The magic is fading for Disney, but for its customers, it's just beginning.

This morning, after announcing that theme park bookings fell off a cliff in the last month and corporate income was down 13% last quarter, Disney's stock dropped 6.1%. Hotel bookings at the Walt Disney World resort are down 10% from what they were a year ago, profits are down from last quarter, and they're only going to get worse.

So Disney, which runs nine of the ten most-attended amusement parks in the world, has sprung into action and is doing something it never does: It's giving stuff away. After years of turning up its whiskered nose at discounting, suddenly it's scrambling to draw customers back to Orlando. Disney is going all-out to fill its parks again.

The biggest score was just announced. If you book by December 20, you can get a seven-day vacation for the price of four days. That means that if you buy four nights in one of its hotel rooms plus four days of park tickets at the full price, Disney will give you another three nights and three days theme park tickets--free. The buy-four-get-three-free deal, equivalent to a 34% discount, also comes with another astonishing gimme from January through March: a free $200 gift card, which can be used to buy food and souvenirs.

What? Disney is giving away money? What's next-- talking fairies?

So it's refreshing to see an airport take control of its own destiny. In Orlando, a city that stands to lose a great deal from the coming slowdown in tourism and convention business, the airport (coded MCO) wants to help passengers save money flying there. So it has uploaded page of the latest airfare specials flying there.

It makes sense, and it's so simple you have to wonder why your airport isn't doing it to stimulate business. Many smaller American airports are floundering as the major airlines yank service. But if airport authorities do all they can to help keep the planes full, the airlines will be less likely to suspend service. If they go, the airports, which depend on landing fees that are built into the cost of every ticket, will go into the budget hole.

I guess pipe dreams can come true, too. This afternoon, in a balloon-smothered luncheon at New York City's Times Square, Disney announced its big marketing push for 2009, and it has the Mouse doing something it almost never does. It's letting people into its parks for free.

The gist of its new ad campaign (mark your big anniversary or birthday with a "celebration vacation" at Walt Disney World or Disneyland) is nothing spectacular. But the centerpiece of the promotion is noteworthy: During 2009, you can get into its parks for free on your birthday.

And like Disney's previous push, the Year of a Million Dreams, implementing it won't cost the company much in the way of infrastructure. Next month at Disneyland, Disney property Miley Cyrus (pictured, with generous rodent) will have a 16th birthday party to help kick things off (she'll give the best present: the gift of P.R).

Mind you, this is a company that starts charging children the "adult" price at age 10, and at Walt Disney World in Florida, that freebie can mean a $75 savings on a one-day pass (Disneyland in California is $69). For kids under 10, the savings will be $63 in Florida and $59 in Anaheim. Disney's parks always did give a few extra gimmes to guests of all ages on their birthdays, including self-congratulatory buttons, balloons, and oozier-than-usual smiles from "cast members." But Disney's parks are notorious for rarely discounting tickets to the general public, and it almost never gives passes away. This economy, though, is seeing lots of stalwarts cave.

Okay, I'll start by admitting that I've been to Walt Disney World a couple of times. Before our first visit, my sisters and I pored over pictures of the Hall of Presidents, the Haunted Mansion, the Disney Castle, and other attractions, plotting the perfect routes to every ride, the ideal sequence of events to maximize the power of our Disney vacation. To the park's credit, it managed to live up to even my incredibly high childhood expectations. In fact, the only down side was my parent's barely-concealed weariness after a few days of wandering around.

A few years later, with my sisters a little older and Epcot offering more mature attractions, my parents agreed to revisit the Magic Kingdom. After a couple of days, I began to understand why Mom and Dad had dragged their feet on our first trip. As my youngest sister led us on a death march tour of Mickey's gulag, I found myself asking if we really needed to take yet another whirl on the teacup ride, once again ride shotgun with Mr. Toad, and be reminded that it's a small world. Standing in line, baking under the brutal Florida sun, I found myself suffering from an existential crisis, doubting the promise that, indeed, Captain Nemo's submarine adventure was really the pinnacle of human experience.

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That cushion is not expected to last. Dwindling airline seats and high gas prices are cutting into the parks' ability to draw crowds as big as they once were, even as shareholders demand more profit each year. Even once you pass through the gates, there's less bang for the buck. Once upon a time, you could buy your ticket and get a full day of entertainment, including shows, rides, parades, and fireworks. Less so now.

Some of the country's most major parks, even ones we thought were doing well, are wasting no time in hoarding their pixie dust. Your amusement park dollar just doesn't get you as much as it did a few months ago. Among the casualties:

Does this picture look homey to you? Travelodge, one of Britain's primary hotel chains, has just opened a property in Uxbridge, in far west London, that's made almost entirely out of 86 shipping containers. Each room was pre-fabricated in China (where else?) with a built-in bathroom, shipped to England, and then stacked, as a BBC video story puts it, like "a giant Lego set."

The 120-room property, banged up in a scant 20 days, was then smoothed over to give it a unified look, much like your aunt might frost a layer cake. The trick works so well that the company is slapping up another one, this one more than twice as big, near London's Heathrow Airport, and about half of its future properties will be pressed from the same cookie-cutter mold.

I wouldn't say the place's industrial provenance is being sold as a gimmick or painted with the worn-out "green" brush. In fact, you'd never know you were sleeping in a former cargo hold, mostly because the hotel chain's rooms have never been very showy. Its battery-hen rooms are short on luxuries (plasma TV, yes; phone, no) and iffy on size (beds are king-size), but they're always defined by a dignified crispness. The pricing system is also simple: The more rooms that are available, they cheaper they are. If you book far enough in advance, rooms can be insanely affordable. For January, rooms can cost just £29 right now. That's about $50 a night.

We all do it. When we're planning a trip to an unfamiliar city or we're looking for a new hole-in-the-wall for a dinner date near home, we poke around online for reviews of local restaurants.

But on some sites, reviews are serving up a steaming plate of B.S.

WalletPop told you about the hugely popular Yelp, which has been accused of extorting restaurants and shops that got received bad reviews. For a price, says a San Francisco CBS affiliate, Yelp will move the badmouthing blurb lower down the page, potentially out of sight. One sofa store owner paid Yelp $350 a month to bury her embarrassing reviews.

Last year, one New York City hotel was awarded a five-star review by an effusive reader of TripAdvisor. Except the hotel hadn't even completed construction yet. Public relations flacks were suspected.

This sort of stuff happens all the time. TripAdvisor says it tries to weed out these obviously false postings. But some readers allege it swerves too far even in that. One travel expert about Hawaii accuses TripAdvisor of twice killing reviews that conflicted with its paid sponsors. For sites like these, integrity is everything. Many publications, though, don't have the resources to do the follow-ups necessary. Increasingly, the phonies are not apparent.