Web Travel Guide 2.0: A Selection of Sites that Will Help You Plan Your Next Vacation (and Hopefully Not Just Waste Your Time)
By Matt McDaniel, editor
Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, finding decent and reliable travel information on the World Wide Web (who actually calls it that today?) was more like exploring the Wild, Wild West. At the time I used Yahoo! and AOL to find facts and statistics on all topics, not just for travel – and facts and statistics are basically all the Internet offered back then (well, that and a few other more prurient items as well, but we won’t get into that). There were no resort cams, no real-time weather, and definitely no online travel booking.
I remember being really excited when Rough Guides launched, because it at least provided interesting content along with the cool pictures.
Well, Rough Guides is still around (check out www.roughguides.com), but as every connected person knows, there’s so much more. In fact, it’s gotten to the point that all the travel-info-peddling, travel-deal-booking, weather-updating, public-transit-schedule providing, restaurant-finding, ATM-locating, airport-mapping, passport-and-visa instructing, vacation-blogging, theme-parkguiding and foreign-travel-requirement updating on the Web has become as much as white noise, turning what should be exceptionally useful trips to the computer into wasted hours at www.wrongsite.com. (By the way, I just made up that website name.
I checked, and it’s not a porn site, so you can go there if you want. But if you do, then you’ve just missed my point about throwing valuable computing time into the toilet.)
So, we’ve hand-picked a bunch of travelrelated sites (a pretty broad category, mind you) that should actually benefit you when you plan your next vacation or business trip. You probably already know a good portion of these, savvy traveler that you are, but it’s our hope that you find at least one or two new-to-you websites that you’ll add to your favorites list.
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