Austin, Texas is famous across the world for its amazing live music scene. Often called the Live Music Capital of the World, the city plays host to many music, art and theater festivals all across the year. These attractions attract a great number of tourists to the city all across the year. There are numerous hotels, both luxury hotels as well as budget hotels to cater to these visitors.

If you want to get good deals on your hotel bookings in Austin, it is recommended that you book in advance. Many hotels here offer great discounts and packages if the bookings and payments for the rooms are made in advance. Another tip is that even if you make your booking in advance, remember to ask for upgrades and discounts at the front desk once you are checking in. Many hotels offer complementary upgrades and other attractive packages if they have free rooms and other last minute cancellations.

The Internet is a great place to search for affordable hotels in Austin. You can either check the official sites of various hotels or travel websites. The travel websites are especially helpful as they collate information like rooms, amenities, tariffs and guest feedback from various hotels across the city and give a comparative analysis. These hotels also help you make your bookings online.

Austin has many music festivals with famous musicians from across the world all round the year. Most of these events are held at the main entertainment centers of the city like the City Hall and the 6th street. If you are visiting Austin during one of the major music festivals, you might find the hotels located close to these venues to be more expensive. Therefore you can opt to stay at hotels in other locations like Red River, Warehouse District, and the Market District. Do not worry, these areas also have numerous notable pubs and restaurants where you get to see amazing local and national musical talent every day.

Overview of Music of Austin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Austin

Attractions of Austin

http://www.austintexas.org/timeline/?currentActivity=1

Budget Hotels in Austin

http://www.hotelsbycity.net/hotels/usa/texas/austin/

Budget Hotels in Warehouse District

http://hotelguides.com/texas/austin-tx-hotels.html

Austin is a city of eccentricities and Austin residents take great pride in it. This is a city of eclectic and diverse culture, open minded and experimental people, and many films, fairs and festivals. Also called the Music Capital of the World, the city gets hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, from America and across the world.

There is a well established network of hotels to cater to all Austin's guests, dotted all across the city. Some of the notable luxury hotels located in downtown Austin are given below:

Four Seasons Hotel - Located in 98 San Jacinto Boulevard, the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin has a unique advantage of being in close proximity to the convention center and entertainment district of the city, yet have a green and tranquil garden next to the Lady Bird Lake. The hotel has 291 well-appointed and comfortable guestrooms and a luxurious spa with a spectacular lakeside setting. There are several fine dining options like the stylish Trio and the sophisticated Lady Lounge.

The Casulo Hotel - Located in 3017 South I- 35, this hotel is great for both business travelers as well as vacationers to Austin. The hotel has a great Zen like tranquil atmosphere. You can choose from the Deluxe rooms, Petite suites, Jacuzzi suites, and Balcony Suites all of which are decorated in chic urban interiors. There is a great in house cafe which has an Asian fusion menu.

Kimber Modern Hotel - This is a great choice for today's urban travelers with a modern architecture and chic yet luxurious interiors. The guestrooms and suites are minimalist and at the same time warm and inviting. The common areas which form the heart of the hotel have floor to ceiling glass walls and have great yet intimate seating with egg chairs, surfboard coffee tables and great art work.

Four Seasons Austin

http://www.fourseasons.com/austin/guest_rooms_and_suites/

The Casulo Hotel

http://casulohotel.com/gallery/

Kimber Modern Hotel

http://kimbermodern.com/about.php

Best Hotels in Austin

http://www.hotelrooms.com/Luxury_Hotels_USA_Austin.htm

If you are searching for affordable apartments in Austin, whether it is for rent or purchase, the Craigslist Austin is a great place to begin your search. Craigslist acts as a centralized network for online communities which feature free online advertising for residential rental and purchase as well as commercial properties in its housing section. Established in 1995, the Craigslist is a very popular website with millions of users across America.

The Craigslist website works on an easy to use search engine where you can feed in required information about types of house, minimum and maximum rent budgets, size of apartment desired in terms of number of bedrooms and other specifications like pet friendly amenities in the buildings to get an exhaustive list of apartments available on rent or for purchase in Austin. The websites also offer picture of the properties advertised. If you are a visitor to Austin and are looking for an affordable vacation apartment instead of a hotel room, you would get great options in Craigslist Austin.

Apart from the apartment listing, the Craigslist Austin offers valuable information to the users on personal safety tips for renters and home owners as well as tips on how to avoid scams and fraudsters. Also remember to read the informative post on Fair Housing which gives you details on the Equal Housing Opportunity Act and links to official websites and posts of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Also do check out the Craigslist blog to read interesting and informative posts regarding housing in Austin and other cities in USA.

Whether you are searching for apartment to purchase or sell, to rent out or for renting, the Craigslist is a great forum to search for properties and customers of your choice. The posting guidelines ensure that genuine users post their classified and hence the website acts as a reliable recourse to its users.

Housing Search in Austin

http://austin.craigslist.org/hhh/

Safety Tips on Craigslist Austin

http://austin.craigslist.org/about/scams

Equal Housing Opportunity Act

http://austin.craigslist.org/about/FHA

The University of Texas at Austin is a Public Ivy institution with a legacy dating back to 1883. UT Austin, as it is commonly known, is one of the largest centers for academic research with research expenditure nearing $600 million in 2009. The expansive UT Austin campus spans 423.5 acres with 150 buildings. The campus also houses seven museums and 17 libraries.

