Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Frommers.com: The Complete Travel Resource
For an excellent travel-planning resource, we highly recommend
Frommers.com
(www.frommers.com), voted Best Travel Site by
PC
Magazine.
We're a little biased, of course, but we guarantee that
you'll find the travel tips, reviews, monthly vacation giveaways, book-
store, and online-booking capabilities thoroughly indispensable.
Among the special features are our popular
Destinations
section,
where you'll get expert travel tips, hotel and dining recommendations,
and advice on the sights to see for more than 3,500 destinations
around the globe; the
Frommers.com Newsletter,
with the latest deals,
travel trends, and money-saving secrets; our
Community
area featur-
ing
Message Boards,
where Frommer's readers post queries and share
advice (sometimes even our authors show up to answer questions);
and our
Photo Center,
where you can post and share vacation tips.
When your research is done, the
Online Reservations System
(www.
frommers.com/book_a_trip) takes you to Frommer's preferred online
partners for booking your vacation at affordable prices.
In the opaque website category,
Priceline
and
Hotwire
are even better
for hotels than for airfares; with both,
you're allowed to pick the neighbor-
hood and quality level of your hotel
before offering up your money. Price-
line's hotel product even covers
Europe and Asia, though it's much
better at getting five-star lodging for
three-star prices than at finding any-
thing at the bottom of the scale. Be
sure to go to the BiddingforTravel
website (see above) before bidding on
a hotel room on Priceline; it features a
fairly up-to-date list of hotels that
Priceline uses in major cities. For both
Priceline and Hotwire, you pay up
front, and the fee is nonrefundable.
SURFING FOR RENTAL CARS
For booking rental cars online, the
best deals are usually found at rental-
car company websites, although all the
major online travel agencies also offer
rental-car reservations services. Price-
line and Hotwire work well for rental
cars, too; the only “mystery” is which
major rental company you get, and for
most travelers the difference between
Hertz, Avis, and Budget is negligible.
8 The 21st-Century Traveler
INTERNET ACCESS AWAY
FROM HOME
Travelers have any number of ways to
check their e-mail and access the
Internet on the road. Of course, using
your own laptop—or even a PDA
(personal digital assistant) or elec-
tronic organizer with a modem—gives
you the most flexibility. But even if
you don't have a computer, you can
still access your e-mail and even your
office computer from cybercafes.
WITHOUT YOUR OWN
COMPUTER
It's hard nowadays to find a city that
doesn't
have a few cybercafes. Although
there's no definitive directory for
cybercafes—these are independent
businesses, after all—three places to
start looking are at
www.cybercaptive.
com
,
www.netcafeguide.com
, and
www.cybercafe.com
.
Aside from formal cybercafes, most
youth hostels
nowadays have at least
