Photo of the day (10.14.10)

by Meg Nesterov on

For many of us, dreaming about travel and planning a trip is a favorite part of a travel process. Those early days of discovering a destination and imagining the delights it may hold, before the reality of long airport security lines, bad hotel rooms, and jet lag spoil the fun, are some of the sweetest. This photo by Flickr user Chris Maki titled “Wanderlust” recalls the immense possibilities a map and a few guidebooks can hold. When traveling on frequent flyer miles, I used to look at places where American Airlines and Marriott hotels intersected (a lot of South America and Western European destinations), and now my inspiration tools include a Turkish Airlines timetable, a stack of inflight magazines, and a Kindle full of Lonely Planet guides.

Have any travel photos to inspire wanderlust? Upload them to our Gadling group on Flickr and we might use one as our Photo of the Day.

Travel and social media: five ways to cut through it all

by Tom Johansmeyer on

As I was scanning the headlines this morning, I came across Christopher Elliott’s article, “Are travelers overloaded by social media?” It’s a fair question. Not only are more and more of us plugging in – Twitter, for example, is adding 1.8 million new users a week – but we’re being increasingly being bombarded “communicated to” by hotels and airlines that are eager to get a bigger share of our wallets. So, there’s a whole lot of status updating and tweeting going on, and we need to figure out how to deal with it all.

It’s easy to blame the marketing guys for this. Aren’t they the people responsible, clogging our Facebook news feeds and Twitter timelines with hot deals and other promotional content? Well, yes … but we want some of that. That’s why I follow, for example, people like @Bsimi and @Colonnade, not to mention @JetBlue.

So, we have to balance our desire for promotional content (and let’s be honest – we do desire it) with keeping our social media environments clean and decidedly our own. Here are five ways you can get what you want without giving up too much:1. Make loyalty choices: with all the content floating around, you need to trim down the number of travel businesses you follow in order to truly take advantage of the best deals. Otherwise, you risk not seeing what you really want. Decide which brands mean the most to you, and ditch the others.

2. Make travel brands earn your social media share: for me at least, it takes more than a few hot deals to get me to follow a brand on Twitter or like it on Facebook. I want interesting content and customer service, too. I may test out a social media relationship for a while, but to make it stick, the company is going to have to perform.

3. Watch your friends: if you see a brand retweeted or otherwise interacting with one of your friends, it may be worth following it – or at least asking your friend why. This is why I follow @FSHotelHouston (Four Seasons Hotel Houston), for example, which was based on Twitter action I saw from @welshwonder.

4. “Favorite” and “like” what matters: use these features to bookmark social media content that you may want to use later. It will keep great deals from getting lost in your active social media stream.

5. Use these relationships effectively: By trimming your list down, you are effectively making a statement about customer loyalty – make sure the people managing those accounts know that! Don’t do it just for perks. Instead, develop a real relationship with the person behind the brand.

Skype celebrates seven years – gives away 400 free landline minutes!

by Scott Carmichael on

Hard to believe that Skype has already been around for seven years, and as part of their birthday celebration, they are giving away 400 free landline minutes to a variety of countries.

There is some fine print worth paying attention to, because after that first free month, they’ll start billing you monthly. Still, even once they start charging your card, you’ll be paying around $4/month for those minutes which is not a bad deal at all.

Now Skype is available on Android, this could be a great way to make perfectly cheap calls abroad when you are traveling (hint: Skype has been hacked to work over 3G when in the US). Head on over to their birthday site, pick a country, and enjoy your free talktime.

HasWifi.com answers a simple question – will my plane have inflight Wi-Fi?

by Scott Carmichael on

Determining whether your next flight offers Wi-Fi isn’t that hard – most airline web sites have their own widget to help answer the question, but things can always be a bit easier. HasWiFi lets you enter your flight information, and instantly tells you whether you’ll be online for your flight, or whether you’ll need to suffer through another horrible inflight movie.

If you want to make life even easier, you can link the site with your TripIt account, and it’ll pull your upcoming flight information from their service, without having to look up flight numbers yourself.

Search results display the flight number, airplane type, destination and of course whether you’ll actually have Wi-Fi. The site also provides user feedback, in case the information from the airline turns out to be incorrect.

All in all, a very easy to use site. The content is simple enough to be viewed on a mobile phone, and the creator kept things nice and clean. So, before your next flight, head on over to HasWifi, and if you are lucky enough to be able to get online, don’t forget to create a Gogo Inflight account to make getting online even quicker.

Traveling women are Facebook addicts

by Tom Johansmeyer on

A new study of female travelers indicates that close to half can’t let go of Facebook when they’re on the road. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the social network of choice for women on the go.

Ninety-three percent of women who have had an overnight trip in the past month, according to Women on Their Way, have Facebook accounts, and 68 percent of them use it for travel purposes. What do they like to do most? Share multimedia! Fifty-seven percent engage in that activity. Status updates and commentary about the trip are next (38 percent), followed by Facebook Places check-ins (13 percent).

While these activities can happen before or after the trip has come to a close, 46 percent of respondents said they use Facebook while actually traveling, and 77 percent connect to the social media platform via a laptop.

So, if you see some hottie in the hotel bar and want to know if she’s interested in doing something regrettable … well, it helps to be “friends” first.


[photo by Andrew Feinberg via Flickr]