50 Essential Travel Tips
Travel is full of pitfalls. One wrong step and your vacation could be ruined by a seedy hotel room, an overpriced restaurant, a wasted afternoon at a tourist-trap attraction or an overnight flight crammed in the middle seat. So, guarantee a smooth trip by planning thoroughly. Here's how to make all the right moves.
Read Traveler Reviews
User-review sites have changed the way most people plan their travel, giving us an enormously useful tool for evaluating hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions and the like. TripAdvisor.com is the big kahuna, with more than 20 million reviews, mostly of hotels — but also less traditional lodging like B&Bs, villas and private homes — as well as restaurants and attractions. TravelPost.com is another, owned by Kayak.com and recently relaunched; like its airfare-aggregating parent, TravelPost.com collects reviews from various websites, such as Citysearch.com, Yahoo! Travel and IgoUgo.com. Check out Yelp.com for locals' takes on restaurants, shops and other businesses, or OpenTable.com, which guarantees that reviewers have actually eaten at the restaurants they rate.
User reviews are helpful but not foolproof, so keep in mind the following tips:
• Read between the lines, asking yourself if the writer shares your mind-set, or if a negative review is the result of a persnickety traveler or a singular bad experience. As a rule of thumb, the more people have contributed, the more valuable overall ratings become.
• Always see how recent the post was. Establishments are quick to change, move or close.
• Always look at photos posted by users; you may find them more telling than words could ever hope to be.
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