Sunday, August 12, 2001
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The Online Traveler | Paul Grimes

Labor-of-love portals can help with vacation planning

When you turn to the Internet to plan travel, where do you begin?

We've heard a lot about searching for the lowest air fares, and many of us have tried it. Beyond that, however, cybersearching becomes murky. For example, where can you find the best sites to compare the quality of hotels?

What sites are best for resort packages, exploration cruises, adventure tours or religious pilgrimages? Without some kind of system, you could be hit-or-missing all over the Web until long past vacation time.

To help you, the Internet has portals, or gateways to information on specific subjects. Often there are hyperlinks so that you can reach a suggested site with just a click. It still may be difficult to determine better and worse, but at least your options are more well-defined.

Probably the most popular portal is Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com). It offers much more than a portal, of course, and much more than travel. First, it has a search engine, which helps you find specific sites by simply typing a few pertinent words in a box. Yahoo! also offers e-mail facilities, shopping, chat clubs, local sites around the world, and much much more.

A key section is Yahoo! Travel. It offers the booking facilities of a typical online travel agency, but it is a portal to much more. There are links to 51 diverse travel categories and subcategories, including budget travel, currency exchange, health, hitchhiking, and women traveling alone. You still may have a problem determining which sites are best for you, but it's a good start.

Some of the best travel portals are much less comprehensive than Yahoo!. Instead of being major public corporations, traded on NASDAQ, as Yahoo! is, they are often created and maintained by one person. Usually it's a labor of love, financed by the creator with perhaps an occasional donation from a friend and the proceeds from a few small ads on the site.

Here are a few personal portals that exist today:

Travel Link Express. (http://members.aol.com/trvlevery) - This venture began in 1995 as the spare-time passion of Dennis Deacon, a 30-ish Chicago-based intranet specialist for a financial institution. Deacon wanted to share links to travel sites that he had collected. So he created the Internet site, along with a companion newsletter, which contains a descriptive potpourri of what Deacon believes to be useful travel sites. The most recent issue - September 2000 - covered sites for lodging, backpacking, sailing Alaska's Inside Passage and eating wildebeest, gazelle, giraffe and crocodile in South Africa. Deacon hasn't had the time to work on an issue since last fall.

Johnny Jet's Travel Portal. (www.johnnyjet.com) - Johnny Jet is actually John DiScala, 32, a frequent flyer from Los Angeles who says he grew up afraid to fly. (He says he was a daring [jet] skier, however, which is where "Johnny Jet" comes from.) He devotes almost full time to the Web site and its weekly newsletter.

He is a former college admissions officer who now travels with a band [LMNT] he helps manage; his down time allows him to work on his computer.

The portal has links to over 500 categories of travel sites, including auctions, "hot deals," maps, restaurant guides, Sunday travel sections, and what to do if you are bored in a hotel room. Each category has links to narrower sites with links of their own. For example, "Airport Info" has a link to the "World Airport Guide," (www.worldairportguide.com)which has links to all kinds of details about specific airports.

Smilin' Jack. (www.smilinjack.com) - The home page says: "This site honors Zack Mosley, creator of Smilin' Jack, the newspaper cartoon that Zack Mosley drew from 1933 through 1973 about a fabled though fictional flyer."

The Web site is the creation of Jack Irwin, a 767 jet captain for TWA. It covers a lot of subjects besides travel, but the principal focus is on airports and airlines around the world.

TripSpot. (www.tripspot.com) - Based in Evanston, Ill., the site is part of a diverse portal group called the StartSpot Network. Along with the predictable links to sites for finding low airfares, hotels and restaurants, others alert you to speed traps, travel jobs, and the "sexiest hotel swimming pools."

Justravelinks. (www.justravelinks.com) - I estimate that this site has direct though somewhat unbalanced links to about 120 others. They include student travel, family travel, gay travel, schools for travel agents and - surprise, surprise - a link to the big linker, Yahoo!. The links are erratic; you may get "file not found" or the same broad array of sites you'll find on another link.

About Air Travel. (http://airtravel.about.com/library/misc/blairlines.htm)- With links to just about anything you'd want to know about air travel, this is one of more than 700 sites in the About network of Internet assistance. Detailed information can easily be reached on virtually every airline in the world.

Something to remember about any portal: Though it may not have been freshened in months, the links to which it leads may have been updated this morning.