But, let’s say it’s not your thing. Where can you find travel recommendations from people like you? Sure you could ask your friends, yet their travel experiences will be somewhat limited. What about having a site that matches your travel tastes with other people with similar interests?

That’s the niche the Finland-based TripSay is going after. I’d say they’re doing a pretty darn good job of it. I found this site using StumbleUpon, since I seldom travel or look at travel sites. The design intrigued me. It’s clean, kind of Web 2.0 with nice controls and a super intuitive interface. So, I started to play with it.

On the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll see the icons above. Pretty self-explanatory aren’t they? Although I don’t know why an orange heart is better than a pink one. Wouldn’t red be more obvious? At first I didn’t know what the Dislike button was supposed to be. Was it a blue boob or a blue bum? A blue bum made more sense, since one of the places I put the symbol on smells like bum. Yes, I just put that in an article. Journalism at its finest, folks.

In case you were wondering, it was Toronto. Let the flames begin! The cloud with the snore Z’ds are for the places you dream of going to.

TripSay wants you to tag at least 5 places before continuing. Now, keep in mind, you do this even before you sign up. That’s smart. It gets you to use the site completely risk free – you don’t even need to give them your e-mail address. That earned a degree of trust from me right away.

After that, you just click on the Proceed button to see your results:

I found what it returned to me to be a bit surprising! These weren’t places that I normally would have considered going, or even looked up. However, once I read the travel recommendations and reviews and the travel profiles of the people that TripSay said were similar to me, I started to really get into it all! Here’s the number one travel recommendation that it had for me:

I don’t know how to pronounce it, but it sounded cool. At first, when I saw a graveyard, I thought this must be some sort of morose joke.  But the more I looked into Oaxaca, the more I realized how rich in culture and history it is. It’s not the super-resort of other Mexican places like Puerto Vallarta or the overcrowded metropolises that I despise like Mexico City.

At this point, I signed up for the free membership to the site. For the next few hours I played with it more and added more places I’ve liked, disliked or dreamed of going to. I found that there is a Groups section to the site. Within these groups, you’ll find people with similar life interests to you. From there, you can view their travel recommendations and get an idea of even more places to visit. I like the fact that there is a group for people that travel with children. That often makes things a bit more…interesting when travelling.

Once you set up a profile of yourself, you can add specific interests to your profile to get even more accurate results. For me it was things like relaxing, history, culture, arts, reading, etc. The auto-suggest feature does come up with some funny results as you start typing though. I started putting history in but I misspelled it as histr. Here’s what it suggested:

I really should have chosen histrionic personality disorder to see what would be recommended. Probably Bellevue Hospital. On second thought, it does look pretty cool.

The Me as a traveller control is a great idea too. Just a simple slider control to find where your balance is on some aspects of travelling. Even as someone who loves history and would love to travel Europe for 6 months or so, I do have a fairly tight budget. I’m also not multilingual. I’m more sesquilingual – one and half languages. French being the half. Oddly enough, I can pick out conversational themes in most Romantic languages as well as German. As long as they are speaking slow enough. Travel sports like waterskiing and such aren’t my thing either. I’m more of a museum guy.

You can always continue on adding places that you’ve been to and liked, or disliked.  Since TripSay utilizes Google Maps, you can zoom right down to pretty much street level. At this point, you can even recommend a particular restaurant or attraction.

Here’s the zoom-in on Vancouver B.C., Canada with my favourited places. We weren’t there for more than a day, but I’d highly recommend it as a destination for anyone, not just museumnistas like me.

Add to this whole mix the fact that there is no advertising, or trying to get you to book trips through them, the experience is an excellent one. I guarantee that this site will go into heavy rotation on my bookmarks.

Do you have any expereinces with TripSay that you’d like to share? Just got some great travel recommendations? We’d love to read them in the comments below!

Image Credit: Kerry Vaughan

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Wanting to experience life as it was lived by the footloose heroes above is sending thousands on the road today who will have their movements and moments chronicled on the world wide web.

When you’re starting to plan a trip today, it’s not as easy as it was for Sal Paradise in the 1940s. You can’t simply board a greyhound and expect everything to go great. Planning and further planning are necessary to get from A to B. In this article, I will provide you with a road trip planning guide for the technology enthusiast by showing you the top web apps available for the backpacker, adventurer or holidaymaker.

Yahoo Trip Planner

This is a tool for road trip planning that will get most of the nitty gritty work done for you such as finding hotels, things to do, where to eat and it will even give you suggestions of where to go. The planner can be found here. When you first go to the trip planner, to your right you’ll see ‘Create a Trip’. Click on this button. You will be asked to sign in with your Yahoo ID. If you do not have one you can register here.

When on the ‘Create a Trip’ page, enter in the location to which you want to travel. This could be a country, area, city or town.

Then, you’ll be asked for information about your trip such as dates and scheduled activities such as tours and outdoor pursuits. If you’re not sure about where to stay then enter the city you’re visiting into the destination bar. This will return tons of hotels, facilities and things to do in the area, which are constantly updated with event plans and new hotels, restaurants etc…

The trip planner also has a Journal to keep your friends and family informed. Here, you can write about your experiences on the open road. Your family (who undoubtedly will subscribe to your journal) will be able to keep track of what’s going on with you, look at your photos and comment on them. Think of this as a kind of travel Twitter come blog.

