My Top 10 Favorite Travel Technologies

In this day and age of increasingly pervasive Internet connectivity (I was just using Gtalk to chat with my Mom, who was at the Singapore airport waiting for a connecting flight to Burma!), travel technologies have become more and more critical to ensuring a good travel experience (or, at least, making your travel experience a little more bearable!).

My ten favorite travel technologies are as follows:

1. ua2go.com - United Airlines' very fast, mobile-optimized site for checking flight status, availability, and even mileage plus account status. Also works great from a regular web browser.
2. seatguru.com - Contains seat maps for virtually every type of airplane used by every major carrier in the world. Works from both a regular browser as well as wireless browsers. Allows you to check the seat configuration for the airplanes you're going to be traveling on, so that you can make the best seat choice available. SeatGuru also has invaluable information about some seats that you might think are really good ones--for instance, certain bulkhead seats do not have room to store carryon bags, and they are also close to the lavatories!
3. fly.faa.gov - Great site that contains incredibly useful information, such as which airports are experiencing delays (and why)--I've used this site from the airplane when we've been advised that there will be a delay (and that it's OK to use mobile phones); you can find out information that the pilots either don't have, or won't share with the passengers! If you are using a mobile device, there is also a text-only version at fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/plaintext.html
4. accuweather.com - Nice weather site with up-to-date forecasts for just about anywhere. As a big plus, they also have a mobile-optimized site at http://wap.wirelessaccuweather.com
5. tripit.com - Have you ever wondered if any of your fellow road warriors might happen to be in the same city as you, at the same time? TripIt combines a very cool personal itinerary service with the ability to hook up to your friends' TripIt accounts (you can't see others' itineraries, just what city they are in)--a social network for travelers. When you view your various itineraries in the service, it automatically displays friends that will be close by at the same time. The service also has a wonderful itinerary parsing technology that allows you to forward your itinerary to plans@tripit.com , and the service automatically reads the itinerary and creates an online TripIt itinerary. I'm impressed--the service can even read the PDF itinerary that American Express Travel sends me, and it's remarkably accurate. TripIt also recently announced "closeness alerts", which automatically notify you if a friend will be close by.
   
6. schmap.com - online and offline travel guides that are updated on a regular basis. The guides contain the usual combination of restaurant and hotel reviews, tourist attractions, and the like, but they also contain a lot of very cool photographs, most of which were taken by actual tourists. In addition to the online version, you can download the entire guide to your PC for use when you don't have connectivity.
7. iPass - awesome service that acts as a broker between many different WiFi providers, including T-Mobile, Boingo, AT&T, etc. My company provided me with an iPass account (and an applet loaded on our laptops) that allows me to utilize over 89,000 paid WiFi hotspots all over the world--at no cost to me. The iPass applet even automatically launches my corporate VPN, ensuring that my connection is secure. Awesome!
   
8. Blackberry 8100 Bluetooth - the ability to wirelessly connect my laptop to my Blackberry 8100 (also known as the Pearl), is incredibly useful. In instances where I do not have access to a WiFi hotspot, I can use my Pearl as a wireless modem, and the connection between my laptop and my Pearl is also wireless. While the speed on the T-Mobile EDGE network isn't stellar (usually around 56 kbps), it's better than nothing! Apparently other carriers, such as Verizon, have much faster data rates--something to consider when your phone contract is up for renewal. There is a good HOWTO guide on hooking up PCs and Blackberries at on the Blackberry Forums site.
9. Garmin StreetPilot GPS - my Garmin c300 GPS, which is a palm-sized device that I can take anywhere, has become an irreplaceable part of my travel weaponry. Even though my unit is one of the least expensive on the market, it does a wonderful job of figuring out where in the world I am and guiding me to my destination as quickly as possible. It also has tens of thousands of points of interest (POIs) that allow me to quickly find the closest gasoline, hospital, or Starbucks! You can even download custom POI lists from the Internet and then upload them to the GPS--for example, a list of safety cameras in the UK as well as red-light cameras in the US will automatically warn you when one is in the vicinity. Well worth the investment for anyone that travels much at all. The only downside: you become very dependent on the device, and hence you don't learn where you are driving--be sure you still have backup analog maps just in case your GPS quits working!
10. Google Earth - an amazing application, originally created by a company called Keyhole and acquired by Google, allows you to play virtual tourst all over the planet. In addition to the satellite and map views that we've all become acqainted with, Google Earth also incorporates a rich set of location information from many different sources. The product also allows you to "fly" around the planet very quickly, and certain areas even have street-level views. I use Google Earth extensively when I'm planning a trip to a new location--it's invaluable to be able to get a general idea of what the area looks like before you go there.
    

This is just a small sampling of the travel tools I have accumulated over the years--I'll publish more on this subject in the future.

Clear Registered Traveler Coming to DIA January 31!

It's official--I received an email from a Denver International Airport official today confirming that the Clear Registered Traveler lanes will be open at DIA on January 31:
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Thank you for your previous inquiries related to implementation of the Registered Traveler Program at Denver International Airport. We are pleased to inform you that the program will officially begin at DIA on January 31, 2008. You may now begin the sign-up procedures by visiting www.flyclear.com to start the application and verification process.

After completing the online process, travelers must stop by an enrollment center to complete their application and verify their identity. There is an enrollment center located in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel in downtown Denver at 1750 Welton Street and three enrollment centers located at Denver International Airport. The first enrollment center is located on level 5, near the entrance to the south security screening check point. Additional enrollment centers will open in January in the center core of both the A and B concourses. Personnel are available at the enrollment centers at DIA from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm. At the enrollment centers, personnel from Clear will take your photograph, verify two forms of government-issued photo identification, and capture your fingerprint and iris images. Once approved, your Clear card will be mailed to you.

