Some of the best travel sites on the Internet aren’t easy to find. They are buried in an ever-changing, highly competitive electronic marketplace in which travelers are easily overwhelmed and confused.
I have been surfing the World Wide Web for two years. I spend four to five hours at it every working day and, to my wife’s disapproval, sometimes at night and over weekends too. It’s my profession: to try to separate what’s useful for travelers from a tidal wave of commercialism and junk.
Fortunately, the technology has vastly improved during these two years. To begin with, I no longer suffer from chronic busy signals at America Online, my Internet service provider. My modem is light years behind the equipment used by Microsoft and other techies who often demonstrate their prowess to the news media, but at least it’s much faster than what I started with.
I’m a frequent target of e-mail, faxes, phone calls and snail mail (that last means mail delivered by the Postal Service, in case you didn’t know) about travel developments on the Web. Such on-line travel agencies as Microsoft’s Expedia, Preview Travel, the Internet Travel Network, Travelocity and Biztravel.com are spending millions to get travelers to look to them for information and–more important–to book flights, cruises, hotel rooms and rental cars.
Many less-splashy sites, however, have developed special expertise and helpfulness in particular areas. I came across some of them through tips from friends, from computer magazines or from “Site of the Day or Week” e-mails from such services as NetGuide (www.netguide.com/travel) or Yahoo (www.yahoo.com/picks). I found others almost by accident: by clicking my mouse from link to link to link, deeper and deeper into an electronic maze, and then suddenly finding that there are golden needles in the haystack, after all.
Some of those golden needles are these:
– For on-line airport information, QuickAID (www.quickaid.com). A project of the QuickATM Corp., a 4-year-old Berkeley, Calif., company that provides touch-screen information kiosks at airports, this Web site has virtually all you need to know about terminal facilities, ground transportation, airlines and nearby hotels at 65 American airports and 31 abroad. For O’Hare, just about every respectable hotel in Chicago and suburbs is included, as are detailed, annotated maps of the airport’s terminal buildings.
– For auto rentals, BreezeNet’s Guide to Airport Rental Cars (www.bnm.com/rcar.htm). This leads you to the on-line booking programs of major auto-rental companies at 52 airports in the United States, eight in Canada and others in Sydney, London, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt and Shannon, Ireland. The site is commercially driven and lower-price local companies are mostly omitted, but the user is spared a lot of clicking from site to site.
– For discounted air fares, TravelHUB (www.travelhub.com/consolidators). This is a site for travel agencies that contract with airlines to sell unsold seats at what are often far below the lines’ published rates. Sometimes, however, temporary advertised specials may be better, such as several lines’ recent $198 round trips between New York and London. Consolidation can be a slippery business for the inexperienced traveler, so consumers should tread cautiously. Twelve presumably reputable travel agencies (they list their credentials on-line) who sell the tickets of more than 500 consolidators can be reached through TravelHUB for booking by telephone.
– For even cheaper flights, the Air Courier Association (www.aircourier.org). This nationwide organization provides all the important information about traveling as an air courier, which means paying relatively little to accompany a courier company’s checked baggage rather than your own. Flights aren’t available everywhere or at all times, but this site will keep you up to date about specials and tell you how to sign up.
– To track frequent-flier accounts, Biztravel.com (www.biztravel.com). The bizMiles program of the on-line travel agency Biztravel.com provides almost-instant information on your status in the frequent-flier programs that you have registered with the site.
– For real-time flight tracking, TheTrip.com (www.thetrip.com/flightstatus). This amazing service of an on-line travel agency told me on a recent afternoon that as of one minute earlier, Delta Flight 609, which had left New York’s La Guardia Airport at 12:08 p.m., was 10 miles north of Palm Beach International Airport in Florida at 4,000 feet and was about to land. (Biztravel.com has a similar service, under renovation at this writing, and transmits flight and gate information to its customers by beeper.)
– For nuts-and-bolts help for international travelers, the personal site of Steve Kropla (kropla.com). Kropla of Kingwood, Texas, a very frequent traveler who works in the oil drilling industry, organized this site to help others learn how to cope with unfamiliar electric systems, television broadcast standards and telephone dialing codes. There are several useful links to other sites, such as a directory to locate Internet cybercafes around the world (cybercaptive.com).
– For cheap sleeps, the Internet Guide to Hosteling (www.hostels.com). Despite its sponsorship by hostels and related businesses, this site’s Worldwide Hostel Guide, supposedly the largest database of hostels available anywhere, claims complete editorial freedom. There also are facts sheet on hostels, a bulletin board for exchanges of information and lots of advice about budget travel.
– For overseas, Transitions Abroad (www.transabroad.com). This is the on-line version of a bimonthly magazine that tells how and where you can live, work, study or vacation abroad alongside the people there.
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Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com
