Europe a la Carte Blog

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Alexisonfire Tickets by © Natalia Balcerska Photography

At the risk of becoming the geeky web girl of the blog, I wanted to point you towards another great free online tool: Eventful. I found this when getting to know TripIt, the travel organising site, and I have fallen in love. Eventful is simple, quick and gives you the information on current events that your two-year-old guidebook can’t.

Without signing up you can use the page by putting your location into the drop down window under the Eventful logo in the top left corner. Don’t put it in the search box on the right side. The search box searches for events, performers, venues or users but not destinations.

Events are categorised for easy searching, so if you aren’t a band buff finding the entries on gallery openings means you don’t have to scroll through the heavy metal. The database is built upon user content, partners and web searches. It isn’t exhaustive and tends to have a lot more information on the larger cities, as you’d expect.

Irish Dancers by ronnie44052

Signing up gives you some more options. I have found the ability to sign up for a destinations events, which then get sent out to me weekly, most useful so far. If you wish to spare your inbox, you can define preferred locations and they will appear in a short list under the location drop-down window. There is also the increasingly-more-required social media aspect to be found under the community tab.

A lot of what the website offers in terms of searching and sorting is more geared towards people staying in a single location. However the ability to quickly and easily get a list of what’s going on in a particular city -without having to work out what the local event magazine is and get a grip on the language- is fantastically useful for travelers.

In my ongoing quest to conquer and make sense of the web’s online content, I landed my browser (currently Google Chrome, for those of you interested) on Eurocheapo. Their tagline, ‘we’ve been there’, inspires confidence, and for good reason. The site has city guides on various European destinations, large and small, and these guides are – to put it succinctly – excellent.

Lisbon - A EuroCheapo Destination - Copyright by Andrew Hayes

City guide features include:

- General City Information: A standard guide includes Getting Into, Getting Around, Expect To Spend, Budget Tips, Car Rentals, Day Trips, Links, and Reading List. That’s a lot of great information. You might be lucky in some locations to get some extra-secret info in the ‘EuroCheapo Insider’ feature.

- Hotel Reviews: In addition to the ‘standard’ information on offer (hotel address, class, location, rates), editors have included reviews of numerous hotels in the target destination.

- Blog News: On the right side of the city homepage is a listing of all the blog post related to the destination. This is quite useful as you don’t have to search through the blog. Posts are timely and useful, such as tips on free attractions, news, and interesting tips.

- Neighbourhood Guides: Cities have a listing of neighbourhoods along with hotels that can be found in each neighbourhood. This can help you get your bearings before travel, especially in large towns like Paris or London.

While EuroCheapo is very hotel-orientated, there are countless amounts of additional tidbits and information. There is a useful cheap flights page but this is not linked in with the city guides so be sure to have a look. There is also a railpass information page, but readers should note that these rail passes are not valid for residents of the European Union, the Russian Federation or Turkey.

I really like this site, although I can’t help but sometimes get lost in all the information available. The site requires a lot of scrolling – but do scroll down as the ‘in the spotlight’ section contains some must-read details.

EuroCheapo currently has 26 city guides (although one of them – New York – is decidedly not a EuroZone country, although I am not complaining) and I would highly recommend it for travel advice. Rumour has it more city guides are on the way.

You can read the Europe a la Carte guest interview with Tom Meyers, founder and editor-in-chief of Eurocheapo. Of course, don’t forget us here at Europe A La Carte for our own unique budget options and travel tips.

Good

- Multilingual service (twelve languages)

- Streamlined user interface

- Search results include hotels reviews, photos, and a map

- Search covers multiple websites which increases the likelihood of a deal

- Ability to refine search results by price, star ratings, hotel name, or features

Bad

- For large metropolitan areas, there is no additional filter to search by particular neighbourhoods.

A search for the first weekend in December for accommodation in London resulted in 1,453 hotels found. The cheapest was a few very nice looking backpackers around £20, or I could splurge £500 for the Rocco Forte Browns Hotel.

I also did a quick check on Amsterdam hotels and found 358 – this time the site gave me some recommendations for budget, mid-range, and luxury travelers. I thought that was a nice touch, hopefully it is coming for all the cities.

While my comparison searches on other websites (including Expedia and Travelocity) did result in a similar price range, Hotelscombined definitely gave me more choice in each of the pricing tiers.

Keep in mind we have had a fair number of accommodation reviews here at Europe A La Carte, should you need any further help in choosing a hotel, hostel, or apartment. Karen has also had good results with Hotelscombined, as she mentioned in a previous post.

Right now I’m sitting in a campsite in Taesch, Switzerland, hoping for the weather to clear and to get my first glimpse of the Matterhorn in real life. It isn’t looking good unfortunately.

