Nine Places To Plan Your Next Trip
There’s a lot more to planning a business trip or a holiday than simply booking travel, making airport parking reservations and finding accommodation. These days you can find out a lot about where you’re headed by visiting sites for countries, cities, destinations and attractions. The only trouble is that those sites are designed to sell you on the delights of the places you are visiting. To find out what actual travelers think, you need to browse the travel forums. Here are nine forums where you can start your research.
Try these forums to plan and discuss your next trip
BootsnAll Travel is all about independent travel, with stories and blogs to make destinations come to life. The forum is sorted by destination, with active discussions of travel issues on all the major continents and regions.
Business Traveller, the magazine for business travelers worldwide, has been around since 1976. Its forum deals with any subject related to travel, with the most popular topics being airlines, airports and frequent flyer programs.
Cruise Critic is the place to go if you are traveling by sea. With five million plus members, there’s a wealth of information on everything cruise related. The forum also includes discussions of individual cruise lines.
Fodors is a byword in the travel guide industry and the site has just revamped its forum. There are forums for regions, airlines, cruises and travel tips.
FlyerTalk is a community for frequent flyers. The site is a huge, active forum, with discussions on miles and points, special interest travel, trips and itineraries, restaurants and much more.
Lonely Planet is famous for its offbeat travel guides. You can get hints and tips on all aspects of travel on its Thorn Tree Travel Forum. As well as sections for regions and countries, you can discuss travel gear, living abroad, going round the world and budget travel, as well as dozens of other topics.
TravelBlogExchange is a fast growing network of travel bloggers, with discussions on almost every aspect of blogging and travel blogging. Here’s a link to my page which features the Taking Off Travel Blog. It’s a great place to find travel resources.
TripAdvisor describes itself as the world’s largest travel community. It is well known for user reviews of different attractions and locations. The forum features discussions of the ins and outs of different destinations as well as specialty areas such as winter sports, beach vacations and business travel.
Virtual Tourist has more than a million members and has a wealth of user generated reviews and tips to help you with trip planning. Visiting the main forum page doesn’t really give a clue how much information is there, but there are pages for each destination and it’s an active forum, so it’s worth digging a bit deeper.
Although these are not forums, two other resources are worth mentioning. Yahoo Answers has questions and answers on worldwide destinations, while Twitter is a great place to get advice on travel. Check out our Twitter profile to see some of the issues we discuss.
This list is only a starting point. I would love to find out about other travel forums that you find useful. Please feel free to add links to your favorite ones in the comments.
Thanks to http://twitter.com/coqui2008 for suggesting some of the forums. Photo by nattu.
Tags: business travel, business travel tips, business trip, parking, travel, travel forum, Travel Tips, Travel Tools
February 25th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Here is a robust and active travel forum that we offer with the Independent Traveler.
http://gonomad.independenttraveler.com/
We publish articles about unique destinations and trips every day on our site, http://www.gonomad.com.
February 26th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Great article about travel tools on the web. Have you also tried http://www.goplanit.com? We were one of the finalists at TC50 and were recently named one of the 9 best travel tools for 2009.
We differentiate ourselves by pushing more information to our users when they are planning a trip. Instead of searching through dozens of websites and pages, we sow you the most popular and highest rated items from across the web. And, if you’ve got friends on the site, you can also see what your friends would recommend for each of the cities that they’ve visited. We even have a “plan it” button that will gather all the information for you and create a trip at the click of a button (based on your preferences). Try it out and let us know what you think.
Jimmy Ku
COO, GoPlanit.com
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 am
This site is great. If you want a feature on hidden places to travel at a budget, opt in to this travel, work, live newsletter http://www.travelworklive.com
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:39 am
what a great post. i really like that BootsnAll is high up on your list!
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:26 am
[...] of the best of these is Google Maps. Used in conjunction with an excellent travel forum or website, it’s a great way to get a street’s eye view of the places you might visit [...]
December 31st, 2009 at 6:18 am
[...] Nine Places To Plan Your Next Trip [...]
January 12th, 2010 at 6:17 am
[...] other cases, I would do some research on travel forums and other resources before making a final decision, but I would still probably book online. These [...]