MapQuest

Okay, so now you’ve got your ideas formulated into an envelope full of timetables, bus tickets, hotel reservations and your trusty passport. What’s next on your road trip planning to-do list? Well now, you have to know where to go. While the average internet user in you will automatically point you to Google Maps, I’d suggest using MapQuest as it is more tailored to the traveler who has a geeky side with a touch of organizational OCD.

Their maps are just as detailed as Google’s but give better information for those on-foot and in a car. For example, while you’re driving at cruising speed you may as well instruct Johnny in the seat next to you to pop open the Mac Book and see what’s to come. Along the top of the map window which is on the homepage of MapQuest you’ll see buttons like ’Gas Prices’ and ’Traffic’ that will inform you of the situation that lies ahead, such as low or high gas prices and traffic conditions ranging from ‘Normal’ to the dreaded ‘Road Closed’.

How about the best restaurants or what’s going on in the city? Each major urban centre will have a star beside its name. Click on that star and MapQuest will give you all the current news on what’s happening in that city.

Quest Map is also available on your iPhone. To find it, the best thing to do is open up the Apple App Store and type MapQuest into the search bar. It is much the same as the web version with most of the same functions so I shan’t repeat myself.

Rand Mac Nally

This useful road trip planning website will give you the best info for the city you’re heading off to. Sure, the Yahoo! Trip Planner and Map Quest will give you small bursts of what’s hot in a city but Rand Mac Nally will condense the whole city and all of its thousands of energy pockets into a few articles that Johnny can read aloud whilst cruising along.

As you can see from the screenshot, there are loads of sub-categories for each city and along the left hand side; there are several options for any kind of traveler. Each city has a huge article detailing its history, cultural monuments and sights.

Rand Mac Nally is less of a planning tool and more of an idea mill from where I’m standing. Before traveling to a city, you can see what’s going on and some facts about the place like weather, population and the local culture and customs. It’s a perfect road trip planning guide.

My final advice for the tech savvy traveler in this article is to be prepared for failure. Often, while out on the road where the internet still comes via a phone line, relying totally on your Mac or iPhone for travel advice and suggestions is a silly move. The best thing (and perhaps the essence of travel itself) is to talk to the locals, see what’s going on and get the inside scoop. While it’s almost blasphemous to say on a website such as this one but the internet isn’t perfect.

On the other side of that coin however, making a journal entry on Yahoo! about how you were stranded offline for three days is interesting and makes for a great experience. Here are my Top Five Tech Travel Tips:

1. Always have spare batteries

2. Carry different plug converters for different regions

3. Charge your equipment at any chance you get – in cafés, hotels, anywhere there is a plug. Free electricity!

4. Download Google Maps for your Cell Phone. This can literally be a lifesaver. Read my article on how to do it here.

5. Tweet – loads!

Any other tips?

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It would be totally awesome if you could somehow take the map along. Google offers a print option but you can only print what you are able to fit on the screen which is hardly the solution you are looking for if you want to get a map of the entire city at the desired zoom level.

You can save the map as image files and go through the pain of stitching them together in Paint or Photoshop. Or you can spare yourself some trouble and get Google Maps to work offline with Google Map Buddy, which does everything for you in a click.

It doesn’t require any installation, just extract the zip file, run the executable and you are good to go.

Using the Google Map Buddy interface you can browse to the Google Maps site you want. Search for or navigate to the location you wish to create the map for. You can zoom in or out so that you can see the entire region for which you want to create the map. Let’s say you want to create a map for the city of Paris with all the major roads, landmarks and public transit stations.

Such details are visible when you are zoomed in pretty close, in which case you cannot fit all of Paris on your screen. So Google Map Buddy allows you to zoom out to a level where you can see the entire Paris on your screen (don’t worry if you can’t see the details at this zoom level) and specify the area you want to create the map for.

Now click the draw button, and draw a rectangle encompassing the entire Paris at your current zoom level. You don’t need to zoom to the desired level of detail because Google Map Buddy lets you specify the zoom level of the map that it will create. So you can zoom out to fit the required region on the screen, and then specify a higher zoom level inside the application’s toolbar to get a more detailed final map.

Once you have specified the details, hit create map and the application gets to work. It downloads the required tiles and stores them all on your hard disk. Once it has downloaded all the images it then stitches them together to create a complete detailed map according to your needs.

It can take quite some time to download and stitch all the images, so you would have to be patient while it is working. It would be nice if the application displayed a progress bar or current activity information to let the user know what it is up to.

After all the downloading and stitching together has finished, your map is viewable as a image file. You can scroll and zoom inside the map image just like any other image file that doesn’t fit completely on your screen. Put it on a USB drive, your iPod, your mobile phone (or maybe print it) to take it along. The tiles that it used to stitch together the map are also available just in case you need them, you can keep them or delete as you wish.

Do you know of any similar application you use with Google Maps? Let us know about it in the comments.

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Before you get all busy preparing, take a moment to recall what went wrong on your last vacation. Did you pack well?