Fortunately, though, the campsite has WiFi so I can let people know where I am, what I’m up to and that the weather hasn’t been playing nicely. When you are travelling off the beaten track and making up the day’s plans as you go along, easy internet access is not a given. I lay in bed last night beneath these giant mountains, the grey bulk of a previous landside blocking half the valley only a few hundred metres away, and realised that if the mountain above me gave way no one would know we were here.

Yes, occasionally I can be a bit over dramatic. It makes trying to fall asleep peacefully that much more of a challenge.

Now, I do have my mobile phone with me and a contract which gives me international roaming. I can SMS family and friends to let them know where I am, but that’s somehow just too 1990’s. In the glorious new Web2.0 I can message to Twitter directly from my phone.

Fun Twitter shirt seen at LIFT

Twitter is a microblogging platform which lets you send SMS length texts out into the web. You develop a network of followers, who all get your latest updates in their Twitter feed and you can follow others, keeping up-to-date on whatever they’re doing. It’s like mini-RSS feeds, or the status updates in Facebook. Europe a la Carte has one. Because of the brevity, it’s less time consuming to write than a full blog post and more informal. People tend to update multiple times a day and create ongoing conversations with their followers. You can do it all from the web, a desktop application or from your phone; and use it to inform people on life’s minutiae, your latest blog posts or even update your Facebook status automatically.

By tweeting where I am and what I am doing, I can let family and friends all know what’s going on right now. A single SMS is accessible to all of them, and even to my blog readers, via a twitter badge on my site. I can share my experiences with the world, as they happen and without a laptop or wifi connection, and I can fall asleep knowing that should that ravine collapse they’ll know where to erect the headstone: “Here lies Jacinta. She came, she saw, she tweeted.”

Amsterdam Houses - Copyright Andrew Hayes

A post this week slightly off topic, but I could not resist sharing this interesting find. If you are like me and travelled a lot before the dawn of digital cameras, you have hundreds of photographs stuffed underneath your bed, unorganised, only flipped through on the random occasion. Scanning them and organising them would just be too much work. But now, scanmyphotos.com offers to take that job off your hands. For US$49.95 they will scan up to 1,000 photos onto a DVD (plus shipping) – anything from Polaroid sized pictures up to shots of 11×14.

There are a few ‘pre-requisites’: you must sort and organise your photos before sending them. The instructions are fairly detailed, but only you know which photos belong to which travel trip, so it seems like a fair request.

I can see where this would be pretty handy especially if you are feeling overwhelmed by that growing pile of aging film. Having said that, I might suggest you choose a traceable shipping service before putting all of your precious memories into the post. To order go to the international page of the scanmyphotos.com website.

I am curious to hear from our readers – would you use such a service?

Generally, I’m a very laid back traveler. When flying I’ll have the plane tickets booked in advance but often not much else. However right now I’m in the middle of planning a big trip - four people, two continents, three months. I’ll have people joining up and leaving again; planes, trains, cars and ferries to book; weddings and shows to get to; tourist sites to see and hopefully some time to chill as well.

So I’ve been looking for tools to help me get this all organised. The first I came across is TripIt.

Tava dentro da minha bolsa hoje! by Ana Cotta

My travel agent gave me my eticket details with a checkmytrip.com reservation number, so I logged into that website and called up the booking. I could email directly from there to plans@tripit.com, with my email address as the sender and all the details were automatically loaded into my trip for me with TripIts Itinerator. Pretty nice - it saved a lot of typing and playing around and it works with a large number of airlines and reservation agents.

TripIt also has a toolbar extension which allows you to clip websites and put directly into your trip plans. This isn’t as good as it could be - I’m spoiled by Google notebook which takes snapshots of the page and inputs the entire content rather than the link. Also TripIt inserts this information as unsorted notes - you have to go to your overall profile and put them manually into the specific trip and even then they remain unassociated with any specific journey or location.

Travel memorabilia by alex-s

The inbuilt travel guide is a work in progress. Currently it strips out Wikipedia entries on the destination, scours Flickr for photos and hooks up with Eventful to find out what’s happening when you’re there. This is a nice start and it will hopefully become more extensive in later versions.

Overall TripIt is a nifty web application for organising your journeys. The automatic creation of an itinerary just from forwarded emails is simple and quick and the ground work has been laid for a very extensive tool. It is still in it’s beta testing phase, so there will undoubtably be many more improvements made in later releases but already I’m quite happy with it.

Does anyone else use a different planning/organising tool? Let us know in the comments - I’m always after the “perfect” solution!

