Resources > TraveLinks (recommended travel links)

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, innoculations, 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.

Wonder what your money is worth in some other currency? A great place to find out is OANDA's wonderful Currency Converter. This site will even create a customized, wallet-sized "cheat sheet" for you to print and take along!

If Europe is in your travel plans, you'll find useful reading (and copious advertising) at European Visits, "The Online Magazine of European Travel".

Steve Kropla's well-maintained Help for World Travelers has what is likely the most current country-by-country listings of: electrical information (plugs and power), international telephone codes, & phone/modem plug standards. Other good stuff too.

If you're roaming the world with a laptop, searching for a network connection, JiWire's Wi-Fi Hotspot Finder might be just the thing you need: tens of thousands of wireless hotspots, free and otherwise, in about a hundred countries.

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

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.

The Travel Library began life as a sort of "home page" for the Usenet travel newsgroups, but has subsequently morphed into a general collection point for travelogues and other information on a variety of destinations.

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 travlang Web site will help you do just that, with pronunciation, for some 80 languages (if you can fight your way through all the advertising). And if you're travelling really far afield, Mark Rosenfelder has compiled translations of the numbers one through ten in an astonishing 5000+ languages!

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.

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. Or you might prefer my own World Time Viewer.

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

Perhaps not the most sophisticated of Web sites, Koen De Boeck's 1000 Travel Tips nonetheless offers lots of independent travel information for some of the more out-of-the-way destinations, particularly those in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central America.

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. Look in the several "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. Enter BreezeNet's Guide to Airport Rental Cars, with 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.

My own fairly extensive Travel Industry Links to commercial Airline, Auto Rental, & Hotel Web sites also includes handy lists of the 2-letter ISO country codes, 3-letter airport codes, 2-letter airline codes, plus tools for checking on real-time flight status, flight performance, airport delay conditions, and airline information.

The San Francisco Chronicle's popular Follow The Reader column is organized and reprinted here, with personal recommendations (mostly — but not exclusively — B&Bs and other places to stay) submitted by its readers.

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 listings (they also appear to be growing faster, though both services claim to have the most extensive listings).

The most extensive list of hotels I've yet come across (over 60,000 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.

Brad Isbell's One Bag, One World blog offers up an assortment of "tips & techniques for light travelers". Although he claims the dubious distinction of having been "inspired" by this site, it's still a worthwhile result; most OneBag.com fans will discover topics of interest there. Mr. Isbell and I don't agree on everything, so you'll find some diversity of opinion. (And were this not the case, it would suggest that one of us is doing all the thinking!)

The information resource that most closely conforms to the philosophy espoused here is Lani Teshima's Travelite FAQ. Though Lani has not been maintaining her site in recent years, and some of its content is thus outdated, there's still a great deal of useful information, opinion, and female perspective to 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.

Frankly, I prefer to leave computers at home when I travel. Circumstances (and, for some, preferences) sometimes dictate otherwise, though, and Roadnews maintains a nice site addressing the challenges faced by frequent travellers who take their laptops along. A good collection of travel links as well.

The Lonely Planet folks host a great 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.

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.

Dan Phillips' Web Surfer Travel Journal features regular content changes, and an eclectic list of travel sites.

If you've exhausted all of the resources here, and have found my suggestions useful, yet still hunger for more travel information, you'll likely discover a few interesting links at my personal Web portal. Click on the "Travel (gear)" and "Travel (plan)" categories that you'll find there.