`Where can I get a clean, safe room in New York for no more than $50 a night?” asks an optimist.
“I’ve heard the main reason to come to New Orleans is to eat-so where should I eat?” asks a woman from California.
A mom from Ohio wonders what there is for kids to do in Toronto.
“What’s a good German restaurant in Bangkok?” asks a homesick Berliner.
Others ask: “Is Nathan Road a good place to buy clothes in Hong Kong?” and “Is Belize City as dangerous as people say, and where’s a good place to stay that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?”
Within hours, these travelers have answers to their questions.
They’re finding help through a global network of people who exchange travel tips, trivia and personal experiences on computerized travel “bulletin boards” on CompuServe, Prodigy, Genie, America Online and other network services.
The Travel Forum on CompuServe Information Service averages 200 to 300 new messages a day about travel, according to Jerry Schneiderman, forum “sysop.” Sysop is slang for system operator, and Schneiderman, who telecommutes from Manhattan, is responsible for the daily administration of the forum. Established in 1984, the forum is now nearing its 200,000th posted message.
Some of the forum messages are queries about destinations, hotels, restaurants and prices, a kind of electronic “letters-to-the-editor” seeking specific travel information. Others are answers to these questions. Many are just comments on travel issues, such as the latest news on airline fare wars or currency-exchange rates.
Subjects covered in a typical week range from visiting Cuba to honeymooning in South Africa to the best seafood restaurant in Bangkok. Popular destinations such as Paris, London, Cancun, Hawaii and Jamaica get the most comments. Interest in visiting New York is high, and other popular U.S. destination cities such as New Orleans, Seattle, San Francisco, Orlando and Washington also get frequent mentions. The Europe and United States sections usually are the most active of the 16 areas into which the forum is divided.
Most who visit the forum read messages-all except private ones can be read by anyone-but do not create new ones, just as most readers of newspapers don’t write letters to the editor.
The responses
The answers suggested for the questions posed at the beginning of this story, as they appeared recently on CompuServe’s Travel Forum and edited for brevity but not personal biases, were:
– “The Leo House, a nonprofit travelers’ hospice run by the Sisters of St. Agnes, at 332 W. 23rd St., is cheap, clean and safe,” says a frequent New York visitor from Baton Rouge, La. “The rate for two on our last visit was $50 a night for a relatively spare room with twin beds, phone, no TV, bathrooms down the hall. Many of the employees are theology students. Frequently you’ll find a sister running the elevator.”
– “It would take all day to tell you about New Orleans restaurants,” says an on-line New Orleanian. “The classics: Galatoire’s, not quite the best, but the most New Orleans of all. . . . Commander’s Palace, Arnaud’s, Mosca’s, Mister B’s (not old but already a classic). Some of the hot new places: Emeril’s, Mike’s on the Avenue, Bayonna. Plain and simple, mouth-watering too: Bon Ton, Casamento’s, Mother’s, Central Grocery. Burgers? The Camellia Grill, the Clover Grill (where they cook your burger under a hub cap) or Port of Call. For steak New Orleans-style and a little politics on the side, the Ruth’s Chris on Broad. For coffee, P.J.’s. There are a million more.”
– A traveling dad from North Carolina responds to the Ohio mom’s question: “Lots for kids to do in Toronto, especially if you come in summer. Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre and the Metro Zoo top the list, but there’s always Jays games (if you can get tickets), the Toronto Islands, of course, and Canada’s Wonderland. The Puppet Centre and the Toronto Stock Exchange are two favorites of my kids.”
– “A very good German restaurant in Bangkok is Schnurrbart at 128/46 Sukhumvit, Soi 23” says Steen Hansen, a Norwegian living in Thailand.
– Responds a Travel Forum member who had spent 21 years in Hong Kong: “Nathan Road used to be a good place, but today you’ll be better off at Stanley Market for inexpensive, casual clothes, and check out the factory remainder stores in Causeway Bay on Jaffe Road for T-shirts and sportswear. Pacific Place shopping center is good for up-market clothing.”
– “Belize City is funky and rickety and it’s not a place to walk around alone at night, but don’t let that stop you from visiting-a safe and inexpensive place to stay in the Ft. George area is Four Fort Street Guesthouse, which has a good restaurant,” says a regular traveler to Central America.
A veritable library
In addition to the bulletin board, where members post messages such as these (which “scroll off” or disappear after a few days or weeks), the Travel Forum has data libraries, more permanent files of travel articles, hotel reviews and saved series of forum messages of special interest that can be read at leisure. These now total about 1,000 articles, mostly first-person reports written by members. The forum also holds weekly electronic conferences, where participants communicate.
The Travel Forum on CompuServe may be counting on its worldwide membership for long-term growth. Although most members live in the U.S. and Canada, it has members from Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Costa Rica and elsewhere.
Currently, 5 to 10 percent of Travel Forum participation is by members from outside the U.S., estimates Schneiderman. The percentage is growing, he says, as the cost of international access declines.
Forum participants are a diverse bunch. Members include the travel editor of the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, Gareth Powell; Alf Ericksen, a lawyer from Florida who spends 90 percent of his time traveling and whose recent trips include visits to North Korea, Vietnam, Yemen and Antarctica; Mike Jones, an old Asia hand who commutes from his home in California to an apartment in Bangkok; Tom Brosnahan, who wrote Lonely Planet’s Central American guidebook, La Ruta Maya, and also Jim Hart, Lonely Planet staffer in Australia; Lindsy Van Gelder, author of a gay-oriented guide to Europe; Maki Itoh, a Tokyo-born New Yorker who spent the summer traveling in 12 European countries; Robin Garr, a former reporter from Louisville now living in Queens, N.Y., who in his job for a nonprofit agency is traveling to all 50 states in a two-year period; and Sharat Munjal, a Toronto member who says he has lived, not just visited, in two dozen countries.
A number are travel agents. Quite a few are travel writers. Some are airline frequent fliers with a million miles or more in their frequent-flier accounts; others, cruise buffs or railroad fans. Most are simply people who like to travel and like to talk about it.
The level of computer expertise also varies, from the sophisticated programmer to the one-finger typist who doesn’t know a byte from a bar stool.
What you’ll need
A user of any of the on-line services needs a computer, a modem and communications software. Auto programs, specially written for use on the global networks, allow users to log on, get messages, send messages previously written off-line and then log off quickly, saving on-line access charges.
Although an estimated 32,000 bulletin boards exist in the U.S., including a number of private travel boards, most are small and do not compete with the for-profit services such as Prodigy and CompuServe. (See related story on how to access the on-line networks.) There also are on-line systems in Japan and Europe.
Prodigy says it is the largest on-line service, with about 1.5 million members, mostly in the U.S. A joint venture of Sears and IBM, Prodigy is the only major service to sell advertising on its system, which users have to watch if they want to use the service. Next largest is CompuServe, with about 1.1 million members and an increasingly global perspective, having local-access numbers in Germany and Britain, with others planned.
The membership numbers can be misleading, however. Members may sign up and then seldom use the electronic services. Some Prodigy members say they have stopped using them because they say the system is “slow” in executing commands and because they dislike being part of a captive audience for ads.
Users of CompuServe are more likely to drop out because of costs. On CompuServe, for example, a member visiting several forums regularly can easily spend $50 to $100 a month on access time, which is usually billed to a credit card. Some members of Genie and America Online complain that these services don’t yet have the critical mass of users necessary for interaction and information exchange.
