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KLM Once Again Does Social Media Right with Their 'Must See Map'

When it comes to airlines and social media stuff, it seems like KLM is always on the shortlist for carriers who actually utilize it in a useful and slick manner. We’ve mentioned before how they kill it on Facebook, and now it looks like they’re just going for a place in the airline social media hall of fame with something called "Must See Map."

Basically the idea is to rely on your friends and internet pals to help you plan your trip in one way or another. Head over to the map website, select where you’re going and then give the itinerary a slick name. After that you’re free to start adding your own tips and notes to your online map. We did a little sample visit to Paris and we added the Eiffel Tower as a must-see—haha.

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Frequent Flyer Miles / Travel Tips / New Year's Travel / Around-the-World Travel / Airlines / Airports / Maps / → All Tags

How Many Times Have You Circumnavigated Earth in 2012?

Not our map, but a sample

112,425 miles.

Does that seem like a lot? It is or it isn't depending on how much you yourself fly, but this number, our personal 2012 total for miles flown, represents a year of new adventures.

The number comes courtesy of the free website FlightMemory.com, where anyone is welcome to sign up for an account to then enter travel itineraries for detailed stats. We recommend getting on that now, before 2013 plans command your attention from the fun of 2012.

Miles tracking on FlightMemory is as involved as you want it to be; ranging from the basics (airports, dates, airline, flight number) to the advanced (airplane type, registration, seat number and class), all resulting in sweet, sweet statistics to brag about share at the dining room table or at the airline lounge bar. Our particular favorites are how many times we've circumnavigated the Earth (4.51x), total different airports (28) and average flight length (2,294 mi, 4:39 h).

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Apple Maps / Australia Travel / Apple / Maps / iPhone / iPad / Technology / → All Tags

Even Australian Police Hate Apple Maps

We've already talked about the problems with Apple Maps and how we miss Google Maps as a standard feature on our iPhone. The former has renamed cities, created new land masses and even directed us down some thru roads that ended abruptly with a dead end sign. Even Apple sacked the guy who created the application last month.

Now, Australian police have gotten involved with their hatred for the navigation app. No, you wont get arrested for using the maps, but you might get lost and they don't want that to happen.

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Travel Tech / Apple / Maps / Google Maps / Apple Maps / iPhone / iPad / Technology / Videos / → All Tags

iOS 6 Maps Drools, Google Maps Rules

Another day, another slew of inaccuracies discovered in iOS 6 Maps. The app, which comes new with the software update on iPads and iPhones but deletes Google Maps, is so crazy bad that it's become the butt of late night comedian monologue jokes, even spawning a particularly hilarious mocking Tumblr.

And it's not just getting driving directions wrong or putting a park where there's actually a parking lot. iOS 6 Maps has managed to make the world appear to be melting in 3D view, reverted some cities to their occupied names from World War II and, well...they're just generally confused about Australia (examples here & here).

Heck, Apple Maps can't even get their own worldwide flagship store to look like it's not in some post-apocalyptic state. Hey, at least North Korea looks awesome!

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Travel Photography / Instagram / Social Media / Maps / Google Maps / → All Tags

Instagram Photo Maps as a Form of Travel Bragging

Last week, social photo-sharing network Instagram released Version 3 of their crazy popular app, rife with new features and improved functionality. One such addition is the "Photo Map," which automates populates a Google Map with the images you have taken and geo-tagged. This means that, last week, your Instagram newsfeed liked look like a listing of who's adding how many photo to where on their map.

Instantly the traveler bragging and jealousy began. "Who in my network has the most diverse Photo Map?" "Who has the least?" Poor newcomers to Instagram probably felt more than a little miffed to view their maps, sans all the fun locations they'd hit earlier in the year and shared prior to becoming wrapped up in the addictive app.

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Olympics Travel / Berlin Travel / Germany Travel / War Travel / Historical Travel / Maps / Photo Gallery / → All Tags

Found: a Nazi Travel Pamphlet Advertising the 1936 Berlin Olympics

In times of war and in times of peace, countries still hope to pull in those tourism dollars. We see it now, with North Korea and the Arab Spring, and you can bet your butt that it was most certainly the same back in the lead-up to World War II in a Reich-ruled Germany. The year was 1935 and it was a dark time; the Luftwaffe was created as were the Nuremberg Laws, and Hitler was already defying the Treaty of Versailles by building submarines.

And yet, amidst all that, the country managed to continue their tourism push in advance of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We recently came across a pamphlet from this period, aimed at American travelers crossing the ocean to visit Germany for the purpose of cheering on their countrymen at the Games, but also—as it's obvious from the wording of this pamphlet proclaiming Germany "The Beautiful Country"—to have a look around the more pastoral, traditional towns. In other words, it was lightweight propaganda.

