Little book of travel

Thanks for the invitation to cowrite on this blog, Kris. I must admit I’m pretty new to the frequent flyer club. I only started to really travel when I moved to Singapore to take up a regional role witin Microsoft. Of course, we all travel at Microsoft but there is a major difference with travelling once a month from Brussels to London or to travel extensively in Southeast Asia. It is only now that I really notice the little details that make a world of difference when travelling. At the moment, I’m probably lucky as I have no real stories to share but I wanted to share a few sites I’ve started to use since travelling more:

• Dopplr: This site lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. Thanks to this site I’ve been able to meet up with people who were either living in the city I was visiting or people who were visiting the same city at the same time.
• Seatguru: A site I use everytime I check in online before my flight. It helps me choose the exact seat I want sit in. Since I’m quite tall, this is really helpful and surely worth the 2 minutes time it costs to look it up. At the moment Seatguru includes more than 350 airplane seatmaps from more than 50 different airlines.
• Tripadvisor: Again, I use this before booking any travel but this time to choose my hotel. We have a preferred list of hotels we can stay in but within that list I’m going to check the reviews of Tripadvisor for the best choice.
• Singapore Airlines: Since I live in Singapore, I’m fortunate to be able to fly Singapore airlines almost all the time and I can only confirm that the rumours are true: this is the best airline in the world.

If there are other handy sites out there, I’d love to hear about them.