We’ve all had those moments - standing in a foreign city, knees squeezed together as you try and work out if you have enough money to buy a coke so that you can use the toilets of the cafe across the street. Public toilets, as has been discussed here before, can be a bit of a hit and miss affair (my personal advice: do not, under any circumstances, consider using the airport’s toilets in Hurghada, Egypt) and simply finding some can be a challenge in itself.

Thankfully we can turn to some online databases to help us locate toilets.

Broken Toilet by borges,

The Bathroom Diaries
This has been online since 2000 and includes 12000 toilets from all over the world. Users can add their own toilet discoveries to it. Some entries haven’t been updated in a long time (they predate the introduction of the Euro), but it’s a great start and the Golden Plunger awards for the best bathrooms are worth checking out.

PublicToilets.org
A simple database which is user generated and covers a variety of countries across the world, but not as many toilets as the other sites. This also includes entries such as “My place, ring the doorbell marked Arnold” which, although amusing, I’d probably bypass.

Find a Toilet UK
The lack UK public toilets has been covered before, and now someone has decided to help us out of the dilema. Findatoilet has 3700 public toilets in the UK documented and is not reliant on user input for growth. Search the database by going to the mobile phone link - which of course also means you can search direct from your phone. Exactly what you need when you haven’t checked it out beforehand and find yourself hopping up and down on one leg.

Diaroogle
Now it isn’t Europe, in fact it’s only one city specific, but Diaroogle is a new database for public toilets in New York. The entries are practical and slightly more unusual than you find in the other databases including, for example, The Museum of Sex and the US Bankruptcy Court.

Take to the Skies - Copyright Andrew Hayes

Sometimes, I tend to over-analyse things. This is usually the case when I am searching for cheap airfare! I previously reported my thoughts on Dutch website cheaptickets.nl but I do have another trick up my sleeve. Kayak is a slick and easy-to-use website that allows endless amounts of manipulation to your search results to help you find endless possibilities of flight combinations. I have yet to figure out why they called it Kayak, though. Maybe because it glides easily through the airline reservation systems? Or because it is a tool that is simple, easy, and does exactly what you expect?

Good

- Multilingual service (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian)

- Easy to use controls allow you to select flights within certain timeframes or airline alliances

- Has ‘weekend’ getaway search option

- Flight Buzz section with up-to-the-minute deals

Bad

- Depending on which flight you choose, you might have to register at a new site to actually book (Kayak does not do any of the bookings, they are merely a screening tool.)

Rating out of 10: 9.5

You start but simply defining your search criteria, and then you will quickly be presented with a large amount of results. Then you can use the Filters on the left side of the screen to easily narrow down your choices by Number of Stops, Airline Alliance, Flight Times, Aircraft Type, Trip Duration, or Price Band. It may sound like a lot of choice but really it is easy! Each result has all the necessary details on-screen but by clicking the ‘details’ link, additional information is displayed. You can even click on a flight that you definitely want and it will reconfigure to show all the flights that will pair up with the one you chose. When you are done, click the airfare link and you will be taken to the corresponding website for booking.

Before you buy, be sure to check out our other air travel tips on Europe A La Carte.

I happened upon the website http://www.adayin.com which claims to sell ‘free vacation guides’. Upon further investigation, I have to say I am very impressed! At first I thought they only have guides for Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, but this is simply a bug with the display map as a number of central European destinations can be found in the location list.

Each city is broken down into smaller guides (Factual and Background, What’s to See, Shopping, History and Economy, Art & Culture, Recreation & Sport, Getting Around, Eating Out) but you can download a single PDF containing all sections.

Pros:

• ·Consolidates all types of information into a single document.

• It is Free!

Cons:

• You are required to give some self-identifying information before downloading (Gender, Age Range)

• There is no rating or recommendation on listings.

I think these types of guides are perfect for long weekends or city ‘minibreaks’ where you might not find it justified to buy a full blown travel guide (or if you are like me and lacking bookshelf space). Indeed you might need to do some further research, but A Day In offers a great starting point. However, be sure always to check in with us here at Europe A La Carte to find the cheapest airfare and exclusive tips for authentic travel.

My Crowded Bookshelf - Copyright by Andrew Hayes

Has travel insurances gone bananas? Well Quotebanana.co.uk appear to think that a zany name is going to attract buyers of travel insurance with a strapline of “Don’t monkey around, pick the best of the bunch”. I hesitate to call Quotebanana a price comparison site as it predominately features insurance companies which are part of the AA group of companies. However I decided to give it a go for annual travel insurance in Europe for a couple. The cheapest quote of £59.10 was with Only Insurance.

I did a search with Direct-Travel.co.uk, from whom I purchased our European annual policy and it was priced at £46.  The morale of the story - it’s always worth shopping around on more than one site and checking exactly what is covered by a policy, payout limits and excesses.

photo by Darren Hester