Travel Deals, From 5-Star Luxury to Camping

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Late spring is the time to seal the deal on summer travel plans and quick getaways. Specials and new services abound. Here are some of them.

Deals and Getaways: Air Canada is offering a sale on flights between New York City and Toronto, with fares starting at $128 one-way for travel through Sept. 9. As per usual with airfare sales, the lowest prices are available for midweek travel. Book by tomorrow.

There are hot deals on trans-Atlantic routes to Europe this summer, too. On British Airways' (BAIRY) all-business-class boutique unit Open Skies, fly in flatbed seats from New York to Paris from $1,029 each way with a round-trip ticket purchase. Paris-bound flights from Washington D.C. start at $1,079 each way. Book by June 30 for travel between July 30 and Sept. 10. Note: BA says the recurring cabin-crew strikes against the parent carrier aren't affecting Open Skies.

Prefer to stay on terra firma? The U.S. National Park Service plans to waive general admission fees at hundreds of parks nationwide on Aug. 14-15, Sept. 25 and Nov. 11. The NPS offered the same deal last year. Other fees for goods and services will still apply.

New Airline Routes and Airport Services: Summer is peak travel season, up there with the end-of-the-year holidays. Accordingly, airlines are introducing new routes, some aimed at high-flying, high-yield business and corporate travelers. Among them: Swiss International Air Lines' nonstop, six-day-a-week service between San Francisco and Zurich. The idea, Swiss CEO Harry Hohmeister said in an interview, is to link Silicon Valley's high-tech engineers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to Swiss pharmaceutical giants like Roche, and tech and green energy startups in Switzerland's largest city.

More broadly, Swiss has installed a newly reconfigured business class (think more personal space, fully flat beds) on Airbus A340 planes to San Francisco and New York, with plans to roll out the new service across its fleet this year and next.

In the gloomy, confusing days after 9/11, serial entrepreneur Steve Brill launched a registered-traveler program called Clear. It was designed to offer road warriors who'd undergone voluntary background checks (and paid $100 a year) fast-track passage through tangled airport security. Clear, citing funding woes, closed last year, but embryonic programs with similar goals are busy being born.