you’re not a smooth-browed teenage stripling but are still in full-time education, the deals are perfectly valid for any students under 35 with an ISIC card.

The offers are booking until 29th April and destinations include a load of US cities (New York, Boston, Chicago etc) as well as Geneva, Hong Kong, Beijing, Cairo, Johannesburg and, for the trust-fund babies, Dubai.

Si and I still just about qualify as ‘youth’ (damn that encroaching 26th birthday!) but we’re both too busy to book right now, therefore we beg you to blog about it if you go so we can live vicariously through your glorious golden lives.

iamscoby is on the North American leg of his round the world trip. Having caught up with old friends in Toronto, been underwhelmed in ‘past-it’ New York, welcomed in ‘fabulous’ Chicago and frozen in snowy Minneapolis, the 34-year-old Scot has arrived in Seattle at the same time as the Dalai Lama.

Compared to his previous destinations, iamscoby finds Seattle ‘refreshing’, describing that ‘it marches to it’s own beat, it’s decidely lovely and there seems to be little of the usual passive aggressive undertones you find in many cities.’ After chilling in the Seattle Water Garden he drops into the Pike Place fish market, where he visits the first ever Starbucks (a true chunk of capitalist history) and records a video of the crazy mongers flinging their fish. He also advises taking a stroll through the arty Captiol Hill district and browsing the Elliot Bay Bookstore, model for the cafe in Frasier and ‘exactly what a bookstore should be.’

iamscoby is particularly impressed with Seattle’s green credentials - ‘it’s a city dedicated to reusing, recycling, free-cycling and composting’ - although he also notices the great number of homeless vagrants on the streets, easily overlooked in a city with such a civilised surface.

Check out his recommendations if you’re thinking of visiting, and let us know if you’ve found some hot Seattle spots of your own.

Currently in the latter half of a four-month tour of North America, Lisa Taylor and her friend are both toting accompanying TravBuddy blogs where they’re recording the progress of their journey.

The two separate journals of the same trip make for some interesting reading (if you’ve time enough to compare the two) and is not something I’ve come across often – which is exactly why I thought it worth mentioning.

If you’re considering a trip across North America, have a read of these on TravBuddy. The couple started off in Ontario, Canada for a month before moving on the US for exactly 88 days to avoid having to get hold of a Visa (if you’re a British citizen visiting the US for less than 90 days you do not require a Visa). Their full travel itinerary is available here, but so far they’ve hit Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon, and are currently at Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Find out what to expect from these locations through the words and pictures of the adventurous duo…