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| Illustration: Vijay Verghese |
CYBER TRAVEL IS A CINCH,
RIGHT? With so much travel information on the web all you have to
do is enter a few search words on Google or Yahoo and, click, you’re
on your way. Or so you thought. Think again.
As many as ninety-nine
percent of web searches on the Internet for travel in Asia –
and a good many other categories besides – end up in dead-end
streets. Why? Because the Internet is, at best, a clumsy
assortment of just about everything everyone can throw at it, from
genuine websites to ditzy diaries, web cams detailing the humdrum
lives of people like Jennifer Ringley (the Pennsylvania student
who started it all on Jennicam in 1996) and boring bloggers –
those dull people who record all their daily minutiae and serve
it up as web fodder for the unsuspecting.
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Alas, it is no
longer possible to tune in voyeuristically to watch Jenny brush
her teeth and watch TV, a routine that held millions in thrall as
they waited, patiently, for her to undress for bed. Said a blasé
Jenny, “I keep JenniCam alive not because I want or need to
be watched, but because I simply don’t mind being watched.”
Nowadays you can head to Earthcam (www.earthcam.com)
to view everything from African game to ant colonies in Britain
and traffic cameras in various metros around the world. “Hey
that’s my husband, and that’s NOT me with him.”
Alas it is no longer possible to tune in voyeuristically to watch Jenny do extraordinary stuff like brush her teeth and watch TV
The rest of us can type
in pretty much anything on our screens and the chances are we’ll
end up on a sex site peddling Japanese cartoons, farm animals or
worse. At least animals gained some celebrity with David Attenborough
as he crawled into hitherto secretive rainforests to shine bright
lights in their faces, moving the camera within an inch of their
privates. “And here as I lift its hind leg we can see how
a male slow loris engages his partner and…” QUIT IT
Attenborough, leave those poor critters alone. Now Serengeti lions
are captured live and anonymously in their most dramatic action
moments – as they loll about in the shade and let their lady
friends get on with managing the kitchen. Hurrah!
Then there’s the case
of the US fraudster who was nabbed and fined for misdirecting innocent
queries in less-than-innocent directions. The gentleman in question
hit upon an idea of marketing genius. Realising that many people
(and a significant number of Americans including the president)
can’t spell, he registered scores of web domain names based
on misspelled queries. For example, the innocent Disney may have
been registered as dysney.com and so on. Millions of dyslexics in
search of Mickey were thus redirected to vastly more useful and
enlightening sites like XXXSirens.Com and so on that are entirely
responsible for my continued education today. But the game was up.
Apparently someone at the FBI could spell.
With all this static and
subterfuge it’s a wonder anyone gets through to any page of
value at all. And Google has over FOUR BILLION PAGES catalogued.
What are your chances? Slimmer than Brittney Spears, I would reckon.
A simple query like “sex” will pull over 219 million
possible sites. Forget brushing up on the G spot and other arcane
wisdom. It simply won’t happen.
But here’s
the real rub. Say you’re planning a visit to Bali and you
sensibly keyed in “Bali hotels” on Google to launch
your search, you’d end up with almost 1.5 million
results. Even narrowing the field to “Bali luxury
hotels” would return almost half a million possibilities.
There simply isn’t enough time in the Roman calendar for all
this sorting and sifting. The smart money is on the first 20 results.
This is what your friends will tell you. Check the first two pages
and drop all the rest – it must surely be rubbish if a major
search engine has ranked it so far down. Right? Wrong again.
Your search for "Bali hotels" may return 1.5 million results. There isn't time enough in the Roman calendar to sort through this
The crux of the
problem for serious travellers (and I apologise for having been
rather digressive arriving at this) is the fact that the overwhelming
majority of searches on the Web are dominated by retailers.
Search for digital camera models and you’ll find hundreds
of sites offering you the best deal on the latest SONY. Key in “Bangkok
hotels” and all you’ll find is cluttered travel agency
sites pushing bargain basement deals with all the twinkling paraphernalia
and blinking messages that you’d expect to find in an Amsterdam
bordello. They all ask, right up front, “Which airline? Which
hotel? Which date?” This is the last step in travel decision-making.
