Filed under: Travel
Stuck in an unfamiliar town? These sites help you get the most out of your business trip.
OpenTable.com. Want to book a table for four people tomorrow night at 8 o’clock? OpenTable.com lets you quickly discover which restaurants in a given city (20 in the U.S., a few internationally) have availability at a particular time, then book a table. Members earn points that can be redeemed for discounts at participating eateries. OpenTable.com includes links to reviews in Zagat.com and other sites.
Zagat. The famed guide to restaurants, featuring consumer reviews and ratings, is available digitally in several forms. You can get restaurant details for free on your laptop (but no ratings or reviews) or cell phone Web browser. For $5 (for 30 days) or $25 (for 12 months), you can access Zagat’s reviews and ratings on a laptop or cell phone browser. Other options: Download the Zagat application and database ($30) onto your Palm, BlackBerry, or Pocket PC handheld; or buy a CD-ROM for your computer ($30). Go to the Zagat Survey Shop for info on these service.
Chowhound. This foodie site features reviews and tips from diners around the world, plus interviews with experts; forums; videos; and blogs.
Hotels
TripAdvisor. Here’s where hotel junkies trade secrets, reviews, tips, and photos. Users rate hotels on such things as service, value, and cleanliness. The site features forums, in which travelers pose questions to other travelers. You can also book hotel and airline reservations.
USAToday.com. The newspaper’s Hotel Hotsheet blog is ideal for keeping up with the latest hotel trends and news.
HotelChatter. This blog has tons of hotel news, gossip, and reviews, as well as annually updated lists of the best and worst hotels with Wi-Fi.
Directions
Google Maps. I’ve had mixed success with all the mapping/direction sites. But I use Google Maps most often, because I love the satellite and street view features and the real-time traffic updates. I also use Google Maps on my Treo for on-the-go driving directions without a GPS.
Weather
Weather.com. For thousands of cities worldwide, Weather.com lets see how local weather will affect outdoor activities; allergies; skin conditions; even weddings.
Destination Videos
YouTube. There are thousands of user-posted videos in the Travel & Places categories.
Travelistic.com. This is probably the most travel-focused video sharing site, with over 5000 videos shot by and for travelers.
One-Stop Resources for Travelers
USAToday.com. The newspaper’s Travel site aggregates tons of tools and information for travelers, including MileTracker, a downloadable application for tracking frequent flier miles and MileMarker, a calculator that helps you determine how many miles you’ll need to fly from points A to B.
Town & Country Travel. The high-end travel magazine’s Web site features a useful directory of linked travel resources. Ask the Concierge, an online feature in which concierges at renowned hotels are grilled about what to do and see in their city, is worth a read. The site recently launched, however, so you’re likely to find only a few Ask the Concierge entries.
Concierge.com. The Web site for Conde Nast Traveler features helpful tools, including a database of travel agents, destination video clips, and Suitcase, an interactive travel planning tool.
Your Travel Bookmarks?
Have I missed your favorite Web travel-related sites? If so, share them with me at james_martin@pcworld.com. Please be sure to include your full name and location.
Further Information
Mobile Computing News, Reviews, & Tips
Fall’s Sleek Cell Phones: Our pictorial guide to this fall’s Apple iPhone competitors includes the Sprint Touch, manufactured by HTC. As its name implies, the Windows Mobile 6 Touch uses a touch screen to speed navigation. Though you can’t pinch or squeeze with the Touch interface, as you can with the iPhone, it does offer some cool shortcuts.
More $200-ish Laptops: Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative isn’t the only inexpensive portable in the news. Intel’s Classmate PC will cost about $200 to manufacture and will be aimed at least initially at schoolkids in Brazil, Nigeria, and some Asian countries (it won’t be sold to consumers). Asus’s Eee PC, now available for preorder, costs $260 to $400.
How to Remove Craplets: Craplets are those unwanted programs and utilities that come preinstalled on many consumer PCs. They hog hard drive space and can slow your system. Among the 20 (mostly free) downloads you can’t live without is PC De-Crapifier, which will remove most if not all of those unwanted programs.
Filed under: Travel
These Web sites will help make planning your next business trip easier and more pleasant.
