Editor’s Note: It’s “holiday week” on The Window Seat, and our editors get into the spirit of the season with a series of articles exploring the many facets of this busy travel period.

Alright, let's get down to business: you're traveling over the holidays. You're stressing a little about it. You have a ton of questions. Honey, join the club.

(And then after you've joined the club, take a seat right over here and we'll talk it over. Ready? Ready!)

Q. Do I need to show up at the airport earlier than usual?

A. In a word, yes. I would, anyway. You've got to remember that the world and his mother (and his mother's best friend and her cousin Sally) will be traveling over the holidays and if you want to get into the math of this sort of thing, the equation looks a little something like this: larger number of people + same amount of space = longer lines. You're also going to be finding people who perhaps aren't used to traveling, and who therefore aren't down with the whole take-your-shoes-off-remove-your-laptop thing at the security checkpoint. Bottom line: give yourself an extra hour, just to be safe. (And also? Don't be the person who doesn't know to take off his shoes.)

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Posted in Air Travel, Planning Tools, Q & A
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Every cloud has a silver lining, even when you’re passing over it at 30,000 feet while running late, shoved in the middle seat between two strangers, and worried about the possibility of lost luggage. It’s true! Read on for my list of five good things about taking to the skies today.

Photo courtesy of IgoUgo member paolo1899.

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Posted in Air Travel, Green Travel, Planning Tools
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China is a fantastic country. China is also an enormous country, and enormous countries equal enormous guidebooks. Seriously, the Lonely Planet China---which I carried around with me for two weeks last summer---comes in at a whopping 1012 pages and weighs close to two pounds. And since I was only visiting Beijing and Shanghai on that trip, meaning I only really looked at two sections of the book with any frequency, I'm estimating that I carried around about 700 pages and a pound and a half more paper than I actually needed.

But there's good news for travelers with weak upper body strength: Lonely Planet has just come up with a solution to slim down its more portly tomes with a concept it calls the Pick & Mix.

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Posted in Planning Tools, Travel Companions
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One of the nice things about living in the 21st century is how easy everything is. We tend to take a lot for granted, such as running water, electricity, and the wonders of the Internet, but we are still obsessed—some people more than others—with new devices that make light work of whatever it is we are doing. Gadgets are toys for the adult set and many are made specifically for the traveler. From eye masks and neck pillows to noise-cancelling headphones and travel games, we’re always looking for ways to make our journeys as easy and comfortable as possible.

Photo courtesy of IgoUgo member Rufusni

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Posted in Air Travel, Budget Travel, Packing & Baggage, Planning Tools
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Unless you’re an all-all-inclusive traveler (or one of those people who considers a twirl around Epcot Center to be a shot of culture), you’ve probably uncovered a hidden gem or two during your travels. And chances are, it wasn’t simply the fortuitousness of your find that made it so satisfying: it was the prospect of all those bragging rights. The nominators of 2007’s Local Secrets, Big Finds can vouch for that…along with every IgoUgo member who has written a travel review since the community’s inception in 2000. Travelers’ love of bragging rights, in fact, is precisely what makes the IgoUgo community such an excellent resource for travel planning and inspiration (if we do say so ourselves). As an IgoUgo editor, I’ve been reading about our members’ picks and pans for the past 3 years, and trust me—these are travelers who know the what, where, and how of finding little-known treasures all over the world (and talking them up freely upon their returns). The best part? You can see who’s doing the bragging.

Photo courtesy of IgoUgo member UCLArocks

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Posted in LSBF '07, Planning Tools
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It’s the word that all cell phone users loathe: roam. And nothing’s worse than opening that monthly phone bill expecting the normal $68 price tag and discovering that you owe a whopping 200 bucks. What! Did! I! Do?!

Well, I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t take the time to thoroughly understand my cell phone plan, and it ended up costing me. My cell phone and I are inseparable. We dine together. We workout together. I even activated international calling, so we can travel together. I know that making a phone call from France or Mexico or Argentina costs me anywhere from 49 cents to a painful $1.50 per minute. Even sending and receiving text messages puts a dent in the bank account. Last month, I made the mistake of thinking that I had a North American cell phone plan through T-Mobile, so I used my phone as I normally would on a short trip to Vancouver. When I received my phone bill, I discovered that my plan only covered the U.S. and not our neighbors to the north as I thought. Ouch!

After reluctantly paying my monthly bill, I vowed (for my financial wellbeing!) to be a smarter international caller. (Check out this nine part feature on using cell phones abroad in The Travel Insider.) My cell phone and I are getting ready for a trip to Australia later this month, and I don’t want to be shocked by another outrageous phone bill!

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Posted in Budget Travel, International Travel, Planning Tools
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I’ve got one. You’ve probably got one. Pretty much every high schooler in the entire country has one, even if they’d rather their parents didn’t see the various party photos they regularly upload to it (I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.)

I’m talking about the MySpace profile, that reigning bastion of social networking that connects strangers with other strangers and then turns them into friends. With more than 100 million users, MySpace is currently the fifth most popular website in the world--third most popular in the U.S.--and a profile page on the site has long been a must-have accessory for any well-connected denizen of the Internet.

And now guess who else has got their own little space on MySpace? Why, Travelocity’s Roaming Gnome, of course.

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Posted in International Travel, News & Alerts, Planning Tools, Travel Companions
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I wouldn’t exactly call myself a planner. Chance, curiosity and spontaneity drive my travels more often than not, and the word itinerary unleashes some sort of overt chemical reaction that makes my head hurt and my palms sweat. One thing I consistently rely on, however, is the Zagat Survey. After all, a good meal isn’t something one leaves to chance.

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Posted in New Orleans, Planning Tools, Restaurants & Cafes
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The Amazing Race: All-Stars premieres this Sunday. It's the eleventh season of this, my favorite, reality show, and they're featuring competitors from past races. Deep down, I've always wanted the chance to battle for a million dollars while discovering exotic places that I might never see otherwise. What's holding me back? Part of it is that I can't find that perfect partner. (The other part is that I get cranky when I'm hungry and nobody needs to see that!)

Actually, even when a million dollars isn't on the line, selecting a co-traveler is tough.

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Posted in Planning Tools, Travel Companions
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