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• Plan Your Next Trip on the Web

Plan Your Next Trip on the Web

The Internet has become a popular destination for people planning their family holidays, business trips or romantic weekends away.

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• Go paperless by buying e-tickets for flights online – it’s one less thing to leave behind on the kitchen table! Most airlines now offer this facility with e-mail booking confirmation. Some even give you a discount for booking online. All you need for check-in is proof of identity, such as your driver’s licence or, if you’re travelling abroad, your passport.

• Research your destination before you go. There are thousands of online travel guides and magazines. The award-winning Rough Guides website contains a vast resource of detailed information on more than 14,000 destinations around the world, and it has a weekly Spotlight feature focusing on one specific location. Lonely Planet is a less comprehensive site, but it’s a great place for first-hand advice and inspiration, where you can check out the opinions and experiences of other travellers.

• There are hundreds of travel websites and many are online versions of popular magazines. For adventurous tales, visit Outside magazine or Getaway. If you prefer less challenging travel options, take a look at Condé Nast Traveller or Travel and Leisure.

• For an in-depth profile of foreign lands, head for individual government Websites. Alternatively, the CIA World Factbook is unbeatable for global facts and statistics. Or, if you don’t mind facing the fact that you’re going to be a tourist, try Tourism Offices Worldwide.

• Look up an online city guide to discover the festivals, fairs and exciting cultural events taking place in the destination of your choice. TimeOut Online has guides to more than 30 cities, with restaurant, club, bar and hotel reviews. Another city guide site is WCities. You can also investigate Australian cities with CitySearch.

• Picture this. You need to plan a conference call with Beijing, but you’re in Belgrade and your boss is in Bogota. If you have a Java-enabled browser you can use the International Java Clock at the BioTactics Clock page where times are simultaneously posted for a dozen cities around the world. The page also lists other time references, including the CIA’s World Time Zone map, and hyperlinks to sites that can help you calculate time differences.

• Before travelling to a foreign country, it’s best to brush up on a few basic phrases. Travlang offers tutorials in more than 70 languages. With a little practice, you should be able to make just about anyone understand you!

• Want to get off the beaten track? One of the great features of Web travel is that it allows you to plan exciting holidays in little-visited corners of the globe. Perhaps you’d like to go diving, take a dog sledge trip across Alaska, climb Mount Everest or take a flight in a modern combat aircraft. You can do all of these and more. Check out Peregrine Adventures.

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