Trip Planning Made Easy
My soon-to-be 18-year-old daughter Katherine has been criss-crossing the country lately, taking a final look at prospective colleges. In some cases, she was traveling on her own. I don't think that bothered her, but it can be pretty nerve-wracking for an anxious parent.
Finding Katherine's flights was easy, thanks to online travel sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity. These sites are also good for arranging hotels and rental cars. But Katherine is too young to rent a car, and she needed help getting between the airport and the colleges.
A variety of Web sites came to the rescue. Thanks to Google, Yahoo and Switchboard.com, I was able to come up with listings of local cab companies, inexpensive hotels and shuttle and public transportation systems. An hour or so of Web surfing plus a few phone calls was all it took to map out a door-to-door plan for her entire trip.
Some of the schools she looked at -- like Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., were far from a commercial airport while others, like Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. (where she plans to enroll) are a short cab ride away. Thanks to the Web, we were able to minimize costs, by finding out the exact distances and, when appropriate, finding alternatives to cabs such as public transportation and shuttle services.
Most of the campus Web sites have a page with directions that sometimes include the names and phone numbers of shuttle services. If they don't, it's easy to find local cab companies via Yahoo, Switchboard.com and other services that offer "yellow pages" and maps.
Switchboard makes it particularly easy to find nearby transportation. Just go to the site, enter the name of the college in the "business name" field and press search. It will give you the address and phone number as well as a link to "Map/Directions" and "What's Nearby." The What's Nearby is particularly helpful because it takes you to a yellow pages-like directory of different types of businesses, showing the distance between the business and the college. Under "travel" you'll find taxicabs along with hotels, airports, car rentals and gas stations.
The hotel listings in Switchboard.com's Yellow Pages can save you a lot of money. My wife accompanied Katherine on one trip and used the hotel option to find nearby motels, including some that were closer and a lot less expensive than the national chains listed by the major travel Web sites. I've also used this service to find inexpensive motels that are in walking distance to the very expensive hotels that conference organizers typically recommended.
Switchboard.com doesn't have a section for shuttles and shared vans. If you type in "shuttle service" in Yahoo, you'll get to a section that lists "Limousines and Shuttles" with the option for a regional breakdown. Unfortunately, it's hard to separate the few companies that offer low cost shuttle services from the many that offer expensive limos. A better strategy is to look at the home page of whatever airport you're flying into. Most have a section on such as "getting to the airport" or "ground transportation" that lists local shared van services along with taxis, buses and rail systems.
Google makes it easy to find the home page for any airport. Just type in the city name followed by the word airport. "San Jose Airport," for example, takes you to a link to Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport which, like most, has information on ground transportation. Also check out Expedia's guide to 50 airports worldwide by clicking on airport information in the "Traveler Tools" section of the home page. Another option is to use one of the city guide Web sites such as citysearch.com.
Be sure to call the shuttle company in advance. In planning Katherine's trip, I learned that a lot of services went out of business after Sept. 11th.
My wife joined Katherine on her trip to Wheaton where they stayed at a friend's house in Cambridge, Mass. To find out how to get from Logan airport to Cambridge, we visited the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Web page where we found schedules and maps for subways and commuter trains. The site also listed an information phone number which came in handy when I couldn't figure out one of the connections.
Getting from Cambridge to Wheaton was a bit trickier. A quick check at Yahoo maps showed that it was 43 miles -- a $100 cab fare. Fortunately, the MBTA Web site showed how to get there via a combination of subway, train and bus for a lot less. Yes, it was a bit complicated, but thanks to the maps and schedules I was able to arm Katherine and Patti with precise and easy-to-follow instructions.
Every large city I checked has a Web site for its transit services. You can usually locate them in Google by typing in the name of the city followed by transit. The first listing for "Chicago Transit," takes you to a listing for the Chicago Transit Authority -- the rail and bus service, not the rock group. Google's first listing for "San Francisco Bay Area Transit" takes you to transitinfo.org with links to all area transit services.
Here at home, I'd go online to find out the status of Katherine's flights by using the flight tracker feature at trips.com. Sometimes, Katherine would call us from the ground either via her cell phone or by phoning our toll free (800) number from a pay phone. If I didn't hear from her within a half hour of landing, I'd call her cell phone just to make sure everything was OK. It always was; which makes me realize that there's one more piece of technology I need. Does anyone know of a product that can help anxious parents relax and accept the fact that their children are growing up? I didn't think so.
A syndicated technology columnist for nearly two decades, Larry Magid serves as on air Technology Analyst for CBS Radio News. His technology reports can be heard several times a week on the CBS Radio Network. Magid is the author of several books including "The Little PC Book."
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