While many of you may be out there lamenting the highest unemployment rate since 1993 and the current state of your stock portfolio, you are probably pretty sick of hearing all of the bad news about the economy. I mean, the economy is about all everyone can talk about—and if you listened to everything that was being said you’d probably just curl under the covers and refuse to come out until the recession is over. That’s why I’m here to bring you a little good news about the suffering economy.

It turns out that the shaky economy makes for a buyer’s market in the travel industry. With fewer people packing their bags and heading out on vacations this year, airlines, hotels, car rental companies, pretty much everyone in the travel industry are having to roll out some pretty fantastic deals to encourage people to travel. In fact, I found out that European budget airlines Ryanair and easyJet have been slashing prices and discounting flights in a heated fare war. European budget airline EasyJet has revealed their January sale by reducing all flights between March 1 and June 30 by 25% as well as offering discounts on rental cars through their partner Europcar.

Ryanair (partially in response to airfare cuts by Virgin Atlantic) has also put 1 million of their seats to more than 300 routes on sale for half price. With plenty of deals on airfare to Europe on major carriers, it looks like that European vacation you never thought you’d be able to afford might actually be affordable (and you may have a whole lot of time to travel if you just joined the unemployment ranks).