St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN)

CHOOSING THE RIGHT 'PORTAL' CUTS INTERNET SEARCHING TIME

August 5, 2001
Section: TRAVEL
Edition: City
Page: G5
PAUL GRIMES, Columnist
Column: ONLINE TRAVELER

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, cyber searching 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 system with at least a semblance of order, 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 on your mouse. It still may be difficult to determine what's better or worse than others, but at least your options are narrower and better 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 locate specific sites when you type a few pertinent words in a box. Yahoo! also offers e-mail facilities, shopping, chat clubs, local sites around the world and 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 at least you've been launched in the right direction.

Some of the best travel portals are much less comprehensive than Yahoo!.

And 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 that are displayed 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.

"I started by subscribing to various online mailing lists," he said by e-mail. "On my primary list, I noticed that everyone was exchanging links with everyone else on the list. I began collecting these, and finally needed a better way to share them with the group. I then created the Internet site, along with a companion newsletter. The newsletter and Web site normally take me approximately a week to prepare."

Each issue of the newsletter contains a descriptive potpouri of what Deacan believes to be useful travel sites. The most recent issue (September 2000) covered sites for lodging, backpacking, sailing Slaska's Inside Passage and eating wildebeest, gazelle, giraffe and crocodile in South Africa.

Why has there been no issue since last fall? "I have not had the time to work on it," Deacon said. "I do plan to begin maintaining it again for the fall foliage season."

-- Johnny Jet's Travel Portal (www.johnnyjet.com). Johnny Jet is actually John DiScala, a 32-year-old very frequent flyer from Los Angeles who said he grew up afraid to fly. (He said he was a daring skier, however, which is where "Johnny Jet" comes from.) He devotes a good deal of time to the Web site and its weekly newsletter.

He used to be a college admissions officer. Now, he travels with a band that he helps manage -- a job that mostly involves sitting around, he said, so he can work on his computer.

The portal has links to 30 categories of travel sites, including auctions, "hot deals," maps, restaurant guides, Sunday travel sections and what to do if you're 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). Says the home page: "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. Click on Air Labrador and you'll be linked to an airline serving Canada's farthest northeast. Or you can get details on United States airports from Albany, N.Y., to Wichita, Kan., and foreign from Aberdeen, Scotland, to Zurich, Switzerland.

-- TripSpot (www.tripspot .com). Based in Evamston, 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). It advertises itself as "the most comprehensive source of travel-related information in the world." It could be; it's hard to tell. With hyperlinks here, hyperlinks there, everywhere a hyperlink, it's impossible to tell who's the king.

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 a link to the big linker, Yahoo!.

I clicked on "Travel Bargains" and received the message "File Not Found." Then I clicked on "Budget Travel" and was linked to the same broad array of sites I would have reached if I had clicked on "Germany" "Hostels," "Train Travel" or just about anything else.

-- 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. In addition, there are links for consumer issues, safety, legal issues, maps, complaints and more

Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com

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