3 Must-check Traveller Websites before your Next Trip

Mar. 24th, 2008 | by Anthony |

All of us take at least one trip annually, whether it be locally or overseas. As much we love them, most of us aren’t able to have trips very often. Whether it’s work, school, financial problems, there is always something that holds us back. Thus when we finally get a chance to get out it’s in our best interests to take necessary precautions to ensure that the next trip is a success. Many factors that ruin good trips include delays, insufficient information about the place you are visiting and just plain old loneliness. Here I would like to introduce to a number of useful websites that can help you make your next trip a better one.

Insufficient information for your trip?

Try WikiTravel

WikiTravel is a user-powered travel guide. There are about 18,000 travel guides and articles written and edited by regular travellers from around the globe. You can find pretty much anything here. So if you’re looking for relatively non-biased destination reviews definitely check it out.

There is one other emerging website that I want to mention here. Chokti is a YouTube-inspired site where you can find virtual tours of places you are planning to visit. At the moment there are about 1200 video/audio tours there. Mostly submitted by users themselves. While it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find a video tour of some remote village in India here, it does cover most of the major cities. Chokti does not require an account - however if you plan to upload videos, you need to register.

Hotel Reviews

For hotel review, pics, and map locations I recommend TripAdvisor. Not always true and objective, but usually offers enough info to get a basic idea. If photos are not enough and you want a visual preview of the hotel then try TVtrip, Trivop and Tripr.

Lonely on your trip?

Try Dopplr

Dopplr is essentially a virtual travel log. It allows you to add friends, share your travel schedule with them and discover other people with similar travel plans. It includes an action-feed on your profile page that shares all your current travel activity with all your friends. In addition to comparing travel schedules with friends, Dopplr also allows you to link your Dopplr account with Facebook and share travel activity with Facebook buddies.

Another useful feature Dopplr has to offer is picture sharing. It allows you to link your profile to your Flickr account and share travel pictures with friends and family. Registration is absolutely free, and they rarely send you emails so there’s no need to worry about “Great Offers” or “Daily Newsletters”. Check out Dopplr infocommercial below:

Delays on your trip?

Try FlightStats

Weather and air traffic make travelling a pain. With flight stats, you’ll know of any flight delays and weather issues BEFORE you leave for your trip. We have already briefly mentioned it here.

Flight Stats uses a cool map in which all major airports are mapped out and color-coded. The colors represent the Flight Delay Index which is based on weather conditions and data sent out from the airports themselves. Red representing major delays and green representing smooth flying. Upon clicking on the dots, you’ll receive more detailed information about the airport in question, such as the exact temperature and the weather conditions.

A sub-feature of the map is the weather overlay. With this feature activated, it is possible to view cloud conditions overhead and predict beforehand if there will be any delays.

If you usually leave for the airport a hour and a half before your flight, you can glance at the ticker-tape at the top of the webpage that shows minute-by-minute delay updates on major international and domestic flights.

Some other included tools are mobile/email updates, real-time flight tracker, airport information, etc.

Other

Not so long ago Aibek published 10 travel websites that should be bookmarked. Check it out as well, there are a number of really useful tools there. These include ATM locator, Taxi fare estimator, public-transport maps and more.