TraveLinks (recommended sites)

Some airports help to ease the stress of travel by providing free wireless Internet connections. Although it's difficult to keep such a list up to date, you'll find a reasonably accurate attempt (for U.S. airports) in TravelPost's Airport Wireless Internet Access Guide. It also indicates charges for those airports that are not so generous with their wi-fi services.

Wandering through the airport, wondering where you might find electricity for your laptop? Jeff Sandquist's AirPower Wiki is just what you need to track down that elusive outlet. There's some WiFi information here as well.

PDF versions of arrival/travel guides for many locations worldwide (of varying quality, but all for free) can be had from several sites, including Arrival Guides, In Your Pocket, Hostelworld, Travelfish, BootsnAll, tripwolf, BookBoon, and Guiomatic.

Largely aimed at the business traveller, the Bradmans Web site lists basic essential information (including airport-to-city instructions) for over 100 cities worldwide.

The U.S. Government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains a superb Web site, filled with health information related to international travel. This is the place to discover what you need before you go.

Various foreign affairs offices provide useful (and important) information about travel in other countries, including but not limited to foreign entry requirements (passports, visas, inoculations, etc.) and travel warnings (political unrest, lawlessness, violence, natural disasters, epidemics, aircraft safety, etc.). For example, Consular Affairs supplies this information for Canadians, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office offers it for U.K. citizens, and the State Department does so for Americans. It can be useful to compare their respective opinions (which do not always agree).

Wonder what your money is worth in some other currency? A great place to find out is OANDA's wonderful Currency Converter. They also offer the best (and free) currency converter app for smart phones, and will even create a customized, wallet-sized "cheat sheet" for you to print and take along!

Travelling the world without your computer and missing that regular Internet fix? Wishing you could send e-mail back home, or pick up messages from friends? My brief Internet Café introduction suggests what in most cases is the ideal solution.

Learning a bit (or a lot!) of the language(s) in use at your destination(s) is one of the best things you can do do improve your relationship with the local citizenry. The Language "Quick Fix" section of the BBC's site will help you do just that, by providing essential phrases, including MP3 pronunciation clips, for some three dozen languages. Want to delve even deeper into pronunciation (including nine major variations of English, plus an equal number of foreign languages)? Try fonetiks.org. And if you're travelling really far afield, Mark Rosenfelder has compiled translations of the numbers one through ten in an astonishing 5000+ languages!

Wikipedia provides a comprehensive, country-by-country listing of (electrical) mains power around the world, with associated voltage levels and photos of the necessary types of plugs. It also offers detailed descriptions of the AC power plugs and sockets themselves.

Wondering how to pronounce someone's name correctly? Both Pronounce Names and HearNames.com offer large collections of given and surnames from many different places, complete with phonetic and audio pronunciation assistance.

Produced by Time Out, "one of the planet's leading publishers of entertainment listings and city guides", this au courant site suggests where to go and what to do in over twenty of the world's major cities.

The nearest government tourist office, visitor's bureau, or the like is generally an area's best source of local information; for tourists, it should be the first stop when you arrive at a new place. The Tourism Offices Worldwide Directory is a bit plain, but has plenty of listings of such non-commercial services.

Washington-based visa and passport expediter Travel Document Systems primarily services US citizens & residents. Their Web site, though, is useful to everyone, listing not only the expected entry & visa requirements, but a huge amount of additional information on most of the world's destinations, including current travel conditions, vaccination requirements, etc.

Want to know what the weather will be like where you're going? Weather Underground provides detailed current information, plus short term forecasts for places all over the world, in its easily navigable Web site.

If you're roaming the world with a laptop, searching for a network connection, JiWire's Wi-Fi Finder might be just the thing you need: hundreds of thousands of wireless hotspots, free and otherwise, in close to 150 countries. They offer an iPhone app for this as well.

Wikitravel, a community-edited worldwide travel guide, is rapidly becoming an excellent source of information on destinations around (and off!) the globe, with plenty of additional travel-related topics — including a growing collection of phrasebooks — as well.

Another way to determine expected weather conditions (particularly for long-range planning purposes) is to view historical data. World Climate publishes such information for tens of thousands of cities worldwide, garnered from a variety of sources.

The World Clock yields a useful (and configurable) display of the current time in many world locations.

An extensive online compendium of useful information about "every country in the world" is published by Columbus Travel Media, a U.K. publishing firm. Their World Travel Guide provides solid basic facts about most destinations on the planet.

The folks at 43 Films have assembled a helpful collection of short animated videos about cultural tips and language hints for a variety of European and Asian countries.

Those interested in travel by bicycle or motorcycle will likely find some great books they haven't yet read at my own Bike Lit site: peruse the "travels" categories.

Using a truly phenomenal database of rail stations, Die Bahn's TravelService site will provide you with schedules for rail (and many road & sea) connections all over Europe. In their home territory (Germany) alone, they cover almost 150,000 regional stations!

The European Railway Server links to timetables, home pages, and "aficionado" sites for the various European railways. Lots of other Euro-rail-related resources can be found here as well.

Though its principal focus is that of the northwestern U.S., Dan Youra's Ferry Travel Guide also provides links to ferries and ferry systems worldwide. It also references some cruise lines and shipping companies.