Forgetting an important item at home is one of the most annoying things to happen when you leave for a vacation. And why do we forget to pack things? Because we don’t work with lists or we make a list in a hurry without external suggestions. I bet it has happened to you before — it has certainly happened to me.

Packwhiz is a packing list generator. The best is, you can sign in using your Google account!

Once signed in, you can instantly generate your first free travel packing checklist. Give it a name and set the parameter that will define your list, i.e. is your destination domestic or international, what type of accommodation and transportation are you going to use, what will you be doing, and what type of weather is to be expected.

Click “Generate” to create a standard list or “Start from scratch” if you prefer to go from an empty list.

If you went with “Generate”, you will see a long list of items on the following page. They are sorted into various categories, such as Toiletries and Personal Care, Documents and Money, Gadgets, Food and Drink, Medicine and more. The more parameters you check, the more thorough the list will be.

Basically, that’s your list and it’s done, unless you edit it. So, you need to go through your list and check all the items that you DO NOT need, then delete them. Of course, you can entirely personalize your list i.e. remove, edit and add items.

To edit an item, simply click on it and a menu will open. You can change the item name, category or add a description.

Items can be added by clicking on the “new item” link at the bottom of each category. If you don’t like the way items are sorted, you can simply drag and drop them around.

Once you’re done, you can publish your list and share the URL or simply go back to your lists, create a new list or edit another one.

Personally, I think generating the list could be slightly more intuitive. I looked at the newly generated list and started checking all items I wanted to keep on my list. That was wrong, the list was already done. So I used the Feedback to give them my thoughts on how they could make removing a ton of items much easier. I found that the Feedback system is one of the best I have ever seen. Check it out, it’s super!

Packwhiz was launched earlier this year, so it’s brand new and there are a few things that need to be ironed out. But for now, it’s very uncomplicated to use and creates thorough, free travel packing checklists that are easy to edit and customize. Unfortunately, they didn’t yet integrate a print option.

For many more helpful tools and websites to improve your next vacation, check out the following posts. They include tips on planning your trip, locating ATMs or public toilets, tracking down metro connections, finding travel companions, surviving airports and flights, and tons more.

• 10 Travel Websites that should be Bookmarked by Aibek
• 3 Must-check Traveller Websites before your Next Trip by Anthony
• 6 Sites To Make Flying A Whole Lot Easier by David
• Top 5 Airline FLight Tracking Websites by Dave
• Cool Online Resources to Plan Your Next Vacation by Tina (me)
• Tavel The World with Hello Backpacker by Tina (me)
• How To Stay Digitally Charged and Connected On The Road by Tina (me)

Is there anything you own multiple times because you forgot to pack it? Confess! You’re not alone.

Image credits: woodsy

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• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)
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• How To Stay Digitally Charged and Connected On The Road (4)
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• A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks (3)

Preparation

Before you head out for your trip, give yourself at least a week to acquire everything you will need to take with you.

Make a list with online traveling packing list and work on it. That means, take some time to think of what you may need. Imagine what you’ll be doing and let the list grow.

If there is something you still need to buy, do so immediately.

Put whatever you decide to take into a box and pack all of it, don’t toss anything away at the last minute unless you’re 100% sure that you won’t need it.

What To Take

Think of devices and their accessories, such as batteries, chargers, adaptors, cables, memory cards etc.

Also, take some extra digital storage space with you, so that you can backup photos and videos. This could be a USB stick, a small hard drive or an additional memory card.

Definitely bring a card reader!

If you don’t want to rely on a computer for charging your devices, get a USB-to-power plug adaptor and actually take it with you. Depending on where you go, you may also need a power plug adaptor.

Make sure you have all your login information with you. It can be easy to forget URLs, usernames and passwords when it’s all saved on your local computer. Creating a USB stick with portable software (e.g. Firefox and/or Thunderbird) may also be a good idea and make you a bit more independent, in case you’re not taking your laptop. Aibek created a list of 100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick (Windows and Mac).

On The Road

If you decided to bring your computer, you will have little trouble finding internet access. Across Northern America and Europe, lots of places offer free or very cheap WiFi. Even most hostels offer it now.

David wrote an article compiling 5 Wi-Fi Hotspot Finders To Find Free Wi-Fi Spots Near You. You might want to make use of these tools before you head out onto the road, though.

If you don’t bring your laptop, you will have to hunt down the best and cheapest options to go online. In North America, I found that libraries are always a good bet. They offer high speed internet on very well maintained compuers. Many towns libraries offer free 15-minute internet and you can sign up as a one time patron to receive 1 hour of free internet. In Europe, Internet Cafes are a standard and you may try libraries as well.

Sharing

When coming back from a trip, everyone will ask you what it was like. Now, it can be not only tiring but also quite time consuming to share your stories with everyone individually. You should consider sharing your experiences while you’re on the road.

What is working very well for me is Flickr. I use it as a sort of low maintenance blog. I upload my photos, add a title and use the description to share what I’ve been doing. To keep it all a bit more organized, I created a set. So after I upload and describe the photos, I add them to the set, where I can also define the order in which I want them to be viewed. This is my “Flickr Travel Diary“.

