Touring The Web

There are hundreds of sites offering data, information and even trivia on practically every every destination or country on the planet. Then there are first-hand accounts from peripatetic travellers, who post their experiences and recommendations, hard to come by in any official guide.

There are two sites, however, that it would be useful to check out:

At www.travelocity.com, you can make airline reservations (but you cannot pay for it online from India), check out other travel schedules, get expert opinions on travelling and advice or comments on what to do, where and how.

And www.fodor.com is, perhaps, the best travel planner on the Net. It is easy to navigate and even a half-hour is enough to plan a trip to any of the nearly 90 cities listed on the site. Heres how you can do it:

There is a Personal Trip Planner on the site that allows you to build a customised mini-guide.

The Trip Planner will lead you through a series of checklists where you click on the destination and mark out your requirements in terms of hotels, restaurants and the like. Once youre finished, these choices are used to build a personalised guide. So be it Acapulco or Amsterdam, the British Virgin Islands or the US Virgin Islands or Washington DC or Zurich, you are unlikely to reach a destination not knowing what to do once you land there.

The Where to Stay Profile