Making the most out of your travel experience the online way

Travel can be a nightmare sometimes.  Whether it’s for relaxation or for business, at best travel is a chore that you have to get through in order to get on with your plans.  At worse it can be a nightmare that never seems to end.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. I get the fact that years ago when you had to rely on travel agents and paper tickets and possibly misbooked hotel rooms that things could often go awry but nowadays we have robust and well-developed and refined travel systems out there.  You really have almost no excuse not to have a good trip.

Let’s start with booking the trip.  If you just watch an hour’s worth of TV or listen to radio or read a magazine you will come across advertising for some sort of online travel agent.  I’m not saying you need to book through them but you can at the very least get online and compare prices for days and days and find those cheap tickets to almost anywhere.

You can take advantage of government security programs that let you minimize your time at security checkpoints in airports.  You can do a lot of the annoying paperwork that you had to do at the kiosks online and just drop your bags off and walk calmly to your plane with plenty of time.

Once you get to where you’re going you can arrange ground transport by taxi or über or airport shuttle.  You can tell people where to pick you up and if you’ll be late.

With hotels you can look at the actual properties where you’ll be staying and see how well you like it.  You can find online reviews or ask other people if they’ve stayed there before.

The most exciting thing about our new online life is that we can look at a location and see if there are attractions, restaurants, and other things that we can do besides what we expected.  We are no longer bound to be stuck in a hotel or an attraction.  We can now explore all the possibilities that a location can offer.

Weather of course is so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning but any little advantage can help.

So look at where you currently live and think about all the possibilities around you.  If you were a stranger what things would you like to know about your location?  Make up a list and then apply that to wherever it is you want to go and find out that information.