The Harry Ransom Center started way back in 1897 with the donation of 10,000 volumes from the personal collection of Swante Palm. Two decades later, the university decided to collect rare books from around the world and thus started the formidable collection. It is home to one of only 21 surviving copies of the Bible from the Guttenberg press.

Other collections and museums like The Blanton museum of art, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, the Texas Natural Science Center(Texas Memorial Museum), the School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection and many such collections make UT Austin an enviable education destination.

The specialist libraries at UT Austin are the result of more than a hundred years of efforts by donors, students, librarians, and faculty. Some of the better known and more frequented ones are Architecture and Planning Library, Alexander Architectural Archive, Benson Latin American Collection, Chemistry(Mallet) Library, Classics Library, Collections Deposit Library, Engineering(McKinney) Library, Fine Arts Library, Geology(Walter) Library, etc.

The University of Texas is also home to numerous specialist centers for academic, scientific, and cultural research. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American history is a formidable chronicle of America. It has varied collection ranging from the political, civil rights, military, and photographic history of the formation of the US. Other centers like the Learning Technology Center, the Fusion Research Center, the Linguistics Research Center, etc., form the foundations that make UT Austin a great academic institution.

University of Texas Overview

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_at_Austin

Harry Ransom Center - Mission and History

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/about/mission/

UT Libraries

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/admin/cird/

Dolph Briscoe Center

http://www.cah.utexas.edu/collections/index.php

A complete experience of the American Southwest is incomplete without a visit to Austin, TX. Austin is a confluence of a quartet of major ecological regions, which makes it an oasis of sorts with elements of the tropics, desert, and some rain. This geographic advantage makes it a flourishing habitat for various flora and fauna, and there is no place that showcases it better than Zilker Park.

The Zilker Park is a recreational area spread over 350 acres of lush greenery. The large size of the park makes it an ideal venue for various events and is home to many attractions, the local favorite being the Zilker Botanical Garden. The botanical gardens in Zilker Park are situated on 31 acres of varied terrain. Located on the banks of the Colorado River, these are separate, independently maintained gardens based of different themes.

For those fortunate to visit the gardens, a must-stop is the Hartman Prehistoric Garden. This garden came to being, with the discovery of over 100 tracks made by prehistoric reptiles and the fossils of an ancient turtle. A major fund-raising and ideation for the theme resulted in the creation of a park with a cretaceous(150 - 0.3 million years ago) flora with ferns, horsetails, liverworts, conifers, palms, etc. There is also a life-size sculpture of an Ornithomimus - a creature believed to have lived in the areas in prehistoric times.

These varied gardens offer a glimpse of various styles of gardening and showcase different specializations in garden-keeping. Visitors need not be baffled by the huge diversity, as guided tours are available to help you understand the diversity and significance of the plant specimens.

There are plenty of events that also happen at the Zilker Botanical Gardens such as the Zilker Garden Festival which is an annual crowd puller. Then there is the Swedish Pioneer Community event happening in the month of August for people interested in visiting this Austin Landmark.

The Zilker Botanical Gardens

http://www.zilkergarden.org/gardens/gardens.html

More on the specialist gardens

http://www.texasoutside.com/botanical.htm

Zilker Botanical Gardens on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilker_Botanical_Garden

About Hartman Prehistoric Garden

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartman_Prehistoric_Garden

Austin is one of the most popular tourist destinations in America and across the world for music lovers and artists alike. Every year millions of travelers come to the city to experience the amazing music, entertainment, art and adventure sports scene that the city has to offer. The travelers have great choices of numerous hotels and vacation rental apartments to stay in during their stay in Austin.

Vacation apartments are fully furnished apartments which are equipped with all amenities that are present in an average urban home. These can be of any size ranging from one room studio apartment to 4-5 bedrooms family lodging. While housekeeping services are offered by the apartment owners or managers, you can opt for maintaining it yourself and save a lot of money.

Vacation apartments are ideally suited for travelers who are traveling with large families and especially with children. It is also suitable for business travelers to Austin who need to be in the city for an extended stay. These apartments offer an 'at home' feel to the guests which is different from any hotel stay. However, if you are on a short vacation to Austin and are likely to be too busy to maintain a vacation apartment, a hotel stay and the services may suit you more.

While the numerous hotels in Austin offer great accommodation and world class services, these hotels can prove to be expensive for many long stay guests. Also, for travelers traveling in large groups may need to book numerous rooms which again prove to be heavy on their pockets. Therefore, for such large parties or extended stay visitors, vacation apartments prove to be affordable stays with a "home away from home" feel.

A great place to search for both kinds of accommodation in Austin is the Internet. The various travel websites collate information about the numerous hotels accommodations in the city ranging from budget hotels to luxury hotels. For information on vacation apartment rentals you can check out the city yellow pages.

Austin Travel Overview

http://www.austintexas.org/visitors/plan_your_trip/

Austin Vacation Home Search

http://www.tripadvisor.com/VacationRentals-g30196-Reviews-Austin_Texas-Vacation_Rentals.html

Austin Vacation Apartment Rentals

http://www.discoverourtown.com/TX/Austin/Lodging-356.html

Austin Hotel Search

http://hotelguides.com/texas/austin-tx-hotels.html