Taking off Travel blog

Today I’d like to share with you one of my all time favorite online planning tools. It’s called Workflowy – and it works just as well for planning travel as for any other use. Workflowy starts from the premise that almost everything you do starts with a list, so when you first login to Workflowy, what you get is a blank page where you can make bulleted lists. Type and hit enter and you have a list item. Keep repeating till you run out of things to list. So far, so good, but there are lots of listing tools, so what gives Workflowy the edge? Several things, and I’ll illustrate by sharing how I set up my account.

Planning a Trip to Europe

As well as projects, goals, blog ideas, thoughts and links, I started a list item for my planned trip to Europe. I wanted one place to collect all the stuff I needed to think about. Once I’d created the main heading, I double clicked on the bullet point to create a new page with that list item as the main heading. On that page, I created a number of sub-items for the issues I wanted to look at, such as the countries I wanted to include, the accommodation to investigate, and some possible sightseeing targets in each country. Then I could add sub-items for each item. For example, under things to see in Spain, I could add Barcelona (yes, I do mean the whole city!), the Sagrada Familia, etc.

Workflowy Features

Workflowy has drag and drop, which means I can easily reorder items if I need to. I can also add notes to each list item, which is useful for more detail or to keep track of links related to a particular task I want to carry out. Every time I complete a task, a line goes through it, and I can choose to keep completed items hidden or visible. I can delete items that are no longer relevant, and I can also export the entire list (or a portion of it) and share lists with people, which could be useful if more than one person is involved in trip planning.

I find Workflowy an excellent tool for all sorts of uses. You can do a brain dump when you are initially thinking about a trip, then refine your thoughts by adding other considerations as sub-items and changing the order of items to reflect their importance. Workflowy also has search and tagging. And there’s one more good thing about Workflowy – it’s got a restful user interface. It looks like a page with a list and it never gets overwhelming because you can keep main list items collapsed and only expand when you want to see the sub-items.

Have you ever tried Workflowy as a travel planning tool? What do you think of it?

Planning a trip? Don’t forget to use our Happy12 coupon and save on off airport parking.

I was recently asked to take a look at TripSofa. This is a question and answer site for travel. In its own words:  “Tripsofa was founded with one single goal in mind: make finding great travel information easy”.

TripSofa Home Page

The Tripsofa home page is impressive, consisting of a map (currently centered on the outskirts of Rome) with a box at the top where you can ask questions and check out the latest site activity. Sign up for the site to ask questions or provide an answer via the comment form (complete with captcha) below each question. TripSofa looks like it’s trying to be Quora for travel and its ais are good. According to the founders, Tripsofa aims to end the annoyance of outdated information: “the site will be continuously updated by our members and staff so that travelers can easily find a wealth of travel-related information without getting annoyed by excessive advertising”.

TripSofa Interface

There’s no denying that the site has a clean, uncluttered interface, with just one simple text ad block above the lists of questions. It’s easy to see which questions have answers and to search for information about areas of interest. You can also check out popular tags or all questions. In the all questions view, you can see hot topics, most voted, most answered and most viewed questions. At the moment, there’s not that much activity, with the top question on the day I checked only having 20 answers. Most were far fewer than that.

TripSofa – My Verdict

At the moment, I’d file TripSofa under interesting, but not yet that useful for me. I’d like to see an easy way to focus the map on the area you want to travel to, and see the questions that have been asked and answered there.  I’d also like to see navigation to all the site options from each page, instead of having to hunt around if you’re not in the right view. If more people participate, TripSofa could be a good resource. We’ll have to see how the site develops.

Old movies, novels and biographies often showcase the adventure of travel – the sense of mystery and exploring the unknown that used to be a part of every trip. Way back when, boarding a plane or a ship was something extraordinary, something that only a small percentage of the population did. These days the mechanics of travel can be more mundane, but that’s no reason that it has to be boring. Try these tips to inject some zest into your next trip.

A Chance Destination

Instead of planning your trip a year or two ahead (which admittedly, you might need to do sometimes), try picking a random destination with a pin in a map or a flip of a coin. If that’s a bit too random, then go to a last minute travel site and see where you can go from your local airport. The only rule is, it has to be somewhere that you haven’t visited before.

Read more »

Planning my next trip made me reflect on how much the process has changed since I took my first self-planned trip. I was 22 and a group of girls from work were off to Miami for a long weekend. We phoned up a travel agent, booked and paid for our tickets and hoped we’d be allocated a good hotel. While some people still book their trips like that, a lot more now take the guesswork out of it with readily available tools.

A Street’s Eye View

One 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 or want to stay. Here’s how we use it. Once we’ve decided on the destination, we start looking for good hotels and local attractions.

Where To Stay?

TripAdvisor is a great resource for quickly finding out what other travelers have enjoyed in a given city and you can use the locations to work out where it might be good to stay. Then it’s over to Hotwire to see if there are any bargain hotels. Once I have a shortlist, then it’s over to Google Maps to see how everything stacks up. Is the hotel close enough to the attractions I want to visit? Is it going to be noisy?  I was able to rule out one hotel, simply because I could see that it was in the flight path.

Narrowing The Search

With a little tweaking, we were able to find places that were close enough to major roads for convenience, yet far enough away to avoid noise pollution. We were also able to use street view to see where the nearest restaurants are. I also plan to see which are the best places to eat by using Where The Locals Eat.

What’s On?

Once that’s done you see what events are available in your destination by visiting What’s On When (or Joobili if you’re visiting Europe) or you can visit Offbeat Guides to build your own travel guide.

Of course, I’m not saying that removing the guesswork from trip planning is a good thing. Sometimes, it’s good to just catch a last minute flight to wherever, try some couchsurfing and wait for adventure to arrive. Which option do you prefer? Which are your favorite trip planning tools?

Photo by Nezemnaya

Sometimes you take a business trip and get back home, only to find that an old friend or colleague was in the same city at the same time. Think of the wasted opportunities to get together and have a bit of fun after a day of meetings. One way to avoid that happening is to use Dopplr. This site provides a simple way to keep track of your travel plans and share them with others whom you trust.

Read more »