Practically every airline trip today begins on the Internet. But with so many travel-related Web sites, if you don’t know where to look, you can end up experiencing information overload, wasting time, and getting frustrated.
So this week and next, I’m following up my July column on “Best Travel Planning Sites” with additional sites, to help you go right to the information and tools you need.
This week I focus on travel planning sites. Next week I’ll turn to travel tools and resources, such as sites that help you find restaurants and hotels, get weather reports, and more.
The Big Three: Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz
Each of these sites has something that sets it apart from the others.
Travelocity. Travelocity Business promises 24-hour-a-day phone support for business travelers at no additional charge. Its FareWatcher Plus gives you automatic updates on fare changes and deals for up to ten destinations. Windows Vista users can install the Travelocity Desktop FareWatcher gadget to receive alerts.
Expedia. This popular site also offers tools and services for business travelers. In addition, it includes helpful tips and information on 65 airports worldwide, to help you figure out how to spend your time during layovers.
Orbitz. Orbitz’s Traveler Update provides a dashboard-style overview of current security wait times, local traffic, weather, flight status, parking rates, Wi-Fi network accessibility, and other information for U.S. airports. Traveler Update combines information generated by users as well as reports from the FAA, TSA, and other sources. You can use the service on your computer and on Web-enabled phones.
Other Sites
SideStep. This site searches over 200 travel booking and airline sites–including Expedia, Travelocity, and JetBlue–and displays results in its downloadable toolbar. When you research a trip on a travel booking site, SideStep’s toolbar automatically pops up to show you the itineraries it recommends so you can easily comparison shop. You can search for airfares, hotels, cars, vacation packages, cruises, and more.
Airfarewatchdog.com. The folks at Airfarewatchdog.com claim that “real people” compare airfares on airlines that booking Web sites don’t typically include, such as Southwest Airlines. The site also includes smaller airlines, such as Allegiant Air and international carriers, which don’t usually share their best fares with the big travel booking sites. The site is no-frills but includes useful features, such as Fare of the Day and Top 50 Fares.
LastMinuteTravel.com. The name pretty much sums it up. This site is designed to help you find the best fares for airlines, hotels, cruises, rental cars, and vacation packages, particularly for those traveling with little advance notice.
Mobissimo. Unlike some travel booking sites, Mobissimo lets you search for international trips as well as domestic U.S. jaunts. The site is limited to airlines, hotels, and rental cars.
Flycheapo.com. This bare-bones site is useful for finding low-cost carriers within Europe.
WhichBudget. Going beyond Flycheapo.com, WhichBudget helps you find low-cost carriers in 124 countries. The site’s text-heavy interface will give you flashbacks to the mid-nineties, but it’s worth a visit nonetheless.
Research Aids
I wrote about the following sites in my July column.
Farecast. This site charts recent airfare history for the itineraries you enter and predicts what your trip is likely to cost in the immediate future. PC World named Farecast one of the 20 Most Innovative Products of 2006.
Kayak. Use Kayak to search multiple travel booking sites. The Buzz section reveals the best prices others have found using the site. Kayak was named one of PC World’s Top 100 Best Products of 2007.
ITA Software. This site is known for being objective (unlike some travel sites) and makes it easy to find itineraries that combine the lowest fares and convenient routing.
Yapta. You can use Yapta to get alerts whenever an airline itinerary you’ve booked drops in price. Armed with that knowledge, you may be able to receive a refund or credit for the difference between what you paid and the lower fare.
FlightStats. Head to FlightStats for on-time performance records for major airlines.
SeatGuru. Peruse seating diagrams for domestic and international planes at SeatGuru.
For Further Information
Mobile Computing News, Reviews & Tips
15 Essential Mobile Web Sites: Ever needed to make, shall we say, a pit stop when you’re on the go? The mobile browser version of MizPee may help you find the quick relief you need. Read about MizPee and 14 other great Web sites for mobile browsers in our roundup.
The Best Mobile Browsers: You might not be surprised to learn that Apple’s Safari Mobile, for the iPhone, earned our thumbs up among mobile browsers. We also reviewed Palm’s Blazer, the RIM BlackBerry browser, and others. Which browser came in last price? You might be surprised.