You can also upload videos to Flickr. I set up a YouTube channel to collect my videos. But what you do is up to you.

What did you find useful to stay charged and connected while traveling? Your input on the matter is very much appreciated!

Picture credits: jana_koll, erkinsahin, Brando, brO.

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To instantly share my whereabouts, detours, experiences and some photos with family and friends, I was looking for a one-in-all tool that could easily be updated while I’m on the road.

What I found was a website called EveryTrail. The original idea for it is to provide outdoor fans with a platform where they can manage and share their tour data or browse the tours of others to find inspiration. For me it will serve as a small travel diary.

The way it works is straightforward. There are three steps to creating a record of your own trip. First you can upload a GPS file or hand draw your trip on the map. Next you add details about the trip including title, date, type of activity, location, trip story, tips for others, and edit the statistics and the map view that will be shown.

Finally, you can add your photos. If both your camera and the GPS device were set to the same time, the photos will be automatically placed on the right spot of your route, based on their date and time setting. If that is not the case you can manually place them yourself.

Once it’s all done it will look something like the following example, depending on which information you included.

Top left: summary with trip story to the right.

Middle left: map with photos to the right. You can also switch to see the full map or the stats instead of the photos.

Bottom: strip of all trail photos. Here you can initiate a sort of slide show and photos next to the map will cycle through the respective trail positions. Below the photo strip are the tags and GPS data downloads, joined by comments to the right. At the very bottom you’ll find share options and a picture summary.

You don’t have to be a member of the site to enjoy exploring. There are over sixty thousand trips to be discovered. You can search the public trips by location, activity, keyword, trip date, all-time or recent popularity, and follow in the footsteps of previous hikers, geocachers, backpackers, skaters, drivers…

Aren’t detailed maps, GPS devices and the developments they have brought us a blessing for the outdoor lovers? On the other hand, true adventurers will find it ever more challenging to discover the unexplored. Are you encouraged to follow the trails they have left for us?

Picture credits: arinas74

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• Cool Online Resources to Plan Your Next Vacation (11)
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• How To Stay Digitally Charged and Connected On The Road (4)
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• A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks (3)

The internet makes it easy to find out about various destinations, great deals, attractions, local customs and curiosities that might otherwise have escaped your attention or become an unpleasant surprise. But there is almost too much information to make up one’s mind. So where should you start?

Here is a small selection of websites that will hopefully help you filter for the best available deals and sights.

Spotted by Locals

Spotted by Locals covers 20 European cities and promises that you will experience cities like a local.

The articles are short and cover everything from art & culture, bars and music, to relaxing, shopping and theaters. The attractions of each city can be browsed by category or area / district.

New spotters are hand selected by existing contributors and a face to face meeting is a must before you can write for Spotted by Locals, representing your own city. They are currently looking for new spotters, maybe that would be you?

trivago

On trivago you can compare prices for hotels, browse the site for attractions, reviews and photos.

When comparing hotel prices in a given city on a specific date, you’ll be presented with a list of hotels on the right. To the left you can refine your search, for example by reducing the price range on a meter bar. When switching from Hotel to Attractions you’ll see a list of attractions for that very city and in the sidebar you can filter for bars, restaurants, museums etc. or pick specific places from the “browse box”, where all available attractions are pulled together and listed kind of like in a tag cloud.

The site operates based on member contributions. Each review is accompanied by a detailed rating and eventually photos. So whenever you return from a trip with novel experiences and great discoveries, this is where you can show off your travel expertise.

InfoHub

InfoHub describes itself as “the ultimate source for out-of-the-ordinary and inspiring travel ideas” and I must say they have a point.

This speciality travel guide is indeed a great resource for finding all sorts of professionally organized tours around the globe. Of course these offers are not free, but using the site and looking for options is totally free and absolutely recommended.

You can browse by country or popular vacations, such as eco tourism, hiking & trekking, photography & videography, scuba diving or sports. A more detailed selection is available in the quick vacation search or you simply search the site for keywords.

World Travel Guide

Although this page loaded a bit slow when I tested it, it appeared to be the most thorough, informative and easy to use travel guide site for locations around the world.

First you pick a destination from the map, and then you select the type of guide you’re looking for to the right. Your options are country, city, airport, attraction, cruise and weather guides.

If there is anything you need to know about a destination, like key facts, public holidays, climate, top things to see & do, getting around by air, water, rail or on the road, this is where your inquisitiveness will be served with details, details and more details, packed in excellent articles, decorated with nice photos.

Lonely Planet

When embarking on an exciting vacation, how could anyone miss out on the Lonely Planet?  This is the ultimate and meanwhile mainstream information resource to help you plan your trip.

The archives are huge and you’ll find tons of useful information, reviews, beautiful photos, and recommendations. Like on trivago you can search for hotels, but also for hostels and within the Travel Services you can find out about available insurances, tours, car & rail, view travel checklists (tips & tricks included) and much more.

As a signed up member of the site you can contribute to discussions in the forum. The forums are what really make the Lonely Planet homepage most unique. Here you can discuss your experiences, expectations or find company for your next adventure tour.

