Taking off Travel blog

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. Read more »

Most of us travel with a mobile device and for many of us, that just might be an iPhone. After all, millions of them have been sold worldwide. One of the attractions of the iPhone is all the mobile applications you can use with it. There are hundreds of those available for travelers. Here they are:

The best travel apps for your Iphone

Check Flight Status

Flight Status - Check the status of thousands of flights around the world by flight number, route or airport. This is one of several applications using FlightStats data.

Find Places Near You

Yelp offers quick links to restaurants, bars, coffee shops and other places near you. Also consider Around Me and Where. When you’re on the road, you might also need to find a cheap gas station (Gasbag) or a bathroom (Sit or Squat). Read more »

Where The Locals Eat

There’s nothing worse than heading to a new city on business, arriving late at night and wondering where to go for a good meal. I should know. I once went on a business trip to Spain and by the time I had got my bags and found a taxi to my hotel, it was already nearly midnight. I know the Spanish eat late, but the local kitchens were closed and I found myself at the Spanish version of Mickey Ds - not what I wanted after a long trip. The next day, I was prepared and I asked the locals I met at the hotel where I could score a good meal so I could have a great dinner that night. When it comes to getting a good meal, you can’t beat local advice - and that’s the premise behind Where The Locals Eat.

Top Eateries In Each State

Where The Locals Eat gives you easy access to the top 100 restaurants in the 50 largest US cities. Since these are where you are likely to be doing business, then this is a great place to find restaurants serving your favorite dishes. The site balances ‘lengthy surveys of serious diners and hopelessly hooked restaurant habitues with the opinions and extensive research of certified foodies’ to bring you the top choices and they are constantly being updated. You can search the site by city and distance to select a restaurant within walking distance of your hotel. Read more »

 When doing some research for some recent posts on Indianapolis, I came across a resource that I think has great potential for business and other travelers. It’s called Offbeat Guides. Still in beta, the site offers you the chance to build your own travel guide for any one of 30,000 cities.

You can test the site without signing up, by inputting your name, location, desired travel dates and destination, then within seconds (which is quite impressive on my temperamental ADSL connection) you get a guide covering most things you would want to know about an area. You get an introduction to the destination, with a bit of history, as well as information about traveling to the city and getting around when you are there. Read more »