John McCain created a stir recently with an ad that compared Obama to celebrity Paris Hilton. If McCain was seeking attention, he certainly got it as the ad became a major news story.

While Hilton was less than pleased with McCain’s tactics, she responded by creating a pretty hilarious video in which she takes a break from reading Conde Nast Traveller to provide some thoughts, including a sustainable energy policy.

Technorati Tags: paris hilton

One of my favorite travel bloggers is Darren Cronian, who writes the popular and award-winning Travel Rants blog. Darren recently invited his Twitter followers to “interrogate him” about the travel industry, so I took him up on the offer.

With the growing interest in being green and the environment, how do you think the travel industry is going to change or will have to change?

The travel industry is going to have to tackle the environment and global warming issue head on as a group, rather than individually. I’ve seen environment initiatives and they don’t touch the surface. The industry in my eyes has a responsibility to educate consumers.

What’s your take on how travel will be affected by slower economic growth, particularly in the U.S. How will this change how people travel?

I’ve recently read that U.S. visits from Brits were up 11% during May, compared with the same month last year. I think the good pound to dollar exchange rate and the fact that shopping and travelling within the U.S. is much cheaper is the reason.

On the other side of the pond, us Brits are lucky in that we can travel around Europe on low cost airlines for the same price as it costs to get a train from one side of the country to the other. It was recently cheaper for me to buy a return ticket to Slovenia than it was to get a train to London.

I don’t think we’ll see a massive reduction in tourists travelling abroad despite what the media might report, consumers simply need a holiday and break away from it all. Holidays are just as expensive in the U.K. as they’re abroad, with no guarantee of good weather.

What kind travel do you see as up-and-coming? For example, is eco-tourism going to see big growth, or will adventure travel attract a lot of attention?

With over 20 million people reportedly booking their own DIY holiday this year, we are starting to see an increase in multi-centre holidays. Consumers are much more adventurous than they were five years ago. More of us want to take short long weekend breaks to different destinations, rather than have one holiday in one destination.

I don’t think consumers understand eco-tourism holidays. I know I don’t quite ‘get it’ and this is where educating travellers about the environment is important.

What do see as some of the more exciting destinations that people are starting to explore?

Long haul destinations seem to becoming popular as the Euro is strong against the weak Pound, so travellers can get better value for money in destinations like Thailand and Hong Kong. Let’s not forget Eastern European destinations though, like Slovenia, Slovakia and Latvia.

Can you give me the Travel Rants story? When and why did you start writing it? How did the blog evolved? Do you think travel bloggers are starting to get the same as attention and respect from the travel industry as travel journalists?

Well, it’s a question I am asked regularly, and to cut a long story short. I paid a visit to a high street travel agency. The agent who dealt with me had no intention of helping me; she was more bothered about planning her weekend than helping a consumer.

I made my feelings known and walked out of the shop, never to visit again.

I’d heard about blogs from a computer magazine I subscribed to at the time, so I bought hosting, domain, and Travel Rants was created. I write in my spare time, and I’ve no working knowledge of the travel industry so this gives me the opportunity to write from my own experiences.

The blog was featured in the Guardian as an ‘Essential travel website’ along with Lonely Planet and Trip Advisor In 2007 and again this year, Travel Rants was voted best travel consumer blog in the Travolution Awards, which is a massive achievement, considering I was up against a large media organisation.

I don’t think that bloggers get the same respect as journalists from within the travel industry. That does not bother me too much, as I prefer to have my own voice and opinions. One day the industry will catch on and realise how powerful blogs and social media can be.

Technorati Tags: travel rants, travel

1 Escape. The sheer need to drop what you’re doing and get outta Dodge. In this case, any old place will do, as long as it’s not your house. The needs this feeds are simple: sleep, eating, and general relaxation. Best options: cottage, spa or hotel room anywhere near good restaurants, preferably with a pool.

2. Discovery. You heard about this place and you’re curious what it’s all about. Your friends won’t shut up about that one fish and chip shop, or that place with all the wooden roller coasters. Every day on your walk home, you see that one place that sticks in your mind. Your curiosity piqued, you decide to check it out for yourself. The needs this feeds are curiosity, a need to expand one’s horizons and the need to break out of the status quo. Best options: offbeat places, strange hotels (like the Madonna Inn in California)
3. Adventure. The stuff Kerouac novels are made of. Rooooooaddd Triiiip! You set out to do something which completely sets you out of your element, whether it’s Zorbing or going on Safari, or getting in your car and picking a destination by lottery. Your needs in this instance are complete escape, a desire to learn more about your world and yourself, and a need to work through your fear.
4. Feeding the Soul. You visit the country where your parents came from. You visit Cambodia to walk the underground war routes. You visit Africa to see how other people live. The need here is to connect with your fellow man, and learn essential lessons about the human condition. It is about finding where you fit in in the grander scheme of things.
5. Reconnecting with Oneself. You decide to book a vacation at a place you once lived, or in your old hometown. You decide to go back to a place where you felt comfortable or safe, and you want to experience that again. In a couples’ situation, you revisit where you first met, or where you went on your honeymoon. This is a need inside all of us where we long to feel safe, and long to revisit experiences which made us who we are.

