Travelling in the Web 2.0+ World

As the month of May and my vacation winds down (four more days!), I thought I would finally jot down a post I have been writing in my head for the past month.  (Also, even with a couple days down time in the past week, I have not been motivated to write about Amsterdam.)

There have been a handful of websites and tools that have been invaluable throughout this month of travel.  In no particular order:

TripAdvisor: This is essentially the de facto guide for ideas on what to do, eat, shop, etc, when visiting a city.  It's so popular now that even shows have TripAvisor stickers on their windows.  Reading others' experiences helps plan your own (like knowing to show up at the Catacombes de Paris hours early to wait in a line).  TripAdvisor also now has Facebook friend integration, so you can tell which of your friends have been to a city or attraction before--exactly how I (re)learned that Kush & Sonia had been to Paris a year prior to our visit--and ask for tips.  TripAdvisor also has these "Offline City Guides" that we used for Amsterdam and Paris, that download attraction & restaurant reviews, maps, etc onto Holly's Kindle Fire, which was super great, since we didn't have a cellular or wifi connection while walking around the cities.  Using the city guide for Amsterdam we managed to stumble onto several restaurants that were pretty darn amazing.  Caveat: TripAdvisor ratings for attractions are culled from those that have rated the attraction--usually those that visited it in the first place.  That means that, for instance, an art gallery might rank high because those that visit it (art aficionados) love it.  If you don't love art, you probably don't need to go, even if it's on the top 5 things-to-do.

TripIt: TripIt started in 2006 and I think I actually signed up in '07 or '08 after reading about it somewhere.  I don't think many people use it--certainly I didn't really, until this trip.  It essentially curates an itinerary for you and keeps all your important info (reservation & booking numbers, addresses, phone numbers, etc) in one location.  All you have to do is forward all your booking e-mails (flights, hotels, etc) to the e-mail: plans@tripit.com and they take care of the rest.  Most of the time it works pretty well.  You can then share trips with fellow travelers, as I did with my sister, or share the details with others (so parents know where you'll be and more-or-less how to reach you, etc).  They also now have apps on pretty much every phone and tablet platform, which was quite useful.  I no longer had to print out each reservation e-mail; just open up the app and my visit details for each day was just there.

AirBnB: I first heard about AirBnB last year; it seemed to be making quite a splash in the Valley (still is), but I couldn't really understand what the fuss was about.  Turns out that the travel industry has a lot of money, and the couch-surfing industry is taking quite a bite of that.  Since we were to be roaming Europe for a month, we wanted to (a) keep costs down, and (b) live in apartments that were closer to attractions/downtown cores--in other words, live more like locals than tourists (and have a kitchen if we needed it--we did!).  We ended up booking three apartments through AirBnB (Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris) and one through HomeAway.com (Bruges), with the leftover being hotel stays.  AirBnB is such an amazing experience.  Because you pay upfront, you don't have to worry about having enough cash on hand to pay the host.  The photos people post are quite accurate as well, so there are no surprises.  Hosts are quite friendly (they have ratings as well), and can give you "discounts".  You can search on availability, location (albeit with a slightly clunky interface).  We were able to stay within walking distance to major attractions--living in hotels in these areas would be quite exorbitant.  (As I write this, I am in a flat about a 10 min walk away from the Eiffel Tower.)  My only gripe about AirBnB is that sometimes it wasn't clear what the address of the flat was, and getting to the flat without a cell was sometimes nerve-wracking (even with the hosts' directions--we happened to get lucky finding each apartment, especially in Brussels).  AirBnB is an amazing service.

HRS: Thanks to Kush for the heads-up on this website, which allowed me to find some cheaper hotels in Luxembourg than I was about to find on Orbitz or Expedia.  It was, though, somewhat sketchy when my first reservation didn't send a confirmation e-mail to my inbox (the second one did, however).

RailEurope: De facto train timetable/schedule site. Works great, until that one day in Luxembourg the site just would not return any results for trains from Lux to Reims the next day and instead kept returning back to the query page. Turns out the trains it was showing several days before were no longer existing. Strange.

Facebook: Just for sharing where you are and what you're doing.  Good for keeping in touch.  I kept updating my "Places" and the "Cities I've Visited" app for fun.  I like to colour in my world.  Also interesting to compare with others.

ATMs:  We used a money exchange in London, but after looking for some places with good rates in Amsterdam, we decided to try the ATMs, and they do indeed give the best exchange rates.  My credit union charges 1% as a foreign exchange fee (without any ATM fee), which was still better than any "bureau de change" we found, in any city.  The only catch was that I could only withdraw max US$500/day.

Weather.com: The Weather Channel has a bunch of smartphone apps that, in the Windows Phone case, allowed me to pin each city in a Live Tile on my start screen.  Invaluable for at-a-glance weather information.

SkyDrive: Finally, a shameless plug for SkyDrive.  I used the SkyDrive desktop client to backup all my pictures every night to SkyDrive.  (Yes, it's not meant to be used as back-up software.)  This gave me peace-of-mind, since the last time I was in UK (2004) my laptop completely died after visiting Scotland and I thought I had lost all my pictures.  (I managed to save them all afterwards by pulling out the hard drive.)  I have taken some 25 GB of photos (with a handful of video clips) this month.

We didn't have cell phones this month (though I have the codes to unlock them).  Turns out that free wifi is more or less readily available (all McDonalds!).  Smartphones + Kindle Fire was sufficient for on-the-fly browsing.  We did bring a netbook and this was certainly useful for uploading pictures and doing research in the evenings.

I can't imagine what travelling without internet access would be like anymore.

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Edit 6/4/12:
I completely forgot about HipMunk (mostly because it was more useful during the planning of the trip)!  Hipmunk is awesome (who can say 'no' to that cute little chipmunk mascot?).  I've been using them ever since they announced years ago; I used them primarily for their innovative flight display/comparison format.  It's so much better than anything else out there.  Recently they also added "heat maps" for hotels, attractions, etc.  (This was interesting because I had been wondering how they were going to innovate in the space.)  Highly recommended tool.