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The Charlotte Observer, N.C., Consumer Travel Column: Newer Web Sites Offer Wealth of Goodies

Posted on: Sunday, 19 February 2006, 06:00 CST

By Tony Mecia, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

Feb. 19--Sure, you know the main Web sites used for booking travel, the Expedias and the Travelocitys and Orbitzes. But there are plenty of other travel-related Web sites out there customers might not have heard of, and are worth checking out.

Some are helpful, scanning databases for information that can save travelers money. Others offer doggone interesting information. A brief list:

-- New ways to search for flights. In the old days, you thought about where to go, then checked the price of the ticket. Now, some Web sites are evolving to allow you to check fares simultaneously to multiple cities -- say if you want to go somewhere in the Northeast, but don't really care where as long as it is cheap.

One of the first of this genre was Travelocity's "Dream Maps" (go to Travelocity.com, click on "Flights" and scroll down under "Need Ideas"). A more sophisticated version is Kayak Buzz, at www.kayak.com/h/buzz/flights . In addition to the map, Kayak gives a tidy and quick list of the cheapest places to fly, organized almost any way you'd like.

Last week, it was showing the cheapest U.S. destination from Charlotte was Boston ($164 round trip). Consumers can also easily find the cheapest flights to Europe (London, $434), to Asia (Hong Kong, $742) and the Caribbean (Freeport, Bahamas, $304).

Another in this vein is www.farecompare.us/Charlotte .

-- Airline food. For some reason, airline food has always fascinated travelers and late-night comedians. Now, the power of the Internet has been harnessed to share information -- and thousands of pictures -- on international airline food, on the eerily addictive site airlinemeals.net.

People send in photographs of airline food served on hundreds of different airlines around the world, from Aces Airlines (Colombia) to Zoom Airlines (Canada).

Someone's even tracked down photos of airline meals from behind the Iron Curtain, in a section devoted to airline meals from the 1950s to the 1990s. Check out the photo of the breakfast on Soviet airline Aeroflot, dated July 1971.

-- Flight tracking. If you're picking up Grandma at the airport and want to know whether her flight from Detroit is on time, sure, you could consult the airline's Web site, or call the airline. But if you also want to know precisely where the plane is, check out Flightaware.com, which uses flight data to track flights.

It also tracks private and business jets and tells you, for instance, that a Dassault Falcon 2000 registered to Wachovia Flight Operations flew to Monterey, Calif., on Feb. 6 and again on Feb. 8. But it can't tell you why, or who was on board.

-- Last-minute travel. Everyone knows the cheapest airfares can usually be found at least a few weeks ahead of time. But what if you want to go last-minute?

Site59.com specializes in last-minute travel and can often put together cheap flight-and-hotel or flight-and-rental-car packages. A new feature called "Meet Me In" allows travelers from different cities to rendezvous in a third city, and book the travel at the same time.

Flyertalk.com. This site is fairly well-known among hard-core travelers, who operate chat boards here to discuss and share tips on the best way to score upgrades to the latest deals. The site skews toward business travelers who are interested in making the most of their elite-flier status, but it tends to be a knowledgeable bunch that welcomes outsiders and tries to answer any travel-related question.

Tony

Mecia

Tony Mecia: (704) 358-5069; tmecia@charlotteobserver.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

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Source: The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)

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