Start Your Vacation on the Web

What's the one thing that everyone needs to stay competitive in the new economy? A break from it. There's just no substitute for a summer vacation to restore your sanity and recharge your batteries. And we don't mean a long weekend tacked onto a conference or a "getaway" during which you spend half your time connected to the office via phone, fax, pager, or email.

Our advice: Unplug already! But before you get away from it all, get on the Web. Travel planning is fast becoming one of the Net's killer apps. Eric Budin, 30, cofounder of GreenTree.com, a San Francisco-based Web company that sells health products, does all his travel planning online. "It costs me zero time," he says. "I can even book travel while I'm on the phone." Recently, surfing Travelocity to plan a vacation to New Orleans, he saw that fares to Paris were low, so he decided to go to France instead and booked his ticket directly through the United Airlines site.

This edition of @work is designed to take you away from work. It offers lots of ways to use the Web to plan your dream vacation -- plus advice on how to stay off the Web once you're on vacation. Bon voyage!

A Fair Fare

Be your own travel agent. One of the best vacation-oriented uses of the Web is comparison shopping among airlines. Microsoft's Expedia Travel (www.expedia.com), Travelocity (www.travelocity.com), and Preview Travel (www.previewtravel.com) are the Big Three of online travel agents -- sites that let you compare fares, schedules, and availability for dozens of flight options offered by multiple airlines. These sites also let you book hotel rooms and rent cars.

Reality check: These sites may not get you much of a price break, compared with what your travel agent can get you. But they do put you in control of the shopping process. Plus, unlike most human travel agents, these sites always remember who you are. Tom Caldwell, 39, vice president of marketing for Atcom/Info, a San Diego software startup, recently used Expedia to book a trip to Aspen. He started buying airline tickets online because, he says, "I was frustrated with people at my travel agency. They don't know who I am, or my likes and dislikes." These sites will remember what airport you fly from, what class you fly in -- even where you like to sit on the plane.

Michael George, 42, VP of marketing for Bizfon, a Salem, New Hampshire-based company that makes a phone system for small businesses, has set up his Expedia profile so that anytime the fares change to one of the places that he or his wife are hoping to visit -- including Athens, Salt Lake City, and Missoula/Bozeman, Montana (for great fly-fishing) -- he gets notified right away. You don't get that kind of service from a travel agent.

There is one big drawback to buying tickets on the Web: You're on your own if you have a problem. If your flight is canceled, you're not going to call Expedia to get emergency help with catching a later one. The Web offers a do-it-yourself model -- for better and for worse.

Name your price. The most important reason to use the Web to book air travel is personal power, rather than price. But the Web does present opportunities to save money. Say your weeklong roadshow was canceled. The good news is, you now have time for a much-delayed vacation. The bad news is, you don't have much time to plan for it -- or much money saved to pay for it. So make your best offer at Priceline (www.priceline.com). The site's reverse-auction model lets you name the price that you're prepared to pay for an airline ticket, along with the dates when you want to fly. If there's an airline that's willing to sell you a ticket that matches those conditions, then you're in business. Of course, you may find yourself departing at 6 a.m. and suffering through two grueling layovers -- all just to travel a few thousand miles. But if you decide to take a vacation at the last minute, or if you really want to save money, then Priceline is a good place to start.

Be smarter about being cheaper. But Priceline isn't the only way to save money on air travel. Almost every airline site offers Web-only specials that get distributed by email at midweek and that are good only for travel the next weekend. These last-minute, fire-sale fares can lure you on a quick get-away or an occasional extended stay, but they don't give you the kind of notice that you need to plan your dream vacation. Plus, if you subscribe to five or six major sites, the emails quickly pile up in your inbox. Smarter Living (www.smarterliving.com), a free online consumer community, sends out a weekly email that consolidates Web-only deals from 20 airlines.

Work those miles. One of the few benefits of all those business trips that you take are all those frequent-flier miles that you rack up: They come in especially handy when you're planning a vacation. WebFlyer (www.webflyer.com), from the publisher of InsideFlyer magazine, keeps you up-to-date on what you can buy with those miles -- including free flights and hotel stays -- and on when you can use them (it lists blackout periods, airline by airline). Another site, BizTravel (www.biztravel.com), lets you store all of your frequent-flier information in one place.