Travel Information on the Internet

There is a "ton" of travel information available on the Internet. This page will provide links to several travel-related sites, but there are many more out there. Feel free to explore and find the sites that work best for you.

NOTE: You may still want to use your own travel agent for ticket purchase; especially if you need to build a customized and/or more complicated trip. Travel agents may know better than you how to find special deals, and can also help with things like trip insurance. You should still take advantage of the resources on the internet just to do a price check to make sure that your agent really is coming up with "reasonable" prices and to find information about what to do at your travel destination.

General

It can be hard to search for information on a particular hotel chain, airline or travel destination, just because there are so many pages that might list the term for which you are searching. When I am searching for travel information on a particular destination, I have found that it is helpful to include the phrase "tourist information" when searching for the name of the destination.

This is also one case where the "catalog" approach may work much better than trying to use use a search engine. As an example, you can go to the Yahoo Travel page and explore lots of travel related topics starting here.

Driving

Planning a road-trip, or just looking for local directions? Be sure to pay a visit to MapQuest. From here you can view and print maps for anywhere in the United States, and also obtain detailed driving directions for your trips. Follow the Travel Guide link for Lodging, Dining, Weather and Tourist information.

Air Travel

There are many sites for information on air travel. We will list just a few here. Many of these will be "Virtual Travel Agent" type sites, where you can plug in the name of your origin and destination cities or airports and desired dates of travel and view lists of possible flights and prices. If you are looking for the best deal on tickets, you should try at least two of these sites, and many different options for choice of cities and dates. (You can sometimes save a lot of money by moving your travel one day in either direction (Saturday night stays can help a lot) or flying in or out of a "nearby" airport, as opposed to the primary airport. (E.g. Fares from Westchester County airport, or Stewart (Newburgh) or Long Island can beat the fares to/from JFK, Laguardia or Newark, depending upon your destination.))

To find the site for a specific airline, start from the Yahoo Airlines page. Many of these pages may offer special deals on flights and packages, access to your frequent flyer account, and information about flight arrival and departure times.

Liste below are a few of the "Virtual Travel Agent" type sites. Most of these work pretty much the same way; you will be required to register at the site, supplying a userid and password, your email address and perhaps a credit card number (to be used if/when you want to purchase a ticket). You will then be able to login to the site to search for your tickets, etc. (Some sites do not require registration to search for flights, but will require registration to make a purchase.)

NOTE: I still need to provide the links to the sites listed below...

Expedia
One Travel (Also has good notification system for last-minute weekend special deals.)
CheapTickets.com
Priceline.com (You can enter a bid for a flight or hotel reservation.)
Many Others.

Currency Exchange

Traveling to a foreign country? Then you will want information on currencty exchange. Again, lots of sites to help you with this. One example which I have found to be very helpful and easy to use is OANDA.

For one-time conversions, you can go straigh to the OANDA Classic Currency Converter.

Before you leave on your trip, you will should print out a copy of the appropriate OANDA Cheat Sheet for Travelers. This will simplify "on-the-fly" conversions as you are traveling and shopping.

NOTE: When using either of the previous two services, remember to specify the correct rate for the exchange. The default rate selected will be the official (interbank) rate. As a consumer, your rate will be slightly higher. You can select a typical credit card conversion rate (2% surcharge) or cash conversion rate (4% surcharge) or specify your own surcharge.

Newsgroups

Don't forget to check the newsgroups for information to help you on your trip. You can get access to them through your ISP's news server (if it provides one) or DejaNews. As an example, at DejaNews, you can search and browse several groups in the rec.travel hierarchy.