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Virgin Launches VTravelled.com Online Travel Community

June 23, 2009 at 11:16 AM | 0 Comments

Hot on the heels of Virgin Atlantic's 25th Anniversary flight and celebration, good old Richard Branson is launching yet another new product into the travel ring. But this time, it's not a spaceship or a smartphone; it's a website: vtravelled.

Taking serious inspiration from Dopplr, vtravelled focuses its content around "Trip Pods" that you create for each of your trips. In their words, a Trip Pod is "a tool to store and organise travel ideas and aspirations. It’s easy to bookmark content from other sites and then share with friends and family to create the ultimate itinerary." These pods are then scattered around a map of the world, powered by Google, with each featuring a photo that you have to upload.

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RentaBikeNow Makes Two Wheels Almost As Easy To Borrow As Four

June 23, 2009 at 9:22 AM | 0 Comments

Our number one travel biking request here at Jaunted is for cheap, Velib-style bike-sharing in every city on earth, but until that happens, we’ll settle for a national bike rental service that makes hopping on two wheels as easy as renting a car.

On the path to this is RentaBikeNow.com, a web-based company that partners with bike shops to provide rentals in 157 different cities across the U.S. and Canada. The site launched a few months back and got a boost recently when Lance Armstrong’s coach, Chris Carmichael, shouted them out on twitter.

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FyndHawaii's Mission Is To Tweet Island Deals All Day, Everyday

June 18, 2009 at 9:17 AM | 1 Comment

It used to be that navigating the sea of travel deals was best left to really hardcore bargain hunters, but now that Twitter has hit the scene with its own special deals and direct offers to lucky followers all it takes is a simple "follow."

Depending on the Twitterer, their page can read like a short-but-sweet stock ticker of amazing prices, especially if you’re looking to head somewhere that needs a little tourism boost. This is why we are excited to hear about FyndHawaii.

The service is your basic Twitter account, but there’s no sharing of mundane activities. It’s all deal tweets, all the time, alerted both on their website and on their Twitter feed. The site mirrors the Twitter account, so you can check for deals when your friendly office IT department has blocked Twitter.

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Bumblehood To Be Yelp Without the Community, Like That'll Work

May 29, 2009 at 11:02 AM | 1 Comment

Another community-driven travel resource is entering the fray, and this one seems to be a cross between Yelp and WikiTravel. Bumblehood's goal is to provide full, user-generated travel guides. They're not exactly Yelp because they have "economy" and "history" sections that go beyond Yelp's urban business focus, but they're not WikiTravel either if only because their interface is slicker. Bumblehood is trying to be the best of both worlds, combining WikiTravel's focus on travel guides with Yelp-style business reviews.

There's something refreshing about a business review site that goes beyond Yelp's obsessive focus on friends, user profiles, and "Elite Status." Bumblehood's emphasis is instead on content, which is particularly helpful for travelers who need access to uncluttered information quickly.

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DiscoverAmerica Wants Your Dollars to Stay in the States

May 18, 2009 at 9:10 AM | 1 Comment

Sick and tired of Americans traveling abroad for culture, food and activity when the good old homeland has it too, the United States has they launched a new website in hopes of keeping all those summer vacation dollars in the nifty fifty: DiscoverAmerica.com. Previously, they’ve used the “discover” theme to attract visitors from overseas, but this new site is focused on those keeping it local this year, for better or for worse.

All the juicy details of America’s finest offerings can be found through integration with the National Park Service, and Google Maps will help you plan a city-to-city road trip. Once you’ve found your dream vacation or experience here at home, the site will be happy to help you spend your hard earned cash through links to all the usual travel booking sites.

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Orbitz Already Campaigning for Your Cuba Travel Dollars

May 14, 2009 at 8:46 AM | 0 Comments

Travel booking website Orbitz is not about to waste any time getting their foot on the door with travelers drooling over the possibility of making landfall in Cuba soon. On March 10, President Obama signed a bill to ease travel restrictions for Cuban Americans heading home to visit family, amongst other changes. On March 11, Orbitz had launched their website petition to open the floodgates to all tourism.

The "Open Cuba" campaign is simple enough: enter your name, state, postal code and email address, and choose if you'd like to receive further news about the campaign or emails from Orbitz about travel deals.

Aha! The entering the email part; that's where they get you! Their mailing list gets padded, they get free publicity, and you feel as though you have participated in history. That is, until you begin receiving Orbitz deal emails when you have no intention of booking a 3-star all-inclusive resort in Puerto Vallarta. You just want some Cuba time, damnit.

Until JFK to Havana direct flights look more feasible, we're going to hold back on the online signature. After all, the only thing we're in the mood to sign after checking out their website is the receipt for a box of Cohibas.

Related Stories:
· Open Cuba [Orbitz]
· Travel firm to Obama: Open up Cuba [Guardian UK]
· Cuba Travel Internet Campaign Begins [Havana Times]
· Cuba Travel Coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: JohnnyPinball]

Air Valid Dorks Out With Airline Seat Pitch Stats

May 5, 2009 at 9:01 AM | 1 Comment

As air travel fiends, we actually relish the part of booking a flight which involves choosing our seat on the plane. Actually, we almost always take the extra step to hit up websites like FlightStats to check the individual airplane's details and it's historical performance on the route. Apparently, FlightStats and other such sites now have a new bit of competition from across the pond: Air Valid.

