Basic Tools for great travel

At the Git-Go, plumbers have their favorite wrenches; carpenters their special hammers; scientists their calculators.

The traveler needs to have some basic tools, too, with which to launch any project. We’ll talk in the future about the different values of using a travel agent but for now let’s look at what we can do on our own. And our tools.

Everyone has his or her favorite web sites. That’s good. Use what’s most comfortable. Tell us what you use; we could like them, too.

Here are a few sites that I turn to as I start any travel planning — whether it’s a long complicated foray across Europe or a quick run to another state nearby. It’s pretty basic stuff, but without the basics under control I’ll get lost in the details for sure.

If I have the idea to got to Timbuktu or Seattle, Alabama or Zanzibar, I usually start in the same way, turning to new and old friends on the
web:

tripadvisor.com. This is my favorite traveler site. Thousands of people contribute their observations about a place, a hotel, lists of things to do and general comments. The service ranks the hotels etc.
by these comments, rather than by price. The contributors, there being so many, tend to cover the gamut rather than just high end or budget travelers. If I’m going to Vancouver or Miami, I look and see what people who have been there are saying about it. As a follow-up, I will read the chat rooms at fodors.com and frommers.com — these are upper-middle travelers who share lot of great information. (I used to look to lonelyplanet.com but have drifted away from that scratchy end of the spectrum. That’s my doing, not theirs.)

kayak.com. Looking to get a ballpark range of prices for hotels and airlines, I favor kayak.com. I still use Travelocity heavily, and usually buy through them, but I like the convenience of the kayak range of prices. The first step is to see what the market generally looks like. Hotels are, say, $150, flights are $300. Then I look more directly at hotel and airline company pages to see what else is going on.

newspapers.com. This is a very handy link to the webs of newspapers around the country and world. I always try to see what the papers are saying about local events, local conditions. We went to Tornoto recently and the guide books told me a lot about the landscape but the local newspapers tipped us to a festival that was going on, what was hot that weekend in music and food. Plus you get to read the news. That’s always helpful.

oanda.com. For an international trip, this is my favorite page to get the currency exchange rates. There are many, of course, but I like this one. It gives you the most up to date exchange rates, of course, but it also sets up a little chart (“FXCheatSheet” under “Currency Tools”) that you can print out and paste on an index card setting the basics of the country you’re intersted in: 1 euro = $1.47, 5 euro = $7.33 etc and the reverse,  $1 = .68 euros, $4 = 2.73 euros, $10 = 6.82 euros, etc. Very handy, believe me.

google.com for official travel organizations and convention bureaus.
Say what you want, the official guys know what most people are looking for. Sure, you may be looking for a hot nightclub in Seattle but the Seattle tourism folks make sure you know about the Space Needle, the SciFi museum and so many other things that you’d feel like a dope for having missed. You don’t have to follow their lists but the lists are a great base to start with.

weather.com. It’s no small thing to know whether it’s going to rain while your in a different place, to know what the temperatures are going to be. It just makes sense to see what the weather is.
weather.com and accuweather.com give you that in great detail close in and pretty reliable projections for further out. It could make the difference in whether you use that precious suitcase space for a sweater or not.

There are thousands of more pages and this will be a recurring feature as we go forward — discovering new tools as we seek new destinations.
Let us know what you use.

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