Travel Links

<BODY LINK="#D66D10" VLINK="#008000" ALINK="#C52D12" BACKGROUND="backgrd.gif"> <H1><FONT COLOR="#C72412"><FONT COLOR="#800000">Hot Links to Travel Web Sites</FONT><A NAME="top"></A></FONT></H1> <P><FONT SIZE="+1">W</FONT>elcome, this is a tour of the <B>Travel Web Sites</B> that we used to plan our world trip. It contains sites that will be of use to anybody planning travel to far flung places, irrespective of the duration. It does not include links to package tour operators etc. </P> <P>For each site, I have given a frank synopsis of what to expect from the site that you would be linking to. I have also given each site a score out of ten for its content and useability. </P> <P>As this page has grown, I have organised the links into categories for ease of location. Please select from the list: </P> <UL> <LI><A HREF="#info">Travel Information</A> - links to general travel information services </LI> <LI><A HREF="#agents">Travel Agents and Tour Operators</A> </LI> <LI><A HREF="#guides">Travel Guides </A> - links to travel guide home pages </LI> <LI><A HREF="#travelogues">Travelogues</A> - links to personal travelogues and independent articles. </LI> <LI><A HREF="#airlines">Airlines</A> - links to airlines and airline booking services </LI> <LI><A HREF="#skiing">Skiing & Snow Reports</A> </LI> </UL> <P></P> <HR> <H2><FONT COLOR="#800000">Travel Information Services</FONT><A NAME="info"></A></H2> <P>The following links connect to general travel information services. </P> <H3>Daily Telegraph Planet</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.the-planet.co.uk">Daily Telegraph Planet</A> is travel information service containing thousands of travel and holiday reports from destinations around the world. All of these reports have been independently commissioned and checked by the Telegraph Travel Desk (luck Travel Desk). There is quite a diversity of material, from weekend breaks in Dublin to trips across the Bolivian Altiplano. All articles are well written, in the style of the Sunday Supplement travel pages. The search engine is excellent, allowing you to move quickly to articles that will interest you. This is quite a new site, and I expect that as it matures over time it will be quite superb. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 8/10 </P> <H3>Foreign Office Travel Advice</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.fco.gov.uk/travel">Foreign Office</A> publish up to date travel advice for a wide selection of countries. The information is concise and reliable. It covers risks to the traveller from military conflicts, terrorism, organised crime, etc and provides some health advice. You can crete a personalised page here which will filter only the information you need, and you can get it to automatically e-mail you with new country reports whenever anything changes. It's brilliant and it's completely free of charge. I think this is ESSENTIAL READING for any worldwide traveller. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 10/10</P> <H3>Trippin' Out Magazine</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.trippinout.com/index.html">Zine for Hip Travellers</A> is an electronic magazine packed with fairly good information on budget travelling in the USA. Unfortunately the coverage is limited to about a dozen US cities only. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 4/10</P> <H3>Trippin' Out Magazine</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.trippinout.com/index.html">Zine for Hip Travellers</A> is an electronic magazine packed with fairly good information on budget travelling in the USA. Unfortunately the coverage is limited to about a dozen US cities only. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 4/10</P> <H3>Shoestring Travel</H3> <P><A HREF="http://www.stratpub.com">Shoestring Travel</A> focuses on how people can travel inexpensively. The data on the site comes from rec newsgroups and other internet users, e-mailing the site owner. Mostly this comprises hotel owners telling you how great their hotels are. Marginal value. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 4/10</P> <H3>The Australian Tourist Commission</H3> <P><A HREF="http://www.aussie.net.au/">The ATC</A> site provides a wealth of accessible information on where to go what to see in Australia. It's a bit ragged round the edges, and the information is not that substantive/mostly sales pitches for various operators flogging hotel rooms, car hire etc. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 6/10</P> <P ALIGN="right"><A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="top.jpg" ALT="TOP" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A></P> <P></P> <HR> <H2> <FONT COLOR="#800000">Travel Agents and Tour Operators</FONT><A NAME="agents"></A></H2> <P>The following links are to tour operator and travel agent sites. As such, bear in mind that the information provided by them is bound to highlight the best aspects of any potential trip. </P> <H3>Travelocity</H3> <P><A HREF="http://www.travelocity.com">Travelocity</A> is one of the biggest and more reputable of the new Internet based Travel Agencies. You can book entire packages, find and book hotels, rent a car, book a flight and more. My problem with it is that its geared to the US market, with prices in dollars and departure points from within the USA alone. I'm told that since it's internet based, its overheads are much lower than the high street travel agencies so it's a good deal. If you're a Yank, go for it!