If you're searching for an e-community of people who like to talk about air travel, look no further than FlyerTalk, which has been around since 1998. Lots of useful travel ideas (on a surprising variety of topics) await your discovery here.

Frequent flyer programs offer much of value, though they're not what they used to be, and now require that you pay them a lot more attention in order to get the best return. Tim Winship's FrequentFlier.com addresses this topic, and presents much of interest, including links to hundreds of airports worldwide.

It's hard to keep track of all the various promotional offers available from the auto rental companies. Both Neotravel and BreezeNet monitor this kind of information, and provide lists of rental agencies at major U.S. (and some foreign) airports, plus details of current discounts.

If you're wondering where you'll be sitting on an upcoming flight, take a look at Matthew Daimler's amazing SeatGuru site. It offers detailed diagrams of a staggering number of commercial aircraft, complete with indications of the best seats, the amount of legroom, and the availability of power ports for computers. A more recent competitor, SeatExpert, offers a similar service.

OneBag.com's Travel Industry Links (to commercial Airline, Auto Rental, & Hotel Web sites) also include the best metasearch engines, handy lists of the 2-letter country codes, 3-letter airport codes, 2- & 3-letter airline codes, and tools for checking on real-time flight status, flight performance, airport delay conditions, baggage limits & fees, and aircraft seating arrangements.

The official site of Hostelling International provides contact and other information for the many hostels that make up their worldwide network. These are the "official" hostels that require a membership to use.

There are, of course, many independent hostels as well. Although hostels.com provides a substantial directory of same, the service is not what it used to be prior to its being bought by a large booking firm; some of their features have been dropped, and contact information for the hostels that they list has been dramatically curtailed (presumably to encourage you to use their booking services). I continue to list them, but have come to prefer hostelz.com, with its generally more useful — and greater quantity of — listings. The newer Hostelworld is also well worth your attention.

The most extensive list of hotels I've yet come across (over 150,000 entries), The Hotel Guide offers a convenient search form to locate what you're looking for.

If your tastes run more to Bed & Breakfast places than hotels, you'll want to explore InnSite, an excellent resource for all things B&B.

TrustYou is a powerful (and impressive) new metasearch engine that applies semantic analysis to millions of online travellers' reviews, in order to find accommodations that meet your specific criteria.

One Bag, One World, originally a blog by Brad Isbell (who claimed to have been "inspired" by this site), but recently taken over by Frank Brown, offers up an assortment of "tips & techniques for light travelers". Its authors and I don't agree on everything, so you'll certainly find some diversity of opinion (though were this not the case, it would suggest that one of us is doing all the thinking); still, most OneBag.com fans will discover topics of interest there.

The information resource that most closely conforms to the philosophy espoused here is Lani Teshima's Travelite FAQ. Following a five-year (2003–2008) hiatus, Lani — who doesn't travel much anymore — reconstituted her site as a (now somewhat sporadic) blog, and plenty of useful information, opinion, and female perspective can be found there. Between Lani and me, you're pretty much covered in the "travelling light" department!

The venerable Arthur Frommer has always been an outspoken producer of useful travel guides, starting with his justly famous "Europe on $5 a Day". Now he offers a very worthwhile travel site, with much to be learned from one of the most experienced authors in the business. And it's updated daily, catering to the bargain hunter.

Kaaryn Hendrickson spent a lot of research time (including a study of these pages) prior to her traditional three-month student trek of Europe; she shares those preparations, along with much that she learned along the way, with visitors to her Backpack Europe on a Budget site.

Betty Winsett, a former professional photographer, offers a collection of informative travel photography ideas at Betty's Travel Kiosk. There's more as well, including a good collection of travel links, and even her own packing list suggestions.

John Gregory has written a complete (25 chapters, 120 illustrations) book on How to See the World on $25 a Day or Less and published it on the Internet. An impressive feat; be sure to take a look.

Marc Brosius maintains a personal travel site at Perpetual Travel, with a variety of information, notably his Round-the-World Travel Guide. Some details of the latter have become a bit dated, but it is still a very worthwhile read.

And you think my site has a lot to read! Randy's Travel Tips are the product of Randy Johnson's considerable (five+ years) third world travel experience. There are four sections: Transportation, Shopping & Bargaining, Safety & Security, and What to Take. For inside information on riding a bus in Syria, or haggling in a Pakistani market, this is the place to go. Randy no longer seems to be maintaining it, but it's still a body of very helpful information.

The Lonely Planet folks host an outstanding bulletin board devoted to travel topics, called The Thorn Tree. You'll find an interesting community of well over 100,000 users there, and perhaps answers to your more obscure questions. This is one of the most useful travel sites on the Internet; just bear in mind that not all of the posters are necessarily as experienced as they try to appear!

Backpackers ("independent budget travellers", per the site's definition) will want to take a look at Giles Smith's ambitious TravelIndependent.info. He offers — in addition to his own thoughts about travelling light — lots of useful destination-specific opinions and advice. A very worthwhile visit for the round-the-world adventurer.

Most travelogue Web sites are pretty bad. Don and Linda Freedman's well-written TheTravelzine.com is a refreshing exception, and should prove worthwhile to anyone planning a European visit.