Going somewhere? If you are, the special travel features that the major search engines have created can help you with just about every part of your trip. But which search engine should you use?
In general, Excite, Infoseek and Lycos have the most comprehensive travel features. All include well-organized, detailed information about every aspect of traveling. Yahoo's strength is its airline and hotel reservation service.
AIRLINE RESERVATION SEARCH ENGINES
You don't have to actually buy tickets on the Web to make use of the airline search engines. Simply finding out - in a few minutes - which flights are available to and from your destination on a specific date at a particular hour is a fantastic time-saver.
Preview Travel, featured by Excite's Travel Channel, gives you the most comprehensive flight information of any search engine that I've come across. A disadvantage is that you have to register, but in this case it's worth your time.
For flights that meet your requirements, Preview Travel provides the name of the airport, flight number, airline, arrival and departure times, location of stops and arrival and departure times, the lowest available fare, type of equipment used, on-time averages and preliminary information about the availability of seats.
Travelocity, the reservations service furnished by Yahoo, is quick and no registration is required. It doesn't give you as much information as Preview Travel, but it does include most of the basics - flight number, airline, airport, arrival and departure, number of stops, equipment and whether a meal is served.
You have a choice of displaying all the flights that meet your requirements or just the three with the lowest fares. Fares are shown only if you make the latter choice. If you opt to display all the flights, you can select the one that interests you and be shown the fare of that flight.
AIRPORT MAPS AND INFORMATION
If you have 20 minutes to change planes, you better know what gate you're going to and where it's located. You can find traveler-oriented information about airports in major U.S. cities on TheTrip.Com, which is the foundation of Alta Vista's Travel Zone.
Just a few of the facts you can learn are the location of the departure gates for each airline, where ATM's, restaurants and snackbars are situated, and the location of rental car counters.
