Online Travel Tips

Making Online Reservations

Whether you want to reserve plane tickets, hotels, tickets to events and shows, or just make dinner reservations at your destination, the Internet is your home travel agent.

Make hotel reservations in advance for popular venues. Look for services willing to refund your money if you decide to change your reservation. Plane tickets typically can't be purchased more than six months in advance, and you'll probably get your best prices about 4-6 weeks out.

You may also find it easier to locate your information online and then call, particularly for overseas vacations.

Online Travel Tips For Exploring Your Destination

One of the great things about the Internet is finding online travel tips from other travelers' reviews of your destination. Fodor's Online, Frommer's Online and Lonely Planet also offer a surprisingly large amount of information both from their travel books lines and exclusively for the Internet to travelers.

You can also get a lot of travel advice from tourist-written sites like TripAdvisor and Epinions. As Consumer Reports warns however, you should be wary of this advice. These pages can be edited by anyone, you don't know if the online travel tips you're reading are from your fellow travelers or from travel agents and hotel owners. Your best bet is to read opinions from more than one site and more than one person before making a decision.

Another way to explore your destinations is by going to travel bureaus and tourism information sites set up by groups and government agencies in the towns you're traveling to. Almost every sizeable European town has a small agency, and if you find one you're interested in that's written in a foreign language, you can even translate it through Babelfish or by using Google's translation service (look for a "translate" link under the page returned). Any time you're traveling overseas, check out the CIA World Factbook for basic, totally unbiased information about the country or countries you're visiting.

Better Virtual Reality

A new trend that's great for exploring your destinations is the virtual world image found in Google Earth. More of these are in development by other companies, but right now Google is the best. This tool allows you to zoom to street level almost anywhere in the world; to give you an idea of how close they can zoom, you can recognize cars and make out shrubbery and underwater coral in images. Use the DirectX version for the fastest world browsing. Every day Google is incorporating new functionality, so visit the website frequently. Use this tool to locate the best beaches, explore narrow streets, and find out what your hotel is really next to before you start your trip.