Retail sites and booking
engines fail to service a web customer’s biggest requirement
– the need to shop around, to research, to circle the subject
and identify choices. The breathless haste of the Web makes it practically
impossible to go through a selection or comparison process before
proceeding to the checkout (or booking). In other words, the last
stage in decision-making (the actual booking or purchase) is amply
catered for, but there is little or nothing by way of reviews, a
buffet of choice, independent opinions and the like that constitute
the all-important first steps.
Print magazines that have
fitting content are far too busy protecting themselves from the
perceived – but highly overrated – threat of the Internet.
Instead of exploiting the power of the Web and coopting it, they
see it as competition, thus preventing people from accessing the
best sort of information – material researched and written
with journalistic rigour, employing checks and balances and quality
filters. This is particularly true of Asia where almost all the
travel information on the Web is posted by travel agencies. I am
always quick to point out to friends that these are not “travel
sites”. They are extensions of the travel agency with all
the maddening nonsense, inaccuracies and outdated literature you
might normally encounter there. These are booking engines at best,
NOT information engines.
Not only do these
so-called travel sites fail to provide useful up to the minute information
and good images, they deny onward access by failing
to supply hotel telephone numbers, e-mail addresses or website links.
They fear this will lose them business. All it does, though, is
frustrate the potential traveller who then has to backtrack from
the dead-end street back to the search engine to start all over
again. For FIT (Frequent Independent Traveller), read Frustrated
Irate Traveller. The higher up the price scale you are – in
other words, the more fussy – the greater the frustration
quotient.
Of course if you know precisely
what you want to purchase, there’s no problem. But Internet
– and shopping – habits are rather different. If you
were to imagine the shopping and buying model as a large pyramid,
people would normally start at the bottom, the broadest part, to
conduct general research. This is where they expect to find the
maximum information on product specifications, reviews and so on,
on hotels, cameras, fashions and the best places to dump their mother-in-laws.
The bottom of the pyramid is where the maximum demand is concentrated.
Travel searches are dominated by booking-engine sites which are useless if you want to shop around and do research
In the next step, viewers
(or shoppers if you will) move up to the narrower mid-section of
the pyramid where the search is trimmed to down to a few specifics.
You’ve decided on India, and whittled it down to Rajasthan.
At this point viewers start comparing specific prices and product
details. Should they choose the plush Lake Palace in Udaipur or
something sumptuous and closer to Delhi like Rajvilas, Samode Palace,
or Neemrana? At the very end of this process, viewers move to the
tip of the pyramid and make their actual booking – the very
last step. In reality, this pyramid is completely inverted. While
there is minimal or no genuine research available, there’s
a flood of booking options. Key in anything on the Web and the blizzard
of results will verify this instantly.
Finding a specific
Hyatt, Sheraton, Shangri-La, InterContinental or Hilton might be
easy – such brands constitute the highways of travel search. But, turn off on a smaller search byway to find a boutique
property in Bali, and you’ll be well and truly lost. To find
some little-known but charming place in Ubud you will need to know
exactly where to place the hyphens and backslashes. The truth of
the matter is that even the “highways” and visible brands
fail to come to the rescue as most searches (at the bottom of the
pyramid) will be for a basket of choice and not one specific hotel.
People will start their search with something like “hong kong
hotel” rather than Mandarin Oriental, Grand Hyatt, or Peninsula,
unless they’ve already made their decision or happen to be
loyal customers.
What can travellers
do? Firstly, narrow your searches by including quotation
marks to define your phrase. This tells the search engine
to look for a combination of words in the exact format you have
presented. Looking for “free Singapore hotel” without
quotation marks will pull those words randomly. You’ll get
free parking, toll-free numbers and so on as the word “free”
figures in a vast number of directories. Make your key words as
specific as possible and drop irrelevant words like ‘and’
and ‘where’ and so on. As Google explains, it “ignores
common words and characters such as ‘where’ and ‘how’,
as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they
tend to slow down your search without improving the results.”
To define your
query further, another useful tool is the “+” symbol.
After your key words, leave a space and then add the “+”
sign immediately followed by a category or defining term as in ‘Bali
hotel +kids’. The minus symbol can be similarly applied to
exclude a word or category. Should you be comparing holidays in
Japan as well as Korea, try typing ‘holiday Japan OR Korea’.
