Poll of the Week: Planning Travel with Social Media

[SarahS]

Which social media sites do you use when planning a trip?

[jocap]

I mainly use a UK cruise forum, which is also a TA site. I've been a member there since the beginning, because originally it was just a review site, and we pressed for a forum- I was one of the original 50 members. Many of us have met at different occasions, including the naming of ships, so are friends off site as well as on.
I'm also a member of a very small UK travel site for over 50s, and have had lunch on a ship with them, and a hotel break. It's all very interesting, and so different to the days when you called into a High Street shop for a brochure, and asked questions of a young salesperson who had never been near the resort.....

[Host Bonjour]

Utilizing online forums was still fairly in its infancy and Independent Traveler was new too but like the internet, quickly caught on. I happened to be planning a trip Down Under to Aussie, NZ and Fiji and while I had guide books and it was such a BIG trip, I felt like I needed more help. I stumbled across IndependentTraveler (not yet our own ".com") and found all the rest of the information I needed to plan the trip and a few months later....I earned a chance to join this amazing team here. Naturally, there IS NO PLACE else I need to go ever, online

I do find a lot of inspiration in film, documentaries and books/magazines (remember books? I've yet to "read" one on my tablet; doesn't compute )) in particular, travel memoirs....generally always interesting as they almost always provide more of an "insiders" view of what it's like at a possible destination on your current list or might end up on a new list in the future! As for still liking books....well I'm the type that likes to flip back and forth a lot and never found doing so to be a problem, even it is in more than one book. I suppose because I trained professionally that way it has translated into everything else I do!

My nieces and nephews will never have this problem since they are probably like the e-trade baby, working with smart phones and tablets not long after birth. I was busy playing with Barbie, but mine DID have the airplane, so I was always planning to go places

[soliteyah]

Just forums for me! In addition to these, I often wind up reading the TripAdvisor, Frommer's and Lonely Planet forums for info.