USA Today Enters the Travel-Guide Game

by Megan Fernandez on




With its signature bold visuals and mainstream sensibility, USA Today has entered the travel-planning arena. A new online-only series called Experience Travel launched last week, aggregating the media giant’s deep bank of travel content into easy-to-use overviews of popular destinations and travel themes.

Experience Las Vegas rolled out the series. Upcoming editions will cover cruising, food and wine, beaches, skiing, New York City, the Caribbean and Florida.

If the Sin City guide is any indication, the Experience Travel format offers a simple (and free) get-in-and-get-out way to browse for travel inspiration, insider tips and trends. It’s uncluttered, abbreviated and driven by excellent, enticing photography. The best content is organized into photo galleries for different types of travelers. Tips take the form of the photos caption, often just one sentence.

There’s a booking engine, too, but it simply sends you to an official tourism board’s website to search for hotels, flights, tours and shows from square one. Experience Travel has no functionality built into its content.

That’s fine with me – there are plenty of ways to book travel online. Experience Travel shines as a place for inspiration and ideas. For instance, the Vegas edition presents seven themed photo galleries, for penny pinchers, high rollers, shoppers and the like (gamblers and elopers, you’re out of luck). The Wallet Watcher will learn of an off-the-menu steak dinner for $9 and a 48-hour, all-you-can-watch show pass at Caesars Palace for $119. There are 42 tips for cheapskates alone; unfortunately, too many are watered down and generic. Several amount to something like this: “Hard Rock’s rates can drop below $60.” Great – but when, usually? Some tips are just plugs and simply don’t belong, like the Stratophere’s observation deck for Wallet Watchers. Experience Las Vegas leaves out the admission price – it’s $18 per person, and the thrill rides at the top cost extra. It’s a great place to watch your wallet become a lot lighter.

The sections Best of Vegas and Vegas Buzz are rich with trend features and news pulled from USA Today’s travel page. On the other hand, the sections for Hotels, Restaurants and Shows aren’t curated; they’re broad, rambling lists with scant details. It appears that every accommodation in the phone book is listed, down to the Hitchin’ Post RV Park and Motel. To weed though these unfiltered sections, click “Show Only Editor’s Picks” at the top of the page.

Though the company’s release described the series as a set of “travel planning tools and information,” its strength, at least at this early stage, is on the information.

[Photo credits: Moyan_Brenn and Taberandrew via Flickr]

Photo Of The Day: New York City From Staten Island Ferry

by Elizabeth Seward on

I had the privilege of escorting photographer Keith Pennington around New York City last week. During his trip, we embarked on a short journey to Staten Island via the free ferry. As it turns out, this ride provides panoramic views of iconic New York City fixtures, like the Statue of Liberty. I could see the park near my house raising its head above the rest of Brooklyn while we were on the boat. The Verrazano Bridge and the beautiful walkway beneath it were in clear view. The buildings in lower Manhattan and on Governors Island were all visible on this bright and sunny day. Pennington managed to capture much of what was to see in this single shot. If you have a photo you would like to contribute to Photo of The Day, upload it to the Gadling Flickr pool or connect with us on Instagram.

[Photo Credit: Keith Pennington]

Polo Anyone? A Quick Guide To The World-Class Sport

by Chris Owen on

The Miami Beach Polo World Cup is an annual event that draws players and spectators from around the world. Each year, more than 10,000 fans and competitors come from South America, Russia, Switzerland, Malaysia and other countries to be in and be seen at the world-class event. Done Miami-style, complete with fund-raising events, exclusive parties and fashion shows, tickets run up to $450 for a VIP pass. But unlike many other south Florida events, this one also has free general admission, enabling just about anybody to experience the Miami social scene.

Still, like experiencing other events while traveling, knowing a little of what polo is all about is not a bad idea.

Beach Polo is a team sport, played on horseback where winning means scoring more points (goals) than the other team. Goals are scored by driving the brightly colored, inflatable ball between goalposts. Each game has four, seven-minute periods called chukkers. Each team has three players and they change horses (polo ponies actually) after each chukker. Two umpires watch for fouls granting free hits. Fouls occur mainly when one player crosses another player who is following the ball on its exact line of trajectory.
While polo dates back 2,500 years, Beach Polo is a Dubai-created event that started in 2004, with the Miami Beach event beginning in 2005.

