The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I donÕt want to stereotype an entire industry, but I have to say that I havenÕt had much luck with travel agents. On two of my trips this year (one to Boston and one to Shanghai) I had to use travel agents to book my flights and my hotel. One good experience and one very bad one, where I had to make repeated phone calls, send e-mail after e-mail and eventually get grumpy before I could get any results. I usually like to book my own travel and the way IÕve done it the last couple of years has really changed. IÕm looking at travelling to Barcelona, Spain, with my family on spring break. The first place I head to is Expedia. Even just as a browsing and dreaming tool, I love this site. Find the most expensive flights and hotels in as many places as you want and dream about going there someday. But this is only the starting point. After searching out hotels and rooms that IÕd be interested in and flights that IÕd want, I head back out to the Web. I want details. I search out hotel websites and look for the full details. One of the big things that I always do is look for price differences between Expedia and the hotelÕs own website. Often youÕll be surprised at what you find. Even better, when you Google the hotel, look at the advertisements in the margin and youÕll often find a coupon for a free night or a reduced rate ÐÊeven better. I look for pictures of the places I want to stay. I even e-mail the hotel looking for information about family rooms and suites. I also always look for reviews of the hotel online. There are many places around that let people post their own experiences. I had found a few good hotels for this trip weÕre thinking of taking but decided not to stay at them because of the reviews that people had written. Another tool I use is Google Earth. You can search for the hotels that you found and see where they actually are on a map. How close are they to the places you want to visit while you are in the city? How close are they to the noise of major freeways? Are there other places that are closer to places you want to see? Google Earth is also great for looking for other places around that you might need during your visit. You can search out restaurants, banks and malls so you have some idea of where all of the places are before you actually get there. Using Google Earth, you can find out how far away places are from your hotel because simply by clicking and dragging, you can measure distances. So after I have this research done, my next stop is Twitter. I post questions, looking for people who have travelled to the places I want to visit. Any tips? Any places to see or avoid? Anyone have opinions about the hotel I think IÕve chosen? Many tourist bureaus of major cities have Twitter accounts and they constantly search, looking for people who are asking questions about their place. I left a few questions on Twitter last week about Mallorca, a few islands just off the Mediterranean coast of Spain. It turns out that a group of hotels have a Twitter account and I soon found that they were following me, and of course they were absolutely more than willing to answer any questions I might have about a place to stay. Sites like these have really changed the travel business. They have made it much more open and in some ways easier to get what you want. You can explore all of the possible options, from flight times and airlines to all of the hotels that you can imagine. You can explore how all of these options will affect the cost of your trip, and even book a car or tickets to shows you might want to attend. The best part is that I can do all this from the comfort of my couch whether itÕs 5 a.m. or 10 p.m. Like the music and the newspaper industries, I think travel agencies need to be offering new services for a changing world. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