There are myriad reasons why we travel. All are valid and lead us to a richer life for having experienced them. Are there ones I missed? Tell us in the comments.

I am responsible for writing a lot of our controls, designing and implementing aspects of our middle tier, and everyone’s favourite job, implementing skins. When I’m not doing one of these things, I’m the drummer in the office rockband band.

A year ago, I wrote a skinning system for all of our local expert posts. At the time, it would have been a bit faster to simply create inflexible controls but I knew this was one area where we would require the same data to be displayed in several different ways.

A skin system was the obvious choice, similar to how a bulletin board can have many different skins. After the initial skins were written, very few new skins were needed and it seemed at the time that the extra effort that went into building this simple yet flexible system was wasted.

Fast forward to last week, deadlines looming, rockband being used more and more as a mental health break, and the amount of work left to do seeming greater than the time left to complete it. The skin system came to the rescue. Our new place page needed to display our local expert posts differently than the rest of the site, a very simple thing to do, cut and paste the new HTML, place the properly named controls in the skin, and its done.

The moral here is one that should be ingrained into every developer/architect/engineer/whatever you call yourself. Always take the time to really think about the future implications of a design decision. At PlanetEye, the whole development team tries to take a step back from the problem at hand and view the proposed solutions as a part of the system overall. This has saved us all from countless extra hours of redundant work.

It was with a great sense of excitement that I typed the words www.cuil.com into my web browser this am.  I had read late last night about the release of a new search engine created by some ex Google staffers and I was anxious to kick the tires my self.  To be honest, I was less then impressed with the results when I tried it out this morning.  I had no problem getting on to the site; it didn’t crash on me. However, of the ten searches I conducted, not one of the sites I was looking for quickly came to surface on the new engine.

I realize I am but one user, however in reading the reviews come screaming across my RSS reader today, I found I wasn’t alone in my initial reaction.  Unfortunately however, in my opinion anyway, too many of these reviews by the “modern press” were quick to bash the folks over at Cuil.

This is really too bad. I hope that there is little to no effect on the gazillions of readers to these sites.   I am not a techie, and I can’t tell you whether or not the code behind this new site is worth a grain of salt.  As a recent partner recently said, “ I wouldn’t know a firewall from a fire hydrant”. What I can tell you is that trying something new is hard.  Forgetting all the typical rigors of everyday life, which present all their own challenges, when one sets out to create in this web world that we live in they are literally trying to change the world.  Trying to get people to change their everyday habits is not easy; it’s like trying to turn the titanic.  These things take time.

I remember not so long ago, while in law school reading about a new search engine that was going to replace what we were using at the time (Yahoo and Ask Jeeves).  Hard to believe that today, not so long ago from my law school days, Google is the standard when it comes to search.  The Googlers too had to fight the nay sayers and all the elements of their time.  However they believed and they persevered. 

Here in the travel world things are no different.  When I first signed up for AOL in 1990 the only thing I could do with my account is access the Sabre travel system.  When the Travelocitys of the world launched no one thought they would last (save for the innovators of course).   At their absolute height of popularity could you imagine booking a flight without visiting one of either Travelocity or Expedia?  Today, millions of people do, by visiting a site either called Kayak or Orbitz.

It’s easy to write off new things, and criticize them.  Shame on them  for not being able to sustain all the attention they received in this their first day.   I mean, clearly they should have been prepared for every major blogger and news outlet to cover what they were doing right?  The world is full of arm chair quarterbacks.  There are countless examples of innovators who didn’t take no for an answer and persevered through the setbacks that all “startups” suffer.  Lets hope that the folks at Cuil and the innovators of tomorrow do too.

In June, we planned a vacation around a trip to Alberta for a friends wedding.  She was to get married in Okotoks Alberta, a small town I have never heard of just south of Calgary.  After much debate, we decided to fly instead of drive because it gave us more time to spend in and around Alberta.  Montana and the Dakotas, I will visit you yet.

The planning began.  After pre-planning the roadtrip, a 4 day visit to Waterton Lakes National Park was a must - first 4 days accounted for, pack the tent.  Next 2 days would be in Okotoks for the wedding, where we would splurge for a nice B&B to cleanup and enjoy the small town of Okotoks - next 2 nights accounted for at the Harmony House B&B.  We decided to leave the next 2 nights open… we have a friend in Banff that we could visit, a friend mentioned visiting Gopher Hole Museum (???), or we might decide to stay in Okotoks.  We’ll wing it.

Planning complete.  We used PlanetEye, Google for location research, Hotwire for airport hotels and a rental car, and iTravel2000.com for flights.  Done.

