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New Travel Stuff You Should Know About

07/15/2010 by Rudy Maxa

The Internet continues to astonish with new apps and websites that can make travel easier or more fun. Here are a few of my new finds:

  • Say you want to take a trip and none of your friends are up for it. Turn to GlobeTrooper, where a small army of folks around the world are looking for like-minded travelers. The site, started by two Australians who couldn’t find enough friends that shared their enthusiasm for climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, lets you post a proposed trip and solicit companions or review postings by others. For example ... next February, someone named Mark is looking for nine people who want to join him to circumnavigate the entire Indian railroad network. Hurry before that one fills up!
  • Here’s an app that will put to rest forever the question, “When is Daddy (or Mommy) getting home?” It’s called Glympse, and it allows anyone you choose with a computer or smartphone to follow your progress via the GPS in your smartphone. This is not spyware because you choose who gets to follow you and for how long—15 minutes? Four hours? Four days? Now, when you’re headed to your friends’ beach house or cabin up north, if you invite them to follow you (by sending a text message or e-mail), they’ll know when to throw the shrimp on the barbie. No cost, and no registration required.
  • Need updates on Florida beaches as the oil spill widens? VisitFlorida is the ticket. You can view impacted beaches, read Twitter feeds from those areas and view local webcams.
  • Instead of carrying around a big guidebook—whose content may only be of marginal interest to you—make your own by visiting Stay.com, where a universe of travel experts have made their favorite recommendations for dozens of destinations. Choose what’s of interest to you and all your clips will be arranged into a PDF you may print out with your destinations laid over a map.
  • You might think a documentary on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be B-O-R-I-N-G. Not this new one called Please Remove Your Shoes. It’s only available for order on the web site, but it makes for riveting watching for even frequent travelers who can be perplexed by TSA rules and procedures.
  • I left my iPhone in a rental car in Orlando not long ago. Lots of information was stored on it—photos, my entire phone book, notes, apps ... If you have an iPhone or iPad, you might want to consider paying $99 a year to Apple to sign up for MobileMe. If you lose your phone, you can find it on a map via its GPS signal, presuming the phone is turned on. If it’s really lost, just a mouse click will erase all the data on the phone (again, as long as it’s turned on). Most importantly, MobileMe backs up all your stuff so you can transfer it easily to a new phone.
P.S. I know I write and talk on my radio show a lot about travel outrages and shortcomings by hotels, airlines and rental car companies. But let me pause for a moment to congratulate Delta Air Lines for eliminating the fee for requesting an award ticket at the last minute (“last minute,” in this case used to refer to 30 days before you wanted to travel). In this era of fees, this was one that really bothered me. After all, it didn’t take any more effort for a computer to grant you an award ticket 60 days out than it did six days out. I know, I know—Delta has connections to this blog. No matter, I’d congratulate any airline that makes this consumer-friendly move.

Comments

Globe trooper, stay.com, and mobileme
are great info. will forward to ALL my travel friends.

steve berger on 7/18/2010 8:52:27 PM
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I second all of the official tourism offices, like VisitFlorida that was mentioned above. When researching a travel destination this is usually my first stop. They have the best organized recommendations, lists, addresses and the like ...

Michael on 8/18/2010 3:46:01 PM
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About Rudy Maxa

Rudy Maxa

Rudy Maxa is host and executive producer of the public television travel series, Rudy Maxa's World. The 78 episodes he has hosted have won numerous awards, including a 2008 regional Emmy for his episode "Rajasthan." He's a contributing editor with National Geographic Traveler magazine and has written for a host of national travel magazines and newspapers. For nearly 15 years he offered consumer travel commentary on public radio's business show Marketplace as "The Savvy Traveler," which was also the name of a one-hour, coast-to-coast weekend show on public radio that he co-created and hosted for four years. Prior to his career as a travel writer and broadcaster, Maxa was an award-winning Washington Post investigative reporter, magazine writer, and columnist for 13 years, during which time his reporting was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He was a senior writer at The Washingtonian magazine and Washington, D.C., bureau chief of Spy magazine. The author of two non-fiction books, Maxa lives in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota.

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