Mobile Broadband Explained: Quick–what’s the difference between EvDO and EDGE? If you’re not sure, read our “Business Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Broadband.”
Filed under: Travel
Leave the laptop at home, copy and paste blog posts, don’t rely on your cell phone, and more tips
You think a three- or four-day business trip is challenging? How about a four-month journey to eight countries–using 14 different plane tickets?
Randy Ross, a former PC World executive editor, recently took that journey. From August 30 until December 20, 2007, Ross ventured solo to Venezuela, Greece, South Africa, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Australia, and New Zealand.
While many don’t have the opportunity to travel so extensively, I figured we could all learn something from Ross’s travels. So I asked for his tips on making the best use of technology when far away from home for an extended period.
Keep a Travel Agent’s Number Handy
Some Web sites make it easier to plan an international, multicountry itinerary and get estimates of ticket fares. But you’ll still need a travel agent to get exact costs for your travel, Ross says.
The sites Ross used for research, along with his comments, include:
- Airtreks.com is a slick site that provides a price range and offers bundled specials. Unfortunately, its estimates can be vague and itineraries often include lesser-known airlines.
- Oneworld provides drag-and-drop ease for itinerary planning on major airlines. The site is marred by sluggish performance, however.
- Air Brokers International doesn’t offer customized itineraries but has lots of packaged specials.
Scan and Store Your Documents on a USB Drive
To prepare for the trip, Ross scanned essential documents–including his passport, prescriptions, immunization records, and driver’s license–and stored the digital files on a USB flash-memory drive. That way, if he lost the paper documents, he still had digital copies. The USB drive was password-protected and included EditPad Lite, a free text editor.
“Every Web cafe I visited had a PC that used a USB drive,” Ross says.
In addition, Ross uploaded the documents to a password-protected, free Yahoo Groups account as an additional backup. Though he didn’t need the digital documents, they might have come in handy: Somewhere in South Africa, Ross lost his USB thumb drive.
Leave the Laptop at Home
“I couldn’t bring a notebook,” Ross says, because it would be too heavy and fragile. “Anything that was really valuable had to fit in my money belt. There was always a chance my backpack could get stolen from a bus baggage rack or from a hotel room, or that I could get robbed.”
Instead, Ross relied primarily on public computers at Internet cafes.
“Stopping into a hostel or guest house and asking to use their Web terminal is a good option when you can’t find an Internet cafe,” he adds.
When Blogging, Copy and Paste
Like many world travelers, Ross kept family and friends up-to-date via a blog. His is called Randy’s Travel Diary. (Warning: The site contains occasional adult language and situations.) He recommends writing your blog posts in a word processing document and saving the files to your USB drive, then copying and pasting the text into your blog. The reason? Sudden power outages in some countries and inadvertent keystrokes made on foreign keyboards could wipe out everything you’ve typed into a new blog posting.
If you blog, Ross suggests adding an RSS feed option (which many blogging services offer). RSS enables those following your blog to automatically receive updates via e-mail and as a feed to their browser.
Trust But Verify Web E-Mail
Ross used Yahoo Web-based e-mail during his travels. Most of the time, it worked without a hitch. But in Cape Town, South Africa, Ross fired off multiple messages–and no one received them. Yahoo customer support couldn’t explain their disappearance. For important messages, Ross recommends asking recipients to respond back to you, so you’ll know if they received the e-mail.
Take a Cell Phone–If You Must
Ross took a several-years-old Cingular 2125 smart phone on the trip. For $200 he had it unlocked for international use and purchased a SIM card that included $100 worth of international calling.
Unfortunately, his phone only worked in a few places.
“Even though it didn’t work much, I had to carry it around along with the charger and all the power outlet adapters for different countries,” Ross says. (He had borrowed those items, so he couldn’t simply pitch them along the way.)
The phone was primarily for making local calls within each country and for emergencies. “I saw a lot people using Skype [to call home] at public terminals,” says Ross. “I relied on e-mail and my blog to stay in touch with people at home.”
In hindsight, Ross says he’d rather have taken a digital camera than a cell phone, and it would have been better to buy a SIM card specific to a country while he was there.