Although the Lonely Planet appears to cover it all, I found that World Travel Guide was more easy to use for tracking down information and InfoHub provided a much better selection of available trips. The point is, different sites are good for different purposes and each site has its pros and cons.

So are you serious about booking your vacation now? Last year Varun wrote about 5 Review Sites to Help You Find The Perfect Hotel and recently David covered 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip.

Which resources do you turn to for the perfect trip?

Picture credits: Zela

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• Share Your Trips With EveryTrail (8)
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To make your life a little easier, and to avoid you being that guy, here are five wifi hotspot finder sites to help you find free Wi-Fi spots near you. Whether they’re restaurants, airports, Apple stores (always a good bet), or friendly store owners, there’s sure to be free Wi-Fi near you.

Wi-Fi-Friendly Chains

There’s an increasing number of stores and restaurants that offer free Wi-Fi at most or all of their locations – these are great places to start in your search for free Wi-Fi.

Major restaurants include Panera, CiCi’s, Cosi, IHOP, and Whole Foods Markets; stores like Staples, Apple, and Office Depot are known for offering free Wi-Fi.

For more stores and restaurants, try this list and this one.

WeFi

WeFi is one of the most feature-rich of the Wi-Fi hotspot locators. WeFi will find new connections, and automatically connect to the best one for your needs.

There’s a desktop version that will automatically add new spots your computer finds into the WeFi database. It’s also got social aspects, letting you see other WeFi users nearby where you are at the moment.

At its basest, though, it’s still a great way to find local Wi-Fi spots near you, and is definitely the best-looking app of the bunch.

For more, take a look at WeFi’s directory listing.

WiFi Everywhere

WiFi Everywhere, a Google Maps mashup with FON is a great way to find the closest Wi-Fi hotspots to you. You start with a map of the United States, and then can zoom in or enter an address to find the nearby hotspots.

They often come from places you wouldn’t expect, so make sure to do the search. There’s not necessarily a promise of free Wi-Fi, but by hiding FON Wi-Fi locations, as well as FON Partner Wi-Fi locations, you can weed out a lot of the paid options.

Every listing tells you what kind of establishment it is (restaurant, waiting room, etc.) as well as whether or not the hotspot has been recently active. You can also send a map to a friend – great for arranging meet-ups to not talk to each other.

OpenWifiSpots

OpenWiFiSpots has a ton of useful Wi-Fi finding features. There’s a Google Maps mashup that lets you search for Wi-Fi near you, and a listing of services that will offer you cheap Wi-Fi.

My favorite feature, though, is the “Fast Food Restaurants with Free Wifi” list. There’s a list of national chains – Burger King, Denny’s, IHOP and others – that offer free Wi-Fi, as well as localized listings – for instance, two Wendy’s in Anchorage, AK, offer free Wi-Fi.

The list is huge, with many different options for finding free Wi-Fi.

Free Wifi Airports

Just about every airport now offers Wi-Fi of some sort. Most of them love to charge you about $850 for nine minutes of Wi-Fi access- at least, it feels like that much. To help you avoid the exorbitant fees, SmallBusiness created a list of “Free Wifi Airports,” a list of all the airports and terminals where you can log on for free.

The list isn’t enormous, but that’s because the list of airports with free Wifi is similarly not enormous. It’s a good list, filtered by US state, and including Austria and New Zealand. If you’re going to be stuck in an airport somewhere (and if you’re flying, you probably will be), why not make it one with free Wi-Fi? Check this list before you fly.

For more options for finding Wi-Fi in airports, check out an older MakeUseOf post.

There’s Wi-Fi everywhere now, it seems. Free Wi-Fi’s a bit harder to find, but if you know where to look, you’ll be able to eat great food, buy great stuff, fly the world, all the while staying connected to the Internet.

Whose Wi-Fi do you use? How do you find hotspots? Which one is your favorite wifi hotspot finder? Let us know in comments!

Photo Credits: Kolya, Lloyd Budd

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• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)
• Things To Know When Using a WiFi Hotspot Or a Public PC (14)

The premise of how DealBase works is simple. Just search for a destination and you’ll be presented with a set of hotels which are currently running promotions. From there, you’ll be able to find the deals that make the most sense to you, and you’ll even get to compare that rate with the regular rate so you know exactly how much you’re saving. You can also of course apply filters to narrow and refine your search.

DealBase currently only works with destinations in the US, Mexico and the Caribbean, but it does a pretty good job in that area. It crawls over 3,500 different sources to track down deals for you and delivers them in a consistent format which is organized but hotels, tags, or destinations so it’s easy to find. According to their website, they currently serve up over 15,000 deals with an average savings of each deal working out to around USD$271, so it does seem pretty comprehensive.

So you know how simple it is to use, here’s a quick walkthrough of finding a deal in DealBase.

1. First, search for your destination (eg. New York City, or Los Angeles).

2. Next, you’ll be given a list of best hotel deals you can choose from, sort or filter down the deals further.

3. Now let’s say I’m interested in booking this hotel for my parents since I want to take advantage of the ’senior rates’, I can see right away that I would be saving USD$127 per night, and get a 54% savings on my booking, which I can perform there and then.  If I want to check current rates in the hotel, it’s just merely one click away via the official hotel website, so everything’s pretty much transparent.

