Handy internet tools that make organizing your travels easier

Few would argue with the fact that the internet has revolutionized the way we travel. Gone are the days of arriving at an airport, flustered and exhausted, with hundreds of unsorted travel documents clenched together between the bulging pages of a hulking great folder.

These days, backpackers can book hostels (of course!) and flights, arrange travel insurance, even check-in to a flight, without so much as picking up a pen. As for that unwieldy folder, it’s been joyously banished to the annals of the past!

But it doesn’t stop there – an entire new breed of website has been cutting down even further on the amount of fiddly (and non-eco friendly) paper travelers need. Here’s a quick rundown, then, on how del.icio.us, Flickr, Facebook and the like are changing the face of travel.

Preparing for Your Trip with del.icio.us

The beauty of del.icio.us is in its simplicity. For years we’ve all been bookmarking away merrily on our home computers – now del.icio.us allows us to access those all-important web pages from any internet-connected computer in the world.

Travel guides, Google maps, embassy details, even reservations – with just a few quick clicks they can all be stored for easy and paperless future access. Then, once they’re safely bookmarked away they can be accessed at will.

Have a look at our example titled Australia_Trip_e.g. on the right hand column of http://del.icio.us/hostelbookers.com. We’ve created a quick itinerary for a trip from Melbourne to Sydney, including flight details, info on the airport shuttle bus, accommodation links and a travel guide, too.

The Trip Itself

And it’s obviously not just del.icio.us that’s changing the way that we store, access and share information on our travels. There’s a whole host of other sites ready to make traveling just that little bit easier.

Social networking sites like Facebook are allowing us to keep in ever closer contact with friends on the other side of the world, and communicate our thoughts, experiences and tips to a global audience.

Flickr.com lets you upload your photos while traveling, so that you can delete photos from your camera and save memory space for more snaps on the road. Or, for those who want their photos seen in private, Driveway.com allows you to send whole albums to a specific friend.

And those are only a few suggestions from the 2.0 wave that’s sweeping the internet. Traveling, it seems, just keeps gets easier, and that hulking folder continues to disappear further and further into the distant past.