Saturday 22 July 2006 by Edward.

You want to plan a cycling trip through wine country in the Finger Lakes area of New York State, USA. How do you find a “great” travel agent? Via 1Trip3.com. That’s how. You enter your destination, the type of trip you want, and any special travel needs. 1Trip3.com returns quotes within 24 hours from three travel agents, from among those that are registered with the service. You pick the agent you want. The goal of the site is to connect you with the best travel agents that match your travel plans.

1Trip3.com is free for tourists to use. Registration for travel agents is free. 1Trip3.com plans to make money through agent referral fees. The advantage here is that I would get to communicate with someone who knows the area and can suggest alternatives — a true empowerment for both tourist and travel agent. A disadvantage might be the varied standards presented by the travel agents. Future enhancements might include tourist rankings/comments/recommendations and trip stories and experiences. I’m keen to see how this site evolves.

Home&Abroad offers a similar service but with significant differences. I wanted to bike the Finger Lakes area of New York state and visit wineries. This site limits me to 58 destinations worldwide with no Finger Lakes to choose from. Ok, so I decided to do the wineries in Québec City, Canada, instead. The site had pre-selected 18 trip themes. I picked “The Inner Einstein” theme. A menu of possible destinations were presented from which I chose enough to fill 5 days of travel time. Finally, an itinerary, map and travel guide was available for printing. The site did not involve one human, though “experts” designed the destinations and themes. An advantage here is consistency in presentation and quality. A drawback is that I could not go to where I wanted, and could not communicate with a real expert familiar with the area. I was limited by what was presented to me.

These types of services might reverse the online trend that shows travellers migrating away from online agencies to airline, hotel and car rental supplier sites.

Roger A. Brooks‘ Rule 2 “The Rule of Partnerships” states that ‘Relationships require more than one person.’ The most important rule in creating a successful tourism strategy is to establish partnerships. The more partners you have the more successful you’ll be.

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Saturday 22 July 2006 by Edward.

National Geographic Interactive is a great place to visit online. Be prepared, however, to upload recent media files at this site, such as RealMedia, to experience video and sound. The Grizzly WildCam on 22 July 2006, at Alaska’s McNeil River Falls, showed several bears fishing for salmon. This sanctuary has the world’s highest concentration of grizzlies. The website has been put together through the partnerhip of the US National Park Service and the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska, to provide “what many visitors consider one of the richest experiences of their lives”.

The Grizzly site has a narrated video gallery, a great grizzly photo gallery, notes about bears, a grizzly blog, links to other resources, bibliography and related links, and technical notes on the WebCam.

The live video signal is recorded from a camera embedded in a fake boulder on the river bank. The signal is transmitted via wireless microwave technology and relayed over about 165 km to the Pratt Museum where the cameras are controlled. The video feed is then relayed to servers at RealNetwork in Seattle, WA, then posted to the internet at National Geographic.

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