Actually two events, the Women’s Polo Cup takes place on Thursday, April 25, featuring eight women’s teams in a one-day series of round-robin championship matches.

The three-day men’s tournament runs Friday April 27 through Sunday April 29 with six teams that include some of the world’s top-ranked players. Sponsored by Argentinean sports and leisure clothing manufacturer La Martina, this year’s tournament will feature Miami’s DJ Irie, whose Irie Foundation will be an official beneficiary non-profit organization alongside Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Miami.

Beach polo is a lot like arena polo, but other forms include cowboy polo, elephant polo, camel polo, cycle polo, canoe polo and kayak polo as we see in this video:




[Photo credit – The Polo Life]

Wanderu’s Site Lets You Research And Book Bus And Rail Travel

by Laurel Miller on

If you’re a traveler, then you’re a Kayaker. Not a paddler, but a devotee of Kayak.com, the airline (and hotel and rental car) search engine that makes booking the lowest fares a breeze. If you’re a traveler, then you’ve also probably cursed the fact that a similar site doesn’t exist for bus and rail travel.

We can now count our blessings, thanks to Wanderu. According to Thrillist, this ingenious domestic search engine offers “hundreds of routes, operators, and schedules into a free, trip-aggregating database.” You can even make bookings, which is like a giant gift from the Travel Gods.

As soon as Wanderu or a competitor makes this info available for international travel, budget travelers won’t have anything left to complain about – except maybe the quality of their guesthouse banana pancakes.

[Photo credit: Flickr user DavidDennisPhotos.com]

Searching, Thinking, Speaking Travel Apps No Match For Human Brain, Maybe

by Chris Owen on

Under the premise that searching for a flight online is a time-consuming and annoying task, travel buyers have been presented with a number of solutions. As new technology moves from the lab to the street, we see it being applied in helpful ways that do indeed make life easier and save us time.

Searching for flights online, buyers commonly visit multiple websites, see something they like on one, look for it on another, cross-check with the airline site and so on. When the time comes to pull the trigger and buy, those flights are often unavailable or priced differently. It can be a frustrating task but one that has to be done to find a flight that works with our travel plans – until now.

Say hello to Pintrips, a new online tool that allows business and leisure travelers to “pin” and see flights they’ve found across the web in one spot. Find something you like on a Pintrips-enabled website? Pin it with a click on the pin button next to each flight and Pintrips saves the find, constantly tracks price changes and enables easy comparison.

Stop right there and Pintrips is a win, consolidating all the good stuff we see while searching and putting it in one place. But going a step further, Pintrips pulls in the results of similar searches done by others in a crowd-sourcing sort of way that might eventually be worth considering.

Called “Public Pinning Boards,” this new feature provides “a fast track to pinning by providing the latest pins from the community as well as latest deals,” said Pintrips in a Wall Street Journal statement.

Pintrips does have its limits; capability is currently available only on American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, United, US Air and Virgin America airline sites and search sites Google, Expedia, Kayak and Orbitz. But new sites are being added every month and users can request sites too.

Easier yet, Cheapair has a new voice-activated flight search travel app.

Basically, we don’t have to lift a finger with this one to find an abundance of flight information. Using the new CheapAir app available for iPhone and iPad, say a request like, “Orlando to Los Angeles, May 5th to the 10th” or “L.A. to Vegas tomorrow coming back Sunday” and up pop the results – no form to fill out.

Still, finding the right flight can be much like looking for a needle in a haystack; there are just so many different options. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just use our brains to narrow down the results, find the perfect flight, priced right, and be done with it?

Applying the flavor of recent research at University of California, Berkeley, that day may come. Scientists have discovered that when we embark on a targeted search, like looking for a contact lens on a bathroom floor or a car key in a bed of gravel, that various visual and non-visual regions of the brain mobilize to track them down.

“Our results show that our brains are much more dynamic than previously thought, rapidly reallocating resources based on behavioral demands, and optimizing our performance by increasing the precision with which we can perform relevant tasks,” said Tolga Cukur, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley in a RDMag article.

We look forward to more results from that research but know that the world of travel apps is constantly changing, as we see in this promotional video for the Travel Channel To Go app from 2008.


[Photo credit – Flickr user TZA]