The word ‘OR’ must be in caps. In most
situations, though, search engines will not distinguish between
upper and lower case characters.
Start by finding national tourism office umbrella sites which can lead you to specific articles, agencies and useful sites
To narrow a search
to a specific price range, use two key numbers linked by two dots
(periods), as in “Bangkok hotel $100..150”.
This will encourage Google to search within the specified range.
The same approach is useful for extracting the best posted prices
for cameras and other paraphernalia. And if you’re tired of
ending up in the sweaty arms of porn sites, filter them out by opening
the Google homepage and clicking on the tiny subhead titled “preferences”
just to the right of the page-centre search bar. This takes you
to a page where, among other things like choice of language, you
can set your SafeSearch filter to the required
level. This weeds out undesirable adult content.
Another option
is to go to the Directory on a search engine like
Yahoo and identify your subject before a) examining the directory,
or b) entering a search through normal key words within this directory.
Since searches
often tend to be destination specific, a useful starting point is
to access the umbrella site of the national tourist organisation of that particular country or region and work your way down from
there. To find these, add the word “tourism” in your
search, as in “Malaysia Tourism”. For your convenience
we’ve listed key Asian sites at the end of this article. Whenever
you find a site that answers your queries, follow three simple rules
– bookmark, bookmark, bookmark. Of course
there’s no guarantee your particular sub-page will still exist
a few months down the road, so make absolutely sure, navigate to
the site’s homepage and bookmark it. The easiest way to bookmark
a page on any browser is to press the “D” key while
simultaneously holding down the “Ctrl” key (on the bottom
row of your keyboard). If you can remember Ctrl+D equals bookmark, you will save yourself considerable bother and
pulling of hair later trying to find the pages you selected.
For a handy page
that does nifty world time zone calculations with
a digital clock face that can show you the current time in New York
or New Delhi, go to http://www.timeticker.com and for those irksome but oh so necessary currency conversions try http://finance.yahoo.com/currency.
So there I was in Shanghai,
confounded by a faulty map – drawn, of course, from the Internet.
It showed the St Regis hotel in the heart of Puxi when, in fact,
it was more than an hour’s drive away from where I stood,
in distant Pudong. So much for that business trip. Had I had the
luxury of an Internet connection at hand I might have watched listless
lions in the Serengeti instead. As it was, all I could do was contemplate
the traffic and fume. On business trips – or even leisure
jaunts with wailing tots in tow – time is money and all the
difference between beachside breakfast and nervous breakdown.
What a palaver.
Why bother? I can’t wait for Jenny to come back.
Useful Sites
Australia www.australia.com
Bali www.bali-tourism-board.com
Bhutan www.tourism.gov.bt
Bangladesh www.bangladesh.com
Brunei www.tourismbrunei.com
Cambodia www.tourismcambodia.com
China www.cnta.com/lyen
China www.chinatravelservice.com
Dubai www.dubaitourism.ae
Guam www.visitguam.org
Hongkong www.discoverhongkong.com
India www.incredibleindia.org or www.tourism-of-india.com
Indonesia www.tourismindonesia.com
Indonesia www.indonesia-tourism.com
Japan www.jnto.go.jp
Kenya www.magicalkenya.com
Kerala www.keralatourism.com
Laos www.visit-mekong.com/laos
Macau www.macautourism.gov.mo
Malaysia www.tourism.gov.my
Maldives www.visitmaldives.com.mv
Mauritius www.mauritius.net
Myanmar www.myanmar-tourism.com
Nepal www.welcomenepal.com
Pakistan www,tourism.gov.pk
Palau www.visit-palau.com
Papua New Guinea www.pngtourism.org.pg
Philippines www.tourism.gov.ph
Sabah www.sabahtourism.com
Sarawak www.sarawaktourism.com
Shanghai www.shanghaitour.net
South Africa www.southafrica.net
South Korea www.tour2korea.com
Singapore www.visitsingapore.com
Sri Lanka www.srilankatourism.org
Taiwan www.tbroc.gov.tw
Thailand www.tourismthailand.org
Vietnam www.vietnamtourism.com
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