Prepay Before You Go
Before embarking on his adventure, Ross prepaid his utilities for five months and set up automatic payments via credit card for other bills. He also set up monthly automatic payments of his credit card bills from his checking account. And it’s a good thing: In several places, such as Karpathos, Greece, Ross was unable to access his bank accounts online.
To prevent fraud, credit card companies sometimes block access to your account after unexpected charges from foreign countries are received. So Ross recommends telling your bank and credit card companies in advance that you’ll be overseas.
On a related note: Recently, when traveling to Canada, I mistakenly tried to use my Charles Schwab VISA card in a Toronto airport ATM. I attempted this two to three times before realizing the card I was using was not my Schwab ATM card. By the time I reached my hotel, Schwab representatives had called my home and cell phone numbers to alert me to the unusual activity. I’ve been a Schwab customer for just a few months, but so far I have nothing but praise for the company.
Closing Thoughts
As much as he enjoyed his trip, Ross says, “I was never so happy to be home,” which is Boston. “I won’t be repeating this kind of trip anytime soon.”
Ross hopes to write a book about his adventures. His working title: Rats in the Lobby, Snakes in the Wine.
Ultimately, his adventure showed Ross he was tougher than he thought.
“I spent a lot of the trip obsessing about bathrooms, sleeping accommodations, drinking water, dysentery, and dengue fever,” he says. “I was bitten up by mosquitoes in malarial and dengue fever areas.
“Beyond a couple of colds I caught in Western countries,” he adds, “I never got sick.”
Filed under: Travel
Today’s sophisticated Web-based travel-planning tools can help spur-of-the-moment travelers find great deals.
I’m not the world’s most organized person, but I always thought it paid off to plan travel well in advance. After a recent European trip booked on short notice, however, I’ve come to appreciate the virtues of last-minute planning. Among other things, I got the best deal of my life for air travel: a short-hop flight within Spain for $18.24.
I also found airfares to and from San Francisco–purchased less than three weeks before I left–lower than any I’d researched months earlier. And on only three days’ notice my traveling companion, Contributing Editor Grace Aquino, located great accommodations in a tourist destination (Barcelona) that was packed for a tech-industry trade show.
The sub-$20 fare (found on Orbitz, for a Spanair flight from Malaga to Madrid) resulted from a database glitch, an Orbitz official said. But more and more people are making their travel plans later and later. Clem Bason, a travel expert at Hotwire–a site that specializes in last-minute travel deals–says the average hotel stay used to be booked about 20 days in advance; now, that figure has dropped to 14 days, and hotels attempt to offer their cheapest rates when most people are booking. Airlines no longer reward advance planners with the best fares, either: “They try to start filling that airplane as you get closer and closer to that trip,” Bason explains.
Be a Flexible Flyer
My trip taught me a few things about eleventh-hour planning. First and foremost, traveling during the off-season helped–probably a lot. Most of the flights were far from full. Similarly, you’re more likely to find deals if you’re willing to travel Monday through Thursday instead of during the popular weekend days.
Try all the angles. Travel-aggregation sites such as Farecast and Kayak, which search multiple booking flights (such as from the airlines, Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity), make viewing all your options easy. We originally investigated a multi-city fare for our flights from Barcelona to Malaga and from Malaga to Madrid, but did better when we searched for separate one-way fares.
Hotwire, Priceline, and other sites can find deals if you are willing to book based on generic attributes as opposed to specific brands (a flight route but not a preferred carrier, for example). These sites allow airlines and hotels to offer big discounts without making it obvious that they aren’t at full capacity, Bason says.
Consider a rental apartment, even if you’ll be there for only a few days. Grace found us a modern furnished apartment in a fashionable part of town through Craigslist’s Barcelona site. Not only did we save money, but we also had separate bedrooms, free DSL, and a kitchen.
Craigslist has sites (in English) for all major European cities. Check vacation rental listings, many of which have photos, for nightly and weekly rates. Don’t be shy about asking questions (does the building have an elevator, for instance).
I still believe in planning ahead when there’s reason to believe that plane tickets or lodgings may be in short supply. But in the future I’ll be a lot more willing to plan late: I’m pretty sure I won’t see an $18.24 plane ticket to anywhere if I buy six months in advance.
