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Tags: Animals / Travel Sites / Compassionate Travel / → All Tags
How To Save Your Favorite Animals On Vacation
Heading off for summer vacation doesn't mean you have to leave your morals at home. A new site called Compassionate Travel gives animal lovers a to-do list and, perhaps more importantly, a to-don't list for the road.
To be frank, the list of attractions to avoid is both general and pretty obvious: The animal involvement in circuses, bullfights and "wild animal rides for entertainment" is clear even to the tourists who gladly participate in them. We hope they'll add some guidelines to use to spot a cruelty-free version of these wild adventures, if such a thing exists.
The site, which is sponsored by the World Society for the Prevention of Animals, is more complete on the proactive side of what animal lovers can do when they're not in their native habitats. Its tips for watching wildlife could be useful even if the animals in question aren't dangerous (like the adorable dolphin pictured!), as is the factsheet on reporting animal cruelty on the road. There's also a nascent page of animal-related volunteer vacations, and seriously, anyone want to go to Kenya and help rescue elephants with us?
Related Stories:
· Travel Do's [CompassionateTravel.org]
· In Captivity: Where's My Elephant? [Jaunted]
· Animal Travel [Jaunted]
[Photo of an elephant in Kenya: meandmyshadow]
Tags: Travel Sites / Traveling Alone / Travel Safety / → All Tags
Travel Security Company Not Winning Over Any of The World's 'Singletons'
According to the press release that just got dumped into our inbox by travel security company SafeCheckIn.com, the world is a dark, terrifying place. It's even scarier if you're a lonely single woman. There are bad men out there, and they will get you! And when they do, no one is going to even know or possibly even care. SafeCheckIn.com is your only friend. Here's why:
What happens if you are a single and you go out alone for a hike, road trip, run, swim, or any activity, but do not come back safely? If you are single, live alone or are away from friends/family, who will begin looking for you? ... SafeCheckIn.com is a new service that allows individuals the security of having someone always waiting for him or her... When you are a single and heading out for any activity, you often do not have anyone to tell where you are going.
Please trust us when we assure you that this first paragraph is the least grating part of the promo. It's not nearly as bad as their website, which screams "don't become a victim" in huge red letters (more on that in a sec). But check out how it mentions "single" over and over again and promises to have someone "always be waiting for you."
Because without SafeCheckIn.com and its email and text service that checks up on you while you are away, you're alone in this dark, dangerous wilderness of life. So pathetically alone.
Tags: Google / Travel Sites / City Tours / → All Tags
Google Enters The Travel Market, Will Create Your Next Vacation For You
There's probably a good chance that the recession is keeping you home this summer, enjoying a staycation and maybe kicking back with some virtual tours. But if you're still planning to leave your neighborhood for parts unknown, Google is ready to help you plan your vacation.
The Internet search giant just unveiled its new Google City Tours, a service designed to outright create whole itineraries for travelers. Type in the name of your city and City Tours will return a series of trips designed to take you around the area's major landmarks. It displays locations, hours, and even the estimated time you should expect to spend at each site.
Tags: Rental Cars / Travel Sites / Expedia / Thrifty / Payless Car Rental / → All Tags
Payless and Expedia Make a Love Connection
Travel site Expedia has been stepping up its efforts in recent years to get travelers to think of it as an all-in-one stop, convincing users to book flights, hotels and car trips, or plain all-inclusives, via the site.
Usually, we're not convinced of the savings, since the package prices on these sites never seem like that much of a deal. But we're intrigued by the news that Expedia is teaming up with Payless Car Rental to offer more low-fare car rental deals. Payless has some pretty good last-minute deals through their website, with domestic rates as cheap as $23 a day. So along with Expedia's existing partnership with Thrifty, maybe this will make their three-in-one deals a little more enticing.
We've booked flight combined with hotel before, but have never gone for the car too to round out a vacation. What about you all? Do you ever look at Expedia's three-in-one options, and would cheaper car rental entice you to perhaps book one if you never considered it previously? Let us know in comments below.
Related Stories:
· Expedia [Official Site]
· Payless Car Rental [Official Site]
· Car rentals coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: Expedia]
Tags: Travel Sites / Blogging / India Travel / → All Tags
Bloggers Sleep Free in India
Set up along the same lines as Couchsurfing, there's a new website that will help you out if you're looking for a free place to stay in India. ExtraBed.in is a portal that connects bloggers from India and around the world, with the Indian bloggers offering others a spare bed for a night or more in cities and towns across India.
The idea of connecting bloggers is kinda neat--the theory is that if you can read somebody's blog, you'll get to know a bit about them and you won't feel like it's a complete stranger coming over to stay. The site encourages you to bring a gift for your host, and some blogger hosts also want you to do some light chores--or once in a while, babysit their kids! But that only seems fair when you're saving on hotel costs and meeting some interesting Indians.
Related Stories:
· Stay in India For Free [Reuters]
· ExtraBaed.in [Official Site]
· Making More Internet Friends [Jaunted]
[Photo: Dream.Chaser]
Tags: Frugal Traveler / Travel Tips / Travel Sites / Croatia / Matt Gross / → All Tags
Frugal Traveler is a Fickle Traveler, Too
World Hum had an excellent interview yesterday with NYT Frugal Traveler Matt Gross. You may remember him as the guy you were jealous of as he traveled around the world on the New York Times' dime. Well, he's back, he's getting married, and he didn't like Croatia.