The trip begins..

I’m worried about the charter we booked - Sunwing, the price was too good to be true.  It ends up being the best flight I’ve had.. ever?  Sunwing had friendly staff, decent free food with a vegetarian option and complimentary wine.

We get a free upgrade from Avis, and StayBridge Suites Holiday Inn, (both booked through Hotwire).  So far so good.

We head south to Waterton Lakes National Park, stopping at Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump along the way.  After 4 days of camping at the Crandell campground, my mind was clear.

Crandell Campground in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, Canada

Day 5, driving to Okotoks, looking forward to an old farm town, and some mom-and-pop restaurants on ‘Main Street’ that go fit in with the old style B&B we booked.  As we roll into town, I see a different town than I was expecting - Boston Pizza, Starbucks, Walmart, Smitty’s, new subdivisions, 4 lane streets.  We check the map, yes, this is it.

Huh.  I pictured something small, with a little town atmosphere, but I had only imagined this because of the B&B picture.  I had no other photographs of the city to base it on.  We travelled blind.  We had no context.  Local photos would have really cleared this up.

Photos are the key.  This is what I was missing.  When planning travel, reviews of places can go either way, but what I really needed was something visual.  Photographs.  With a few pictures, I would have understood the town immediately and not been so surprised.

Blind travel no more.  Photos speak louder than words.

You can see parts of the rest of my trip in my Alberta Travel Pack.

We decided to make the best of it and headed straight for the funnel cake stand.

We braved the weather for about another hour before we headed to a friend’s house in Kleinburg to dry our clothes and wait out the storm. 

It took only 2 hours to wait it out, and we were dry and raring to go. We returned to the park, and magically, we had some of the best weather we have had all summer. Luckier still was that the crowd had been reduced significantly. We were also able to get on every single ride we wanted at least twice, and we had an absolute ball. (I still can’t believe I braved Behemoth twice in a row.)

On my third trip around the Wilde Beast, I was able to put the whole day into perspective: this is why people travel, and this is why patience and fearlessness is required there, too.

People travel to put themselves out of their comfort zone. We were at Wonderland to scare ourselves all day. There is no “greater purpose” to subjecting yourself to the weird forms of torture that only rollercoasters can provide.

I spent a day in what began as an uncomfortable situation, and it was only when I gave in to the fact that I was on someone else’s turf and couldn’t control my surroundings did it get to be truly enjoyable.  This is exactly what I had to do when I was in China. I got off the plane, didn’t speak the language, and had to make my way to meet my new boss at a location I had never been to (all after 21 hours in the air.) It was only when I bucked up and let life “take the wheel” that the experience truly became amazing.

This is the essence of what makes travelling magical. It’s the ultimate thrill ride that always leaves you with a sense of having really done something. 

We’d like to know if you’ve ever had a time when you felt really out of your element whilst on vacation. Respond in the comments below.

“Being recognized by IDC as one of Canada’s leading online companies is terrific news,” said Butch Langlois, PlanetEye’s president and chief executive. “It’s another important confirmation of our online travel planning service and the exciting features we have launched such as the Travel Pack, which lets people collect and organize the photographs and places they discover on PlanetEye.”

IDC made its selections after considering a wide variety of companies it monitors that offer Web 2.0/social networking services. The selection process was based on criteria such as clarity of vision, development of a partner ecosystem, strength of customer/user base, prospects for growth, and the overall market trajectory.

The other companies selected by IDC were AdHack, dthree Inc., Octopz, Overlay.TV, Ramius, SceneCaster, Standout Jobs, Tomoye and Tungle. 

The launch went well, and although things are still pretty busy, “The Friday Photo” is back!

This week’s photograph was taken by Carlos Diaz, who takes breath-taking photographs throughout South America. The photo below is of Lago Argentino, a freshwater lake located in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, Argentina. It is the largest lake in Argentina, located in Los Glaciares National Park.

An important element is our Local Experts, who provide on-the-ground insight on what to do, eat and see, and where to stay in destinations around the world. Since our launch last week, it has been great to see new PlanetEye members get really excited about discovering our Local Experts.

One blogger, Felipe Coimbra, even wrote that our Local Experts are “in my opinion, the most valuable piece of information from PlanetEye….”

The process to build a team of Local Experts in 50 cities around the world has taken quite a bit of time as we focusing on getting people who were not only good writers but, as important, passionate about where they live and excited about sharing their insights with fellow travelers.

I’m pleased to announce we have filled the last holes by finding really good people to write for us in Budapest, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Prague and Mexico City. In some ways, it feels like completing a marathon but it also feels like the beginning of a new journey.

While we have no freelance Local Expert positions open right now, you can complete an application if you would like to be considered in the future.

Here’s a map that shows where are Local Experts are located around the world.

View Larger Map

Technorati Tags: local experts, planeteye, travel