</P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 8/10</P> <H3>Travel Bag Adventures</H3> <P>Travel Bag Adventures is a tour operator specialising in interesting and unusual holidays in far flung places (e.g. Whale Watching in Mexico). Essentially, if you want to book a tour where someone else does the planning for you, this is a good site. What I didn't like was that all of the destinations sounded too good to be true - the descriptions are very much aimed at telling you what you want to hear so that you buy a holiday from them. I treat such info with a big pinch of salt. Still even if you want to sort out your own itinerary, this is a carefully constructed site and a reasonable source of ideas on things to see, so why not <A HREF="http://www.travelbag-adventures.co.uk/">Go to Travelbag Adventures</A> </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 6/10</P> <H3>Nomad Backpackers</H3> <P><A HREF=" http://www.nomads-backpackers.com/">Nomad Backpackers</A> was set up in the 1980s specifically to provide affordable,comfortable accommodation for travellers coming into a number of antipodean destinations. Their 'Australia Starts Here' package includes many other features such as transfers from the airport, discounts off excursions and onward travel, advice etc. For people planning to visit Australia on a budget, this is a great website. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 7/10</P> <H3>Cheap Flights UK</H3> <P>Basically an index of Travel Agents dealing in cheap flights worldwide. It's possible to search by agent, by country, by airline, etc. The problem is that there is a lot of information and no way of telling the good from the bad - there's no guaranteeing the integrity of what you find. Calling Trailfinders is a better bet. <A HREF="http://www.cheapflights.co.uk/">Go to Cheap Flights UK</A> </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 4/10 </P> <H3>Explorer Tours - Amazon Jungle Lodges</H3> <P>The <A HREF=" http://www.explore-net.net/explorer/">Explorer Tours</A> site offers holidays in one of two very swish looking Amazon jungle 'resorts' in Ecuador. It all looks a bit clinical and far removed from reality - international cuisine, pool etc - not exactly a backpackers hang out! </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 3/10</P> <H3>STA Travel</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.sta-travel.com">Student Travel Association </A>home page is a site aimed at <I>young</I> budget travellers planning a long trip. It includes up to date location feedback from students who've just got back, but the information is <I>badly organised</I> (by date of the report rather than by location) and overall the site is very 'thin' on content and feels like a poor first attempt. The most useful thing seems to be if you're a full time student, it's a good place to find out about discounts, order an ISIC card etc. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 1/10</P> <H3>Asia Travel.com</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.asiatravel.com">Asia Travel</A> website is a <B>hotel listing</B>, with good descriptions, pictures and discounted rates on over 400 hotels and resorts in 70 Asian destinations. It includes an online reservation facility, which we did not try. Most of the hotels listed are out of the budget traveller range. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 7/10</P> <H3>The Hotel Guide</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.hotelguide.com/cgi-bin/thg/searchform ">Hotel Guide</A> site provides access to a <B>huge</B> listing of hotels all around the world, with brief no nonsense descriptions and indicative prices. The annoying thing is they provide no addresses or contact details of the hotels themselves, forcing you therefore to make reservations through them I guess. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 6/10</P> <P ALIGN="right"><A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="top.jpg" ALT="TOP" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A></P> <P></P> <HR> <H2> <A NAME="guides"></A><FONT COLOR="#800000">Travel Guides</FONT></H2> <P>The following is a selection of home pages for well known travel guides, such as the lonely planet and rough guides. These tend to provide the most believable and useful information. </P> <H3>Lonely Planet</H3> <P>As you might expect, this is an excellent web site for the would be traveller. Each country gets a pretty detailed write up covering pretty much everything you would expect. The site is packed with photos, which can be optionally downloaded. Perhaps of most interest are the <B>Travellers Reports</B> the latest up to date feedback from travellers who have just been to the destinations. <A HREF="http://www.lonelyplanet.com">Go to Lonely