SitesForSoreEyes
The Travel Site Less Visited
By Jim Calloway and Courtney Kennaday
The idea of traveling, whether for business or pleasure,
is both exciting and vexing. Unfortunately, few of us
have the time or money to permit us to hit the road not
caring where we stay or how we get there. That’s
why we believe there isn’t an aspect of travel
that can’t be improved by careful Internet research,
from the planning stages on.
We all know the heavily advertised travel websites like Orbitz, Expedia,
and Travelocity (we
can even hum their jingles). Of course, we love those
sites and use them, too. But the great poet Robert Frost
wrote of the “road less traveled.” We prefer
to explore the site less visited. We hope you enjoy these
unusual websites, and that you find them useful and fun
too.
For starters, we love Trip
Advisor, which offers all the tools you need to
plan your trip. But what makes this site golden are
the reviews from actual travelers. We wouldn’t
think of planning our next vacation without it. While
people’s opinions can and do differ on a given
hotel or restaurant, we prefer to know as much as possible
before we book. If we’re looking for a quiet
hotel for a romantic weekend with our spouse, reading
several reviews that mention “child friendly” or “big
water slide” could save us from disaster. You
can sort hotel searches by popularity, price, class,
alphabetically, or top value. Be sure to check the
date of the review before making a final decision.
Hotels that were reviewed negatively can get a new
manager or remodel and make a turnaround, and vice-versa.
Besides Trip Advisor, you might also sample the reviews
over at Yelp, which
was founded to help people find reviews of local businesses.
We also love Kayak, which
lets us search many airlines at once. A particularly
useful feature is the ability to “favorite” promising
flights as you scroll through the pages of potential
flights. You can look through several pages of search
results marking favorites. When one tires of that (which
for us is when the prices start getting way too high),
you can go to your favorites and pick the winner.
We all know that all airline seats are not created equal.
Some of us like window seats and some of us like the
aisle. (We’re not sure anyone likes the middle.)
But SeatGuru gives
us the lowdown on what seats have “hidden” positive
and negative features, like a cool breeze from the air
conditioning system or a block against reclining due
to the exit row behind. We always have this site standing
at the ready when we reserve our tickets online and bring
it up when it is “select a seat” time.
Bing Travel (formerly
Farecast, but acquired by Microsoft in 2008) is the first
airfare prediction website. According to Bing Travel,
it utilizes over a billion airfares on a daily basis
to predict with 75 percent accuracy whether fares are
rising or dropping and if you should buy now or wait.
We searched for flights to San Diego from our home town.
The search results produced a typical list of flights,
sorted with low price first, but the kicker was the 7-day
Price Predictor for the search, which indicated that
we should buy now, since predicted fares were rising
or steady. There was also a confidence rating of 94%
that the prediction was accurate based on their track
record. There’s also a hotel Rate Indicator, which
labels hotel finds by “Deal,” Average” and “Not
a Deal.” We think it’s human nature to want
to buy something that has a green “deal” flag
on it. At least, it made us feel better about what one
has to pay for a hotel in Washington, D.C.
Another option for finding the best deal: sign up for
price drop alerts on hotels and flights at Yapta.
Or, visit Travel
Zoo, which publishes deals on hotels, airfare, rental
cars, and more. Travel Zoo aims to be your one destination
for deals, and vows to make shopping for bargains even
easier if you sign up for their email deal alert, the
Travelzoo Top 20®
Bring all your travel research together with Trip
It, which promises to turn the chaos of planning
travel on the Internet into an orderly process. Sign
up for free and you can build an itinerary, organize
your trip, and then Trip It will help monitor it and
inform you of any changes.
Here’s a site that we hope we never use: Sleeping
in Airports. Sadly, it seems an inevitable fact of
air travel these days that we may end up draping ourselves
pretzel-like around one of those ubiquitous gray airport
chairs with a coat over our head trying miserably to
catch a few Zs. This site shares travelers’ advice
and reviews of airports around the world, in terms of
comfort for spending more than a short layover. Regretably,
we note that only two of the top ten “best” airports
are even on our continent.
You know the saying: “when you’ve got to
go...” What if you don’t know where to go?