4. One more useful feature would be the tagging function. This deal for example, was tagged ’seniors’.  All I need to do is click on the tag, and it will display ALL senior discount rates on the site, so you know where else you can take advantage of your status. This function works for other classifications as well of course, for example club memberships. Who knows? You might even change your holiday destination if you get a really good deal elsewhere!

DealBase’s policy is to be the best at displaying deals, and being completely unbiased about that.  Choosing a hotel however, goes beyond just getting the best deal. Hotels are hardly commodities, and especially in the case of higher end hotels, you are paying for the experience more than anything else. Having ratings or at least tie-ups with rating sites would take DealBase to the next level, where currently you have to go off the site to do additional research about the hotel so you know you’re getting your money’s worth.

Shortcomings aside, DealBase is extremely simple to use, transparent and very functional site for finding best hotel deals from the convenience of your computer. Definitely worth a try.

Also check out Varun’s article on 5 sites to find the perfect hotel.

What other travel tools do you use to find the best hotel? Tell us in the comments!

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• 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip (4)
• 5 Review Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Hotel (18)
• Watch Online Products for Price Drops with ShoppingNotes (9)
• TripSay Brings Travel Recommendations From People Like You (6)
• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)

But it turned out that he had a 5 year travel plan. Now doesn’t that makes sense? I found it hilarious!

So did you already pick your travel destinations for the year 2009? Need some help planning your trip? Want to go backpacking?

Hello Backpacker

You may want to look into the Hello Backpacker website to help you pick your travel destination and plan your world trip.

The site is set up into five different categories – get inspired, plan your trip, on the road, back home, and discuss. Let me guide you through each of them.

The travel videos contain material from the most famous cities, historical and natural sights. If you have any videos you would like to share you can submit them to the site.

The rest of that section still needs some work as it doesn’t contain a lot of material, so let’s move on to the next one because that is where it gets interesting.

In the backpacker’s toolbox you can download a free 99 page PDF file that contains checklists, templates, FAQs and lots of advice to prepare you for your trip. A must have!

In the crowd recommendations section you can pick your travel destinations and see where other people who picked those destinations tend to visit.

In the next step you can compare price levels between those countries. Or you can go to that section directly and choose from different ways of doing that.

The power plugs section provides information about voltage, frequency and plugs used in different countries. That’s critical information if you’re going to carry an electric device that requires recharging.

On the road you may know some country-specific gestures to keep out of trouble. But frankly, there are the same four gestures for every country and either they are using an de-escalated F** U sign or they fail to show the actual one. Very puzzling.

The currency card for currency conversions is more helpful, although you can never be sure how up to date it is. The currency converter tool may be better, at least it was already updated in 2009.

The conclusion of this section is the emergency card that you can create for yourself. It’s something you should really carry with you all the time, just in case. The one below is of course just an example. We all know you don’t call Chuck Norris, Chuck Norris will call you!

Once you’re back home you can update your travel map with all the places you want to see, don’t want to see or already have seen.

The profiling section is a small test of 10 questions that will tell you what kind of traveler you are. It totally failed me though since all the right answers were lacking and I had to pick the one I found least repellent. I actually don’t imagine myself shopping in New York and didn’t drink any latte in London (who can afford that anyways).

This leaves us with the last category.

Check out the forum to share your experiences and maybe you have some blog awards for the site, so that this section won’t be so sadly empty?

We have covered other websites useful to travelers in the past, for example:

- 10 Travel Websites That Should Be Bookmarked by Aibek
- 5 Review Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Hotel by Varun
- 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip by David
- 6 Sites To Make Flying A Whole Lot Easier by David

How do you organize your trips and where will you go this year?

Picture credits: barunpatro

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Share Your Trips With EveryTrail (8)
• How To Stay Digitally Charged and Connected On The Road (4)
• Create A Free Travel Packing Checklist With Packwhiz (2)
• Cool Online Resources to Plan Your Next Vacation (11)
• A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks (3)

With a bit of know-how, and the willingness to put in the leg work (or mouse work, if you will), you can find incredible deals on travel of all kinds – from airlines to hotels to rental cars. Companies realize they’re better off selling at a smaller profit than not filling the empty spaces. It’s better for an airline to fill every seat on a plane that’s going to fly anyway, even if some of the tickets sell at a smaller return.

There are several last minute booking sites out there that know that, and use the companies’ desperation to your advantage. If you’re looking to book a flight, hotel, cruise, or any other type of travel in the near future, try starting with these last minute travel sites.

First, though, a disclaimer: these are all last-minute deals. If you’re set on a particular place on a particular date, these sites are risky. If you can afford to be a bit more flexible though, and run with the great deals that come up (a really fun way to travel), these sites are for you.

LastMinute

LastMinute promises you up to 70% discount on your travel. You can book flights, hotels, cars, or whole packages anywhere from three weeks to three hours in advance. If you want to, book the ticket, pack, and go.

