Tag: Travel Websites

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Awesome Blog Alert: 'I Am Packed'

February 9, 2012 at 3:30 PM | by | Comment (1)

What'd you pack? It's not a question you ask your friends and family when it comes time to zip up the bags and head on out on a trip; it's a question asked by a curious traveling public, of every traveler ever. Yeah, we want to see inside your suitcase or duffel, and though it's true that most of the time it's to compare packing prowess, it's also because the world enjoys stuff.

Without further ado, let us introduce the Air New Zealand-backed photoblog I Am Packed, which has one purpose: to feature the well laid-out contents of a traveler's bag, plus minimal information about the person (name, age, hometown, destination). It's beautifully simple, oddly inspirational and—best of all—'they take submissions.

Their archives only go back as far as August 2011, so you won't while away the entire day scrolling down the site. We had a similar series that started in September 2011, but ended with the year (here's a post from it). This way, the magic of peeking into other people's bags continues.

[Photo: screenshot]

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Check Out JetBlue's Very First Website, from 2001...

February 6, 2012 at 6:19 PM | by | Comments (0)

Okay so JetBlue just finally launched their very first iPhone app, but at the same time, they also pushed out a new mobile of their website, and a new website all around. To prove how far they've come, JetBlue shared with us the above—their first functioning website, from 2001. Wow. Throwback. Now compare it to 2012, below...

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LAN Launches a LGBT Travel Website, Just in Time for Carnivale

Where: Chile
January 19, 2012 at 3:05 PM | by | Comments (0)

Latin America's largest air carrier has expanded their horizons by tapping the lucrative LGBT travel market and launching a full travel website devoted to gay travel in South America. LAN Airlines' fresh site is an extension of the main page for the airline, but has features to celebrate the diversity that the continent offers to gay and lesbian travelers.

Believe it or not, LAN isn't the first airline to be as open online as they are open-minded; they join the ranks of Delta, Virgin America and Southwest in their commitment to inclusion. The carrier also will be a competitor for American Airlines, which consistently takes top honors as "Best Airline" to the gay community.

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The Newest United 'Hub' Calls the World Wide Web Home

December 20, 2011 at 8:24 AM | by | Comments (0)

The newly combined United is adding a few hubs here and there—like the ones in Newark and Houston that used to belong to Continental. However, their newest hub is one that lives entirely on the internets.

United just launched UnitedHub.com in order to provide plenty of answers, information, and other handy facts about the airline, the merger, and the joys of flying around in economy class. The future promises to bring more about their travel apps, check-in process, and how to interact electronically with the jumbo-airline, but for now most of the stuff has to deal with what’s coming and what’s changing.

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Wolfram Alpha, Airplane Stalker.

November 22, 2011 at 12:07 PM | by | Comment (1)

Okay, this is awesome. Go to WolframAlpha.com (a site that's like Google if Google was a huge science dork), and search "flights overhead." Yes, just those words. Now sit back for a millisecond until WolframAlpha returns with a list of the flights currently overheard you at that very moment.

This is the hottest little time waster on the internet today, and we may just stay addicted to it throughout the holidays. There's no need to live near an airport, either, as WolframAlpha picks up on planes cruising up above as well as ones coming in for a landing.

Our results—as we're currently in the triangle formed by JFK, LGA and EWR—returned an AirBerlin flight en route from Düsseldorf to Fort Myers, FL. It's crazy to think that a website can let us know that there's a couple hundred Germans directly overheard, each of them dreaming of the Florida sunshine they'll enjoy in under three hours.

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Google Unveils Flight Search, Provides Helpful Instructional Video

September 14, 2011 at 4:00 PM | by | Comment (1)

Last May we told you that Google was getting into the travel business, with the Mountain View search giant having just acquired travel software company ITA. ITA provides the algorithms that power sites like Orbitz, Kayak, and CheapTickets - to say nothing of handling schedules for a bunch of airlines - and that's pretty much all it does. So Google's intentions weren't exactly inscrutable, even if the exact details of what they wanted with ITA weren't totally clear.

Then a few months later flight schedules started showing up in Google results. That wasn't particularly exciting in and of itself, but it banished any remaining doubts about whether Google was getting into the flight search game. And so no one was really surprised when, earlier this week, Google finally launched their new Google Flight Search. It's exactly what you think it is, and you can check it out here.

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TripAdvisor Will Now Even Hook You Up with Train Tickets

July 7, 2011 at 2:55 PM | by | Comments (0)

Okay you guys. Enough of this opening multiple tabs and windows to search all your travel options. Travel booking sites are finally getting hip to integrating many modes of transportation into one search, and the latest to up the ante is TripAdvisor.com. In addition to providing flight prices and information, they'll now set you up with rail tickets:

TripAdvisor has partnered with one of the leading mobility and logistic companies in the world, Deutsche Bahn, as well as other top European rail providers including Rail Europe Inc., to give travelers access to train choices across continental Europe as they plan the perfect trip. It becomes the first travel website to integrate multiple rail providers in-line with flight options across a global network.

