Still have a reason not to travel?

PERIPATETIC

The Universe is conspiring to make travel easier. Just as we were getting used to booking our airlines and hotel rooms online instead of using hum-ho travel agencies, we got online third party vendors who'd attend to not just hotel and flights but also car rentals and other verticals.

Now online travel agencies are subordinate to Meta search travel engines "" Mobissimo launched in India last year, so did Fare.net.

And while search engines, OTAs and meta-search engines battle it out, the Indian online travel market just keeps swelling (it's expected to exceed $2 billion by 2008) as consumers shout give me more, sitting back and enjoying the benefits of an increasingly comprehensive, comparative shopping experience.

Let's face it: travel itself is no longer novel, so canny e-commerce entrepreneurs are in on the game, feeding our new need for travelling smarter. Flightstats.com is one such website that thrives on details.

From flight delays to airport parking information, security wait times, airport weather, airport authority jobs, airport performance scorecards and even where to get the best cappuccino in Heathrow, flightstats.com is so exacting, it makes you feel just a bit geeky for being in on it.

But airport delays aside, what is the one thing that can make bearable a trans-Atlantic trip in cattle-class? More legroom, right? Now you can find the best seat on the plane with websites like Seatguru that abet your seat-grabbing strategies, so you no longer have to wink frantically at the guy at check-in at the risk of him thinking you have an annoying twitch. But what of all that extra space if you have to share it with a corpulent co-passenger given to spilling over his extras onto yours?

Now you can even check out who your fellow travellers are with passenger list.net. However, that website's still in beta-status and I suspect the product will never be entirely legal, given that airlines are wildly possessive about passenger information.

But any super traveller knows that nothing, and I mean nothing, beats travelling luggage free. How, you ask? Easy peesy. Companies like Carry my luggage, or First luggage, for a fee, will pick up your luggage at your doorstep and deliver it to your hotel anywhere in the world so you can travel hands-free and can plan to hit the ski slopes as soon as you arrive in Aspen, safe in the knowledge that your skis won't find their way to sunny Barbados instead. No more lost in transit.

And if you're too lazy, or too rich (or both) to even pack your own bags, Flylite comes to your rescue. Flylite is a new company that packs, catalogues, delivers, picks up, and even drycleans your stuff so you don't have to. The downside? You'll be $200 short and the service is only available in the US for now.

And if you ain't that rich, you can at least pretend to be. These days, for a pretty reasonable annual fee ($99) some companies offer you access into VIP/first-class lounges in 500 airports across the world.

Which leads me to recall. A friend's NRI cousin recently visited India. Being wealthy and paranoid (one usually leads to another) he travelled with four nannies, two personal "guards" and cartons full of hand sanitisers.

Anyone who ventured near his lovely children would first be decontaminated with squirts of the sanitiser by an attending nanny before being permitted a cuddle.

Now, something tells me that nothing can ever make this family's travels stress-free.