LastMinute also offers sections for “this weekend,” “next weekend,” and “under $250″ for those looking for cheap vacations. There’s a ton of stuff on there, most of it within the United States and Caribbean. If you’re looking to get out of town as fast as possible, and don’t care much where you go, LastMinute.com’s a great place to start.

TravelZoo

TravelZoo definitely wins my award for the ugliest site to look at that’s actually useful. It has many of the same features as LastMinute, and also offers an incredibly useful email subscription list. Sign on to the list, and TravelZoo will send you their Top 20 of the Week, pulling together the Top 20 last minute travel bargains of the week from around the Internet. It’s a popular list, with editions for the US and around the world, and offers great deals of all shapes and sizes.

Airfare Watchdog

I like Airfare Watchdog because it does things a bit differently: all you’ve got to do is plug in the airport you want to fly in to or out of, and you’ll see the cheapest other halves – either the airport you’ll fly out of or into.

For instance, I plugged in leaving from New York’s Kennedy Airport, and got a list of the cheapest last minute flights leaving from that airport, as well as how far in advance you can book them. There are sections for domestic and international flights, and a huge list is compiled.

Fun fact: I can fly from JFK to Akron, OH, round trip for $144. Not a bad deal. There’s also a list of “Fares of the Day” that will help you find the cheapest flights you can possibly find, anywhere in the world.

SideStep Deals

SideStep is primarily a booking site like Orbitz or Priceline, but it has a large and useful “Deals” section. It works something like a Google for cheap travel, in that SideStep doesn’t have the deals itself, but instead points you to the best deals around the Web.

There are flight deals, cruise deals, hotel deals, themed vacations (skiing, golf, etc.) and a number of other ways to save money. As always, most of the deals are for last-minute vacations, but it’s a huge repository of links to deals around the Web, sorted well and presented easily for you.

It’ll require some more browsing, because you usually can’t buy directly from SideStep, but it’s certainly a good place to start, as it includes a huge number of other sites trying to find you deals.

Vacations to Go

If you want to go on a cruise, check out Vacations to Go. They get the deals from cruise lines that no one else gets, based on the notion that cruise companies want to sell every last spot, even at huge bargains. It requires a sign-up, but it opens the doors to huge deals that no one else can see.

Since Vacations to go is a bit more exclusive, there’s likely to be less competition for great deals, but it’s also not the limitless resource some of the others are. Also, check the site often: cruises are rarely available more than a week in the 90-Day Ticker, but you can book further in advance with the “Find a Bargain” feature.

Luxury Link

Luxury Link is a high-risk, high-reward way to travel. It’s essentially an eBay for vacations, in that you can bid on the vacation you’d like to attend, and the highest bidder gets the vacation. In addition, there are vacations you can “Buy Now,” and skip the auction process.

The real deals are going to be found through the auctions, which feature everything from cruises to flights to hotels, in destinations all over the world. This is great if you know generally what you want to do, and can play the auctioning game for a while before you go. Their prices are higher, but so is the quality of the destinations.

If you want to go to a particular place, do a particular thing, and at a particular time, don’t use these sites. If you’re a “travel by the seat of your pants” kind of person, looking for a fun, economic way to travel, try one or many of these different websites, and see where they take you.

When you’re looking to travel, where do you go? How do you book vacations?

Photo: terriseesthings

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 5 Review Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Hotel (18)
• Cool Online Resources to Plan Your Next Vacation (11)
• A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks (3)
• TripSay Brings Travel Recommendations From People Like You (6)
• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)

Share your videos and you can even make some money!

TravelPost

TravelPost gives you unbiased hotel reviews and ratings as they are written by actual visitors. What’s more TravelPost has some information about the traveler as well (like budget and purpose of travel) so that you can compare your needs and the reviewer’s requirements and decide accordingly if the review is from your perspective.

The coverage is pretty good and the site also offers other functionalities like travel news, searching for deals and other such things.

TVtrip and Trivop

TVtrip and Trivop are your videoguides to hotels. If you’ve ever booked a hotel online, only to get there and find out that the images very cleverly showed only the best parts of the hotel, then check out the videoguides (although videos can be misleading as well). This also eliminates a lot of misinterpretation
caused by either lack of expression on the reviewer’s part or misinterpretation on your part in case of text reviews.

The basic workings are similar, locate the place you are traveling to on the Google Maps Mashup or use the search functionality, a list of potential hotels will appear, click on one to view further details :

Tripr

Tripr is a videoguide with a difference. Tripr shows you ‘real’ video reviews, made from a consumer’s point of view, because customers can make a video of the place they stayed at and upload it to Tripr. The concept thus gives a first hand customer perspective on the facilities. What’s more, if you upload a video to Tripr, you can get paid!

When your video results in a booking you will receive a commission for your video! There are some guidelines as to how the video should be shot and what all it should include.

TripAdvisor

Although an all-in-one-place to get advice on your trip, if it’s only hotels you are looking for then you won’t be disappointed at TripAdvisor. It lists the hotels in the city you are looking for. You can then read reviews for the hotels. You can even find lots of information about the destination, restaurants, things to do etc with TripAdvisor.