When travelers conduct a flight search on TripAdvisor, the site will now display rail itineraries alongside flight choices for routes where it's relevant, and in some cases priced even cheaper than air travel. The site has partnered with leading European rail providers, including Deutsche Bahn and Rail Europe, for the beta launch to give travelers access to train choices across continental Europe.

[Photo: Tripadvisor]

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Talking Tech at TripIt's San Francisco HQ (Plus a Little Ping Pong)

June 2, 2011 at 11:42 AM | by | Comments (0)

If you open up your Foursquare app in San Francisco's Mission district, a slew of tech start-up HQs pop up all around. One of them is a name you may also be familiar with as another app on your phone or iPad: TripIt. Begun in late 2006, TripIt has grown from a simple travel itinerary management tool to something that can easily replace many frequent flyers' thick leather journals, full of appointment notes, airplane seat numbers and jotted loyalty program info.

So, while walking through The Mission on a sunny May day, we stopped in to see what makes TripIt tick. The answer, as we discovered, is actually quite simple: TripIt's overarching desire is to use technology to make life easier, to simplify the "internet travel experience." For users, this comes through immediately. Sign up for a free TripIt account, then forward all your trip confirmation emails to TripIt and a nice itinerary is generated, complete with city maps and pertinent reservation details for everything from flights, hotels and rental cars to Airbnb stays, ferries and Megabus rides.

Personally, ever since upgrading to the $49 annual TripIt Pro (which tracks everything from our flight status to if we're eligible for a refund), the combination of TripIt plus mobile boarding passes means we haven't had to print and keep track of any travel documents for a while. It's a new sort of freedom we didn't think possible for someone traveling as often as we do.

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Hangin' with The Hipmunk: What's Next for the Internet's Hot New Travel Booking Site?

June 1, 2011 at 11:20 AM | by | Comment (1)

He's an infographic fiend, our small obsession, and even our Travel Tweet of the Week; yes, he's the Hipmunk. This sprightly little chipmunk is no less than the mascot for the most exciting and fresh travel booking engine out there right now. Hipmunk.com, though less than a year old, has already become our default search site for pricing airfare and hotels, so we sort of crashed their headquarters last week in San Francisco.

If you want to read the tech trend story on how Hipmunk got started, there are plenty out there. The site had momentum from the first, seeing as how its founders—Adam Goldstein, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian—are behind the popular social news sharing website Reddit and well known in their own rights. We could tell you all about that, but instead we're far more interested in things like the fact that they just bought an office couch (it's IKEA, and lime green)! And they're developing hoodies!

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However Did We Manage Before TripIt?

March 25, 2011 at 12:10 PM | by | Comment (1)

It's Friday and we feel like watching some videos. Don't worry—we aren't going to go all Rebecca Black on you, but we are going to share a video we thought was pretty great, not to mention educational.

For some time now, we've been using the free iPhone Travel App/website TripIt to keep all our crazy confirmation emails from every corner of the travel earth together. It's hard to explain the magic that creates a beautiful itinerary and then allows us to view it and all our needed details on our iPhone without the need of a WiFi network, but luckily the above video spells it out quite well.

If you're anything like us, you should strongly identify with at least the first 25 seconds. Just looking at the "travel" folder in our Gmail can give us heart palpitations from the unorganized mess it appears, so we just throw it all at TripIt and make them deal with it. And now we know, via this video, exactly how they do deal with it.

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Hipmunk Turns the History of Baggage Fees into an Infographic

March 24, 2011 at 5:54 PM | by | Comments (0)


This is the only tippy top of it

Holy crap. You know that little chipmunk mascot that likely keeps drawing you back and back again to search flights and hotels on Hipmunk.com? Well, that anime-cute rodent has been doing some serious number-crunching behind the scenes, and Hipmunk has released a beautiful, want-to-lick-it lovely infographic that easily educates the traveler on the history of evil, evil Baggage Fees.

The infographic is quite long, covering all the major soap opera-like drama that's gone down with airlines and oil prices and whatnot since 2000. There's a few "Hip Tips" for getting around baggage fees, and we especially love the shark feeding frenzy graphic about half-way down. Finally, they make us frightened for the coming of space travel. SEE THE WHOLE THING HERE.

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'How Much Do You Heart Me?' Asks Adioso's Travel Deal-Booking Flight Attendant

February 11, 2011 at 10:49 AM | by | Comments (0)

For those of you scrambling this weekend for a perfect Valentine's Day gift, and for those of you who just want to book some affordable travel deals quickly and easily, we've just discovered an awesome tool on Adioso, the travel booking site flavor of the month. They have a mini-site called "How Much Do You Heart Me?," starring an adorable cartoon flight attendant, who asks you how much, on a sliding scale, are you willing to pay for a flight and hotel vacation for two. Adioso then searches for package matches within your budget for upcoming weekends.

The deals can originate from most US cities, but we tested it out with New York of course, and began by setting it low, at $610 total for two people. How Much Do You Heart Me came back with a weekend trip to Arlington, Virginia (because Virginia is for lovers?) with a grand total of $552, including roundtrip airfare and two nights at a Hyatt for two people. Not too shabby, but what can the big spenders get?

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