You need the Bathroom
Diaries. Yes, the Bathroom Diaries lists and rates
the facilities in more than 100 countries, including
some really remote ones. So if you’re in Antartica
and pondering that second beer, go ahead.
Raise your hand if this ever happens to you: you take
a wonderful trip and buy picture postcards to mail to
your awestruck friends and family. Perhaps you even buy
postcard rate stamps. But, somehow, you end up at home
with a suitcase full of dirty clothes and unmailed postcards.
Enter Hazel Mail.
Just upload your digital photos to Hazel, add the personal
message and recipient’s address, and Hazel will
turn your photos into postcards and mail them for you.
Each card costs approximately $1.50 apiece, although
you can register and purchase “HazelBucks” to
save money. Now there’s even an IPhone app for
Hazel, which should make it even easier to use while
traveling.
What about the nitty gritty of getting from point A to
point B in a city? Hop
Stop is a city transit guide for a number of major
U.S. cities. If you are planning a trip to NYC, for example,
and want to use public transit, go to Hop Stop, plug
in your starting address and destination. Hop Stop will
give you detailed step by step directions for which subway
line to take, where to enter and exit, distances and
travel time. Similar to Hop Stop is Metro,
but Metro bills itself as the ultimate free guide on
PDA (Palm, PocketPC, iPhone, BlackBerry, Smartphone...)
to public transport systems worldwide (400 cities covered
now).
Want to plan a group vacation with your family or friends? Triporama gives
you the tools to create a group home page, send invitations,
share information with everyone, map your itinerary,
and more. Membership is free, and the signup is simple.
One of us has a big birthday coming up, and the travel
deals for girlfriends caught our eye. But Courtney told
Jim to get his own friends.
Have you ever heard of the BootsnAll
Travel Network? Sometimes “independent traveler” is
a euphemism for “backpacker.” BootsnAll started
with backpackers in mind, and grew into something for
every kind of traveler. One can spend quite a bit of
time there, sorting through mountains of good information.
There are the usual travel website offerings, such as
flight booking, hotel reservations, and travel insurance,
but this is a much more collaborative website, with message
boards, blogs, photo sharing, and articles authored by
members of the BootsnAll network. Even if you aren’t
going anywhere right now, the articles are fun reads.
The message board is organized by topic, such as “destination
forums,” “travel resources,” “ways
to go,” and more. Destination forums are broken
down by geographic regions. Travel Resources covers a
real hodgepodge of food, health, photography, gear, finding
buddies on the road, and even funding your travel habit.
In order to participate, you must register, but searching
and viewing are open to anyone. “Insiders” is
a cool feature of BootsnAll. Members can post specific
questions about a place and receive an answer from the
people who are recognized as experts by BootsnAll. Although
this is similar to a message board, you can ask a much
more specific question about a place and get an expert
answer.
Real Travel and Travellers
Connected are cut from similar cloth as BootsnAll
but may not be as content rich. However, Real Travel
makes our list because of the incredible list of hotels
and the vacation idea feature. Click on the hotel index,
and you are taken to an alphabetical list of hotel
names. Click on the hotel you want and get an information
page for the hotel. As for the vacation idea feature,
just click on a category, like “architecture” or “food & wine,” and
you get a list of top cities for that category.
Travellers Connected seems to have more of an emphasis
on student travel, but we think overworked lawyers could
use a “gap year” themselves. One suggestion
for what to do with your gap year: relive some of the
great journeys of history and literature. Wanderlust maps
out the travel routes of Lewis and Clark, Charles Lindbergh,
and Phileas Fogg (Around the World in 80 Days),
among others.
With all these great websites at your disposal, we have
just one question: are you packing yet?
Jim Calloway is the director of the Oklahoma
Bar Association Management Assistance Program. He served
as chair of the ABA TECHSHOW 2005. Calloway publishes
the weblog, Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips, at http://jimcalloway.typepad.com,
and was coauthor of the book, Winning Alternatives
to the Billable Hour. He serves on the GPSolo
Division Technology Board. Courtney Kennaday is the director of the Practice Management
Assistance Program of the South Carolina Bar, where she
advises bar members on practice management and law office
technology. She also publishes the weblog, SC Small Firm.com,
at http://www.scsmallfirm.com.
© Copyright 2009, American
Bar Association.