Planet</A> </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 9/10</P> <H3> Budget Travel </H3> <P>The <A HREF=" http://www.budgettravel.com">Budget Travel </A> website is dedicated to the traveller "who doesn't want to pay five star prices". The site is organised by destination country, with a consistent format for each, covering all the usual things such as contact addresses, etc. I found this most useful as a source of contacts for budget accommodation in Hong Kong. On the down side, the pages on this site are huge and not too easy to navigate, many of the web addresses provided aren't actually linked, and I'm not sure the information presented is very reliable. (But that's what you get on a budget site I suppose) </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 4/10</P> <H3>Rough Guides</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.roughguides.com">Rough Guide</A> site is basically a glorified advertisement, not exactly a comprehensive travel guide. The site format seems to be to provide a few enticing snippets from their (excellent) guides, but nothing of much value in isolation. Don't waste your time here, buy the book. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 5/10</P> <P>By contrast, The <B>Hot Wired</B> site is a general internet magasine, but has entered into some kind of promotional partnership with Rough Guides, where they include <B>full transcripts</B> from a number of the guides to a selection of countries including; Mexico, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Canada and India. <A HREF="http://www.hotwired.com/rough/">Go to Hot Wired Rough Guides</A> </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 8/10</P> <P></P> <H3>Fodors Guides</H3> <P>The <A HREF=" http://www.fodors.com/">Fodors </A> site is brought to you by the producers of the renowned, but somewhat stuffy guidebooks. It has a good search facility, by destination, which brings up pages of useful facts on any one of 87 countries. It's not my cup of tea, being seemingly geared towards the older traveller, with money-to-burn who likes to stay in 5 star hotels, whose idea of adventure is a trip on a cruise ship, and whose sole venture into the visited country is aboard a specially chartered air conditioned coach on a guided shopping trip. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 3/10</P> <H3>Lets Go</H3> <P>The Lets go guides are bibles for student travellers but the <A HREF="http://www.letsgo.com">Lets Go Web Site</A> is not much use for travel planning. It's little more than a catalogue for the books on sale, with dead end URLs and background graphics that take ages to load. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 2/10</P> <P ALIGN="right"><A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="top.jpg" ALT="TOP" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A></P> <P></P> <HR> <H2> <A NAME="travelogues"></A><FONT COLOR="#800000">Travelogues</FONT></H2> <P>The following is a selection of personal travelogues and independently commissioned articles that we liked. </P> <H3>Rec.Travel</H3> <P>The <A HREF=" http://www.travel-library.com/">Rec.Travel Library</A> is a mine of travel information organised by country. There is an excellent section on <A HREF="http://rec.travelmate.com/rtw/html/faq.html">Round the World Travel</A> for people just starting to think about this kind of thing. besides this, there is an emphasis on personal travelogues with accounts varying from utterly boring diatribes by sad gits moaning about the fact their plane was late, and others which are lively and informative. </P> <P>A well presented proficient and comprehensive RTW travelogue is <A HREF="http://grmcf.com/">Gavin McFarland's photos from around the world</A> page. Gavin did the trip in 1997 and this is largely a photo-journal. (Warning - It can be a bit slow to load)</P> <P>One of the best I came across was an extremely well written account of a trip through Honduras called the <A HREF="http://www.goodfelloweb.com/honduras/tour//">Honduran Notebook </A>- a top web site - amongst the best I've seen. </P> <P>Another beautifully presented travelogue of the Mayan route through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras is <A HREF="http://www.euronet.nl/~jeroen_k/mayan_route.htm">Jeroen's Ruta Maya</A>. </P> <P>In addition there are numerous other sources of information, such as online travel and tourism magasines, US government information (e.g. the CIA factbook!!!). Definitely <B>worth a surf</B>: </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 10/10</P> <P></P> <P><B><FONT SIZE="+1">Wired 2 The World.com</FONT></B></P> <P>This is <A HREF="http://www.wired2theworld.com ">David and Kristina's</A> recent account of their 9 month trip around the world. A useful planning reference site - especially since it contains a detailed breakdown of their budget and actual expenditure for the trip.