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Weather / Travel News / Travel Tips / Turbulence / Maps / Cruise Travel / → All Tags

You Can't Stop Turbulence, But You Can Know When to Expect It

In-flight meals may not be the most sanitary things and engines may not work properly all the time, but the thing that scares us the most is turbulence. When the plane starts shaking, we close our eyes and try to go to a happy place inside our mind, where the skies are clear and smooth and we're about to land. But thanks to a website that we've kept in our bookmarks, we're able to prepare ourselves for turbulence by visiting the Turbulence Forecast.

The Turbulence Forecast is a straightforward site, which gives maps of countries or regions and layers over them with sectors where light to heavy turbulence can be expected. The map you see above shows only green sectors on the USA right now, so turbulence is light, but trust us when we say that we have seen those boxes go red (mainly over the Northeast) to distinguish more severe turbulence.

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Videos / Comedy Travel / Maps / Google Maps / Travel Tech / → All Tags

'Let Me Google Map That for You'

How do you sightsee, or even find your way when you're a bit lost in a city? Paper maps are so several years ago, so naturally you're going to pull out that phone and fire up GPS. And, naturally, it doesn't always load or pinpoint perfectly.

Luckily Deutsche Welle's TV news show Euromaxx has introduced a character who silently parodies these little hiccups of modern life, and his name is Max X..

Enjoy the little video above—a little laugh to start your week—and you can find more on Max X's YouTube channel here. We discovered Max X. while watching too much hotel TV, and hint that another one coming soon to the internet touches on the issue of taking photos of yourself in front of landmarks.

[VIdeo: Deutsche Welle/ Euromaxx]

Airports / Airport News / Travel Tech / Travel News / Maps / Bing / Bing Travel / → All Tags

Bing's New Airport Maps Will Help You Track Down a Terminal's Starbucks

It’s clear that Microsoft’s Bing isn’t the most popular search engine, but they just launched a cool new travel tool that might just make us "Bing and decide" a little more often.

There’s now 42 different airport maps available through the search engine, and if things go well they’ll soon be expanding outside the nifty fifty. Now you don’t have to explore—the often archaic—airport websites to find what you need. With Bing you can easily access where to find a quick bite to eat, an overpriced latte, or just where to pickup your suitcase. The full airport list is right here, from Omaha to Orlando.

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Travel News / Travel Tech / Social Media / Maps / In-Flight Entertainment / In-Flight WiFi / → All Tags

MondoWindow: Combining In-Flight WiFi with the Appeal of Window Seats

Your flight sucks. You've got a middle seat, your seatmate's elbows have taken the armrests and you know you're flying over pretty scenery but you can't see a darned thing. Enter MondoWindow, a new site that promises to make "every seat a window seat" by allowing you to watch your flight (or any flight, really) travel over a satellite map of the terrain below.

The site, designed to be like the online version of those cool "Window Seat" books, launched at SxSW in spring of this year, and we've been watching the Beta version of the site since. It's pretty neat-o, if you're a complete geek for these sorts of things and always love to see data like your altitude and flight duration timeline.

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Google Maps / Google / Google Earth / Japan Travel / Technology / Maps / Tokyo Restaurants / → All Tags

Google Now Mapping the Inside of Japanese Businesses, Everything Else

Google continues to make progress on their project of enabling you to see the world without ever leaving your house (sadly, not totally a joke). The company is adding more and more information to Google Maps, this time encouraging Japanese businesses to upload panoramic images of their stores to Google's Business Photos database, which is hooked into Google Places, which of course is embedded in Google Maps. The Japanese focus is part of a broader roll out, with Business Photos accepting images from US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

The upshot is that, metaphorically but not really, you'll soon be able to navigate your way "inside" restaurants and shops digitally on Google Maps. Just like with other photos in the application, users will be able to pan, tilt, and zoom the 3D panoramic images of business. CNN's hyperlocal Asia travel site CNNGo, showing an admirable awareness of cultural sensibilities, mused that the feature will especially appeal to their "more shy" Japanese readers. We imagine that users elsewhere will find plenty of other uses, above and beyond the wow factor.

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iPhone Travel Apps / Maps / iPhone / Britain Travel / Travel Tech / Awesome Stuff / → All Tags

London's School of Economics Uses iPhone App to Map Your Happiness...Your 'Mappiness'

Before we explain the iPhone travel app "Mappiness," we've got a few question for you: Do you like to know that people care about your feelings? Are you willing to share your feelings with your iPhone on a daily basis? Do you live in the UK? If you answered yes to all of those, then Mappiness is for (and heck, even if you don't live in the UK).

Mappiness is actually more than an app; it's a project run by the London School of Economics to discover where/when/why people are happy across Britain. Eventually, when they produce the end result based on research provided by those who use their free Mappiness app (namely, you), a traveler would be able to glimpse a map of the UK and see, perhaps, exactly what towns are typically most happy while hanging out with friends at a pub, versus having a work conference or sitting solo in a park, reading.

The app, right now, is building that data by noting its (anonymous) user's locations, and asking them every day how happy they are and where they are and what they are doing.

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