According to Matt, it just wasn't impressive as, you know, Bishkek or Tirana:
I just wasn't all that excited about anything that I saw or did there. I had a fairly good time and I'm curious to maybe go back three or four years from now to see how it's developed, but that's more an intellectual curiosity rather than from-the-heart desire to return. Everywhere else I felt like I left with so much more that I wanted to do, people I wanted to spend more time with, food that I didn't get a chance to try. Everywhere else seemed so limitless, yet Croatia's ... Croatia. Every town on the coast has it's beautiful little old town with a hill and a church and white marble and terra cotta roofs. I spent two weeks there--and then I was ready to leave.Ouch! Dubrovnik may be Paris on the Adriatic, but it's in no danger of replacing Tbilisi on Matt's list anytime soon. Hope they don't take it too hard over there.
[Image via Meitta/Flickr]
Tags: Travel Sites / → All Tags
Keeping the Family Vacation Under Control
There have been a rash of sites of late, all combining social networking with travel--Trip Mates, for example--trying to cash in on the success of MySpace. But what if you don't care about making friends when you travel, and instead, you just need an efficient way of herding your family on a trip? Then you'll want to use Trip Hub.
It functions as exactly that: A Hub for a group vacation. By creating a homepage for the voyage, Trip Hub functions as a place to centralize information, like hotel and flight reservations. A group can also discuss details on where they'll be headed, and post a blog about their trip while they are there. We actually like Trip Hub more than most of these sites, since we could imagine using it, especially if we were a far-flung group planning a trip across several time zones. Sure beats trying to make more friends over the Internet.
Tags: Airlines / Airline Hell / Travel Sites / → All Tags
Smarter Travelers Still Stuck in Line
Air travel is a mess--haven't we established that already? But according to Old Man Sharkey over at the Times--you kids get off his lawn, by the way--there are certain ways that you can inform yourself. Like doing a study!
Somehow, us regular plebes have access to all the real-time flight data we could ever hope to get out hands on, thanks to a website called Flight Stats. For free, users can see where planes are at any given time, check which flights were late the day before between two destinations, and see the delay stats of airports themselves.
Except, anyone using this site should already know that Atlanta or LaGuardia are black hole airports, sucking in passengers but not letting them leave. Is Flight Stats really going to help you as a heavyset woman from the TSA vigorously frisks your private areas searching for your shoe horn they claim is Swiss Army Knife? We thought not. It's an amazing, powerful source of information, but we can't see it as a useful tool for anyone other than the most hardcore traveler. It should be a boon for travel writers looking to make a point, though.
[Image via Relient K/Flickr]
Related Stories:
· Smarter Summer Fliers [NYT]
Tags: Travel Tips / Travel Sites / → All Tags
Another Shameless Plug
Thank the Lord for this one. As our laptop battery takes the long sail into the sunset/not holding a charge anymore, we find ourselves more often in need of a power outlet. It looks dorky, but it's better than no computer time at all. As the focus of the site is travel, it is airports--where we often are-- that are the most difficult places to find free juice.
AirPowerWiki is a user-generated site for finding places to plug in at airports across the U.S. and the world. It's a Godsend. How else would we know that the plugs in Madrid's Barajas airport are next to the fire hose outlets on the floor, or that the plugs in Newark are near the ticket counter? Try to look inconspicuous when you're near that ticket counter, though.
[Image via edans/Flickr]
Related Stories:
· New Site Round-up [Upgrade Travel]
· Air Power Home [AirPowerWiki]
Tags: Tech / Travel Sites / → All Tags
Pictures of You
When it comes to buying trinkets for friends and family on vacation, we can be exceedingly lazy. The only thing that we like to do less, in fact, is buying postcards and writing them. They seemed like a quaint thing to do, before the popularity of cell phones and email, but now it seems positively anachronistic.
Mobycards takes cell phone technology and applies it in a nifty way to the postcard tradition. Users take a picture with their camera phone and send it with a text message to the Mobycards phone number. For about $5, mobycards will send the picture as a postcard, with your text on the back, to your friends.
See, thanks to technology, you can annoy your friends with vacation photos far more easily than ever before. O brave new world, with such gizmos in it!
[Image via lschoen/Flickr]
Tags: Travel Sites / → All Tags
Making More Internet Friends
CouchSurfing is great when the site isn't in the throes of self-destructing, as it did recently, but what if you want to keep in touch after you're done sleeping on someone's futon? Enter Tripmates, a comprehensive site for keepi track of fellow travelers before and after trips.
A more accurate name , though, would be "MyTripSpace". Users can create a travel blog, post what music they are listening while traveling, organize a trip with a group of people on the site, or write reviews of hotels, restaurants, and bars. If you're into one-stop shopping, the site could have an interesting future, but ultimately we're tired of filling out profiles; give us Flickr and mass emails any day. Those emails are annoying but still the most efficient.
Tags: Travel Sites / → All Tags
Canadian Explorers
Somehow we missed the launch of Canada's "Keep Exploring" campaign. We came across a three-page print ad devoted to it in the July 1 issue of the Canadian news magazine Maclean's.
The campaign, which can be viewed at www.keep-exploring.ca, is conceptually driven. It breaks personalities down into eight categories: Aficionado, Anthropologist, Chameleon, Epicurian, Improv Artist, Mingler, Thrillster, and Trailblazer.
The site then, predictably, affixes these personalities to various interests. In turn, these interests are linked to activities, itineraries, and particular places across Canada. So, for example, if you're a Thrillster, you dig pubs, roadtrips, and zipline adventures, right? The site links your thrillster ass to a range of 'hood and nightspot sites, 18 roadtrip itineraries, and Whistler-Blackcomb Ziptrek Ecotours.
We're sure that the whole thing annoys academics and aesthetes, but we like this campaign, if only because it puts into practice the Canadian habit of trying to accommodate everyone in one or another way. Plus, there's something exciting about a travel campaign that is able to connect a range of ideas to a national brand as opposed to, say, sticking one image or concept or feeling to a territory's brand like a gold star the in-house strategists hope won't lose its adhesive.