Do you know of some other sites that offer similar functionalities? Have you used one in the past? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Cool Online Resources to Plan Your Next Vacation (11)
• A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks (3)
• 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip (4)
• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)
• Share Your Trips With EveryTrail (8)

That is where HopStop comes in. It is billed as your city transit guide. They provide door-to-door subway and bus directions and maps for New York City. You can also search for places to eat, drink, sleep and see in the City Guide. While the site says it only works for NYC it seems to now work for Boston, Chicago, Long Island, San Francisco and a few others.

With HopStop you can:

• Send directions by e-mail or text message to a cell phone directly from the website.
• Plan a trip with multiple destinations using the Itinerary.
• Get directions or the locations of nearby subway and bus stops remotely on your cell phone or PDA with the HopStop Mobile SIte.
  

I jumped on their site and punched in my intersection and Time Square’s intersection and this is what it spit back at me:

Directions that are perfect. Thanks HopStop!

To make it even better they have mobile options! Yes and it is still completely free – FTW!

I know they will be adding even more cities soon but in the mean time tell us what YOU use to find subway, tube or metro directions. Holler at us in the comments kiddies!

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• Take Google Maps Offline & Get Maps You Can Print using Google Maps Buddy (16)
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First, you’re going to need some gas (even if you’ve got one of those classy hybrids). Well say no more:

Gas Bag (iTunes Link)

Gas Bag is a nifty little gas pricess app that will show you local gas stations on a map, prices included. It’s a social network, so coverage may be really good or really bad in your area. It all depends on how many locals use the network and actively record their purchases.

Even so, it has a great interface, is easy to use, and many commenters on iTunes seem to think it works very well for them.

The thing I like most is that it has Google Maps integration. While this isn’t a novel feature, it’s been implemented well. Gas Bag can either determine your position with GPS (or pseudo-GPS) or you can manually search for your location. After it has your location, it displays the six or so closest gas stations. You can zoom in or out for more or less options.

Once you decide to purchase some gas somewhere, there is the option to enter your purchase into the network. I won’t go into the specifics of exactly how that interface works, but I’ll say it’s much better than the webapp I used to use to track my gas consumption. I stopped using that webapp because the interface was a bit too tiny and when you’re in a hurry, entering gas data isn’t something you always have time for. Let’s see if this one lasts any longer on my iPhone.

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Now that you’re all gassed up, you’re going to need some traveling music. Well obviously you’re carrying around an iPhone/iPod, but just as the last App helped you pick a gas station, the following one will choose some music for you.

FlyCast (iTunes Link)

FlyCast is a pretty decent iPhone radio application. Usually I use Pandora’s iPhone App whenever I need some impromptu tunes, but sometimes I crave the discretion of a DJ and a mix of music that doesn’t necessarily match my exact taste.

Over the course of my life, I have been generally disappointed with internet radio because either the selection is way too limited or the player is really difficult to use. On both counts, FlyCast makes up for all that lost time.

The lists of stations for each genre isn’t terribly long, but everything is still pretty well represented. Also, FlyCast pulls from several different radio sources so if one doesn’t work out, you can try another. They are still expanding their line-up, but it looks like they already have over 1000 stations.

The interface is the part I like best about FlyCast. After you select a station (which admitedly can be a bit confusing), it takes you to the main player. From here you can play/pause the music as well as adjust the volume.

I’m a bit confused as to why there is a separate slide for the volume (alongside the iPhone’s volume controls), but I assume it has something to do with the incoming stream needing to be controlled differently.

When the stream is building up a buffer, the WiFi logo blinks blue. The number next to that indicates how much music is buffered ahead of where you’re listening. This is a great feature because it tells you how long you can get out of sync with your signal and still have an uninterrupted experience.

Most stations pull in cover art and song information along with the signal. Because it’s just a regular iPhone page, you can double-tap any cover art to blow it up to full size. If you want to surf the web (especially to find out about the songs you’re listening to there is an integrated browser that should keep the music running as you surf.

The rest of the features are a little confusing. I had trouble labeling anything as a favorite and most of the other options didn’t seem to have any function. Detractors aside, the core function of this App is solid and in a world of terrible internet radio players, this one does remarkably well.

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With music in your soul and fuel in your vehicle, it’s time to fill your body with food!

Urbanspoon (iTunes Link)

Urbanspoon is probably the best App on this list. First of all, Urbanspoon is already a really great food review site that lets people rate their local eating establishments socially.

On their network you can have friends too, so you can see who likes what. The iPhone App is partially an extension of that network because you can sign in and benefit from having an account. On top of this, though, there are a few terrific features that can help jazz up your night on the town.

Above is the “shake” interface, which lets you lock in location, style, and/or price and then give your iPhone a hearty shake. This starts the unlocked sections spinning (complete with some fun sounds). Where it stops nobody knows! After the selection is made, you can either shake it again for a new one, or click the item for information. The App can give you the address for directions or simply show you ratings and pictures to help you make the best choice. If this interface isn’t for you, a more low-key “browse” window lets you search all the places near you by rating, style, or closest proximity.

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Hopefully at least one of these Apps will make your next trip a little more fun! … Oh and, in case you’re travelling abroas make sure to check previously posted 10 Travel Websites that should be Bookmarked.

Let us know if you have any other favorites for traveling.

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