Air Valid offers the typical tools of a flight data website; there's an airfare search engine (Mobissimo), a list of blacklisted airlines, general plane make information and airline number of passengers per year. The site's big claim to fame, however, seems to be its seat pitch information, allowing taller travelers to compare airline's seat space.

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Red is Your Friend with TripTrop Travel Time NYC

April 30, 2009 at 12:59 PM | 0 Comments

Tired of trying to explain to visitors how long it will really take for them to reach LaGuardia without the aid of a taxi? Or perhaps you are a tourist yourself, vainly attempting to juggle a visit to a pizzeria in Brooklyn with an Upper East Side dinner date with old friends. No matter the circumstances, so long as you're pressed for time in New York City, new website TripTrop is your savior.

Combining the average length of time for a person to travel between locations in the Big Apple by both subway and walking, TripTrop displays this information via a fun, rainbow map where red is your friend and blue means you might as well take a helicopter.

In the map above, we've plotted travel times from Times Square, which then displays anything within 10 minutes in the happy red, which cools down in color as the travel time increases.

Sadly, this handy little web tool is only available for New York City right now, but we can totally envision the Google grids of public transportation-friendly cities like San Francisco, Chicago and London underneath its spectrum. Until other cities join in on the TripTrop fun, however, we'll just be over here a gas at how close yet how far away is Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Related Stories:
· TripTrop NYC [Official Site]
· TripTrop NYC: Visualizing Travel Time [PSFK]
· Travel Websites Coverage [Jaunted]

[Image: TripTrop]

Kayak's TravelPost Tries To Win Our Hotel Review Hearts

March 9, 2009 at 11:25 AM | 1 Comment

Not to be outdone by TripAdvisor’s latest offering, Kayak has a little something up its sleeve. After hearing about what the competition has to offer, the travel meta-search king sent out a press release to illustrate what still makes it number one.

CEO Steve Hafner lets us known that he’s flattered that TripAdvisor has mimicked his site’s design, but tells us that Kayak’s caliber of results still sets it apart. Uh-oh, the travel bookings/review site feud is on!

Now, Kayak is creeping in on TripAdvisor's turf by launching their own hotel review website. TravelPost is going to, or at least hope to, take travel reviews to the next level. It promises to search over 200 travel sites to bring you the latest in reviews, information, and rates.

If we were TripAdvisor, we’d be worried. Sure, they have all the review mojo now, but they’ve kind of been resting on their laurels and Kayak is definitely up to the challenge.

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TripAdvisor Now Advising On Airfares

February 27, 2009 at 9:26 AM | 3 Comments

Just when you thought that everyone and their brother had a search engine devoted to travel, we get one more. Adding a little friendly competition to the mix is travel review king TripAdvisor. The site launched its own flight meta-search yesterday, and now hopes to save you money in the air and to keep you away from that roach motel.

We took the new search for a spin, and it seemed to respond well to our simple requests. It lets us know that it’s searching perennial favorites like Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire, and many more. The results include all the legacy carriers, but like so many others, leave out our Luv buddy—Southwest Airlines.

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2008's Best Travel Blog: There's Something About Kugels

January 18, 2009 at 12:36 PM | 7 Comments

The results of the 2008 Weblog Awards are in, and the winner for Best Travel Blog is ... MyKugelhopf. To be honest, I had never heard of MyKugelhopf before the poll came around, but I had a look at it and have to hand it to creator Kerrin Rousset. The Zurich-based New Yorker has a nice-looking and frequently-updated website about food and travel, with tight writing, quality photography, and wide range of destinations and yummy-looking foods. In fact, she travels so much, to so many exotic locations, that I wonder if she has a regular job outside of this blog thing. Could this be her main job? It doesn't even carry any advertising! However she does it, it's a winner, so congratulations to Ms. Rousset. Incidentally, MyKugelhopf is named after a sweetened bread, similar to brioche, that is enjoyed in France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It's probably quite good with coffee.

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Are You Still Searching For Travel Deals Online?

January 9, 2009 at 3:00 PM | 2 Comments

No room to dream: Online vendors are freaking out after a Times Online report revealed internet searches for travel were down 42 percent after Christmas, when holiday-fattened bank accounts are traditionally emptied out for spring vacations.

Searches for travel to the US were one of the hardest hit segments of the British travel biz, as the pound falls against the dollar and Brits tighten their belts. The only segment that showed any improvement were searches for package holidays, but the interest didn't lead to a corresponding lift in bookings.

Online bookings were taking a hit back in October already, but the gap between booking a trip and not even looking for one is pretty enormous. So dear readers, are you still looking for travel online, even if you can't afford to go now?

Related Stories:
· Internet Travel Searches Drop 42 Percent [Times Online, via]
· Financial Fallout Travel: Online Booking Hurting, Too [Jaunted]
· Budget Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo of an empty terminal at MAN: Jett Loe]