</P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 8/10</P> <P ALIGN="right"><A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="top.jpg" ALT="TOP" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A></P> <P></P> <HR> <H2><FONT COLOR="#800000">Airlines & Airline Booking Services</FONT><A NAME="airlines"></A></H2> <P></P> <H3>British Airways</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://www.us.british-airways.com"> British Airways</A> site is a professional and well laid out site, where you can check prices and availability of BA flights worldwide. It also includes details of so called <A HREF=" http://www2.british-airways.com/app/?path=2"> World Offers </A> - This supposedly offers discounted flights, but there were none going to the destinations and times I checked. It smells a bit of so called 'bait and switch'. BA are currently in a price war with Virgin on certain routes, so there are a few good deals to be had but not usually as good as you'd get from a decent round the world travel agent. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 3/10</P> <H3>SABRE airline booking and a2b Travel Sites</H3> <P>The SABRE Group is a big player in the electronic distribution of information technology solutions for the travel and transportation industry. The SABRE network is used by more than 30,000 travel agencies to book flights with more than 400 airlines, thousands of hotels etc. A cut down version of the system is available online at the <A HREF="http://www/easysabre.com/">EAAsy Sabre</A> site. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to navigate since it is <B>command driven</B>. </P> <P>A more accessible front-end to SABRE cab be found in the <A HREF="http://www.a2btravel.com">a2b Travel</A> web site. However, what really irks me about a2b Travel's site is they have a 'Book the best deals on any scheduled airline' option. The best deal they could come up with for a London to Miami flight in (low season) November was a disgracefully pricey £862 each. The fares on both of these sites appear to be the <B>full published fares</B> - there are <B>definitely no bargains here!</B> </P> <P>If you want a decent discount - you need to go to a specialist agent such as Trailfinders or Travelbag. (See the <A HREF="http://freespace.virgin.net/adrian.ball.contacts.htm">contacts </A> page for their addresses). If money is no object, and you can be bothered to get familiar with the interface, then these are the sites for you. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 2/10</P> <P ALIGN="right"><A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="top.jpg" ALT="TOP" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A></P> <P></P> <HR> <H2> <A NAME="skiing"></A><FONT COLOR="#800000">Skiing & Snow Reports</FONT></H2> <H3>Skiing Generally and Snow Reports</H3> <P>If you are going skiing, the <A HREF="http://www.goski.com/home.htm">Go Ski</A> website includes a wealth of information on over 2,000 resorts in 30 countries around the world. It also includes up to date <A HREF="http://www.rsn.com/goski/gssnow.html">Snow Reports</A>. It doesn't however include a snow report from the Sierra Nevada in Spain. For this we had to visit the <A HREF="http://www.cybermundi.es/ski/nieve.htm ">Cyber Ski Espana</A> website which gives the lowdown on all the Spanish resorts. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 7/10</P> <P></P> <H3>Skiing in Argentina</H3> <P>Fancy a radically different summer holiday? Then why not go skiing or snowboarding in Argentina. The snowy season runs from June to August. There are a number of high altitude well equipped resorts to choose from, and I have to say that the <A HREF="http://www.worldski.com.ar">Argentine Skiing </A> website is probably the best winter sports website I've seen; beautifully presented and easy to navigate. A basic understanding of Spanish will help though. </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 7/10</P> <H3>Ski Central</H3> <P>The <A HREF="http://skicentral.com">Ski Central</A> site is very good, but only covers North American and Canadian resorts, which was of no use to us. (Maybe next year!) </P> <P ALIGN="right">Score 5/10</P> <P ALIGN="right"><A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="top.jpg" ALT="TOP" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A></P> <HR SIZE="3"> <P ALIGN="center"><A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="top.jpg" ALT="TOP" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A>  <A HREF="http://freespace.virgin.net/adrian.ball/index.htm"><IMG SRC="back.jpg" ALT="BACK" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A>      <A HREF="reports.htm" TARGET="_top"><IMG SRC="itinbtn.jpg" BORDER="0" ALT="ITINERARY" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A>   <A HREF="atoz.htm"><IMG SRC="atoz.jpg" BORDER="0" ALT="A TO Z LOCATION FINDER" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A>   <A HREF="http://freespace.virgin.net/adrian.ball/index.htm"><IMG SRC="home.jpg" ALT="HOME" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A>  <A HREF="mailto:adrian.ball@virgin.net"><IMG SRC="mail.jpg" ALT="MAIL US" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="60"></A>  </P> <P></P> <HR SIZE="3"> <P><FONT SIZE="3"></FONT></P> <PRE><I><B>Travel Links</B> Last Updated: 29th May 1999 Web Page by Adrian Ball (adrian.ball@virgin.net) </I></PRE> </BODY>