Denver International Airport plans to use dedicated lanes for Registered Traveler participants at both the south security check-point as well as at the security check-point located near the pedestrian bridge that leads to the A Concourse. RT at the north security checkpoint will follow soon.

Clear cards are currently accepted at Albany, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, LaGuardia, Little Rock, New York's JFK, Newark, Orlando, Reno, San Francisco, San José and Westchester County (NY) airports.

Denver International Airport is pleased to provide this service improvement for our frequent travelers. If you need any additional information, please visit our website at www.flydenver.com and click on 'Registered Traveler Program' under the Information Center.
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I can't wait to be able to finally use my Clear card--and I plan on doing so on February 4th, when I head to New York. I'll be sure to post an entry about my experience. Congrats to DIA in taking the next step in making air travel more convenient for the business traveler!

Nice Tip for Checking In Online

I love the idea of checking in online--the ability to make sure that you have the seat you really want and then bypass all counters at the airport is wonderful. Unfortunately, if you want to check in online while you're actually on a trip (and don't have access to a printer so that you can print out your boarding pass), you might think that you can't use online check in. WRONG!

I have discovered that you can actually go through the process of checking in online, and then just "pretend" to print your boarding pass. Depending on the carrier, you can either just breeze through the print option, or if it forces you to print, download and install a free PDF writer (like PDF Creator)--this will give the browser the impression that it actually printed something.


Next, go to the airport check in kiosks, enter your confirmation number (or other identification), and you should be presented with the option to reprint your boarding documents. Wha-la! You are now set to go through security, and you haven't had to deal with a single human (yet!). I have used this tip many times with United and Frontier, and I'd imagine that it would work for virtually any US carrier. International travel is an entirely different animal, of course--most carriers still won't let you check in online at all for these trips.

Registered Traveler Programs - Boon or Bust?

There has been quite a bit of publicity of late around the US "registered traveler" program that was initiated a few years back by the Transportation Security Administration with support from some of the airports and airlines. The notion behind the RT program is to allow frequent travelers to register with the TSA, voluntarily supplying biometrics (like fingerprints and retina scan) and undergoing a background check, in exchange for the privilege of being able to go through a special security line at the airport. In effect, it allows people to pay their way to the front of the security line at select airports. The TSA mandated that the RT program be open to multiple vendors, and that the identity cards used by the various RT vendors be inter-operable; that way, subscribers to one vendor could use their RT cards at all airports that have RT lanes.

The dominant vendor today is Clear, aka Verified Identity Pass, which charges $128, which includes a $28 TSA "vetting fee". At present, there are 13 Clear airports, with 4 coming soon, including my home town of Denver, which is supposed to have its RT lanes open by the end of January.

I signed up for Clear last August while I was in Orlando, with the theory being that it would be of a great help in making sure that I make it to flights on time. The sign up process was simple--fill out the application forms and take them to a Clear registration kiosk (I went to the one at the Orlando airport). Clear personnel take your biometrics (finger prints and retina scans) at the kiosk, and a couple of weeks later your fancy new Clear card arrives in the mail.

Unfortunately, I have not yet had an opportunity to use my RT card. It seems that all of the places I have been traveling to don't have RT lanes! I was excited to find out that Clear has lanes open at La Guardia (where I'll be traveling in a couple of weeks), but then I discovered that they only have lanes open for certain terminals--and my terminal isn't on the list.

I will definitely use the Clear lane at my home airport when it opens later on this month, although it won't speed up my experience at DIA much, as I hold Premier Executive status with United, which allows me to use the 'premium traveler' line anyway. The real decision point will come next August when my Clear card comes up for renewal--if the only airport that I've been able to use my Clear card is DIA, I probably won't renew the service for another year.

It's a great idea, but until RT lanes become ubiquitous at every airport in the U.S., their value will be limited, particularly for frequent travelers such as myself that can already cut security lines.

** News Flash ** - Clear and Hilton announced on January 25, 2008 that, effective Feb 15th, Hilton HHonors program participants will be able to pay for their Clear membership with 35,000 Hilton points. That's quite a few points, but I guess it beats laying out the $128 in cash.....

Welcome to The Sanguine Traveler

As with all journals, one must start somewhere. In this case, let's start with a definition of sanguine, in case you're desperately trying to remember exactly what it means:

san·guine (adj): \ˈsaŋ-gwən\: having the temperament held characteristic and marked by sturdiness, high color, and cheerfulness; confident, optimistic.

At this point, you're probably thinking "OK, so now he's educated me on what sanguine means, so I can win the next spelling bee that enter...but what does that have to do with traveling?"

The answer, my friend, is that the only way one can survive traveling in today's harsh climate, particularly if you're traveling on business, is to be sanguine about it--one must be sturdy, cheerful, confident and optimistic in order to survive without losing one's mind (and potentially one's life!).

I have traveled extensively, both for business as well as pleasure, for the greater part of 20 years. Over that time, I have learned a lot of lessons from the school of hard knocks that I think others that are put in the same position can benefit from. Since I continue to travel extensively, I am also constantly learning and experiencing new things that others might gain some value from.

At the very least, this forum will be a great catharsis for me by allowing me to express my problems, frustrations and compliments about an industry that many times loses its focus on what's really important--the customer.

I welcome your questions and comments--please feel free to use this blog's comment feature, or you can drop me an email: mark at ehrmail dot com. Happy travels to you all!