With the start of the holiday season a week away, it’s time to review Transportation Security Administration rules and general tips for making 2011 holiday air travel as painless as possible.

Following are 10 best-traveler practices and TSA tips for holiday ticket-holders—particularly for those traveling in coach and who don’t have elite status with any carrier, which is a majority of the flying public. Come to think of it, most of these travel tips are good year-round.

Smartphone users can also get more information by scanning the QR code in the accompanying image. (Additionally noteworthy: While TSA agents at the gate are not always a jolly crew, the administration’s blog writer has a much better sense of humor, and the site’s worth a read for additional info, links and laughs.)

And now for those tips:

1. Shoes stay on! (at least for kids). Children ages 12 and younger no longer need to remove their shoes. Plus, kids are no longer subject to enhanced pat-downs. These new allowances from the TSA may not help a vast majority of the traveling public, but it’s a boon for parents—and passengers standing in line behind them.

2. Wear easy-to-get-on shoes; minimize metal on your body. For the rest of us over the age of 12, please, no boots with 50 buckles or ones that lace all the way above the knee, unless you’re willing to remove them before you get in line and move out of the way after you’ve made it through screening. Causing people to wait while you struggle in and out of difficult footwear is just plain unacceptable, especially after we’re coming up on close to a decade of having to endure this rule. As for the metal element, keep jewelry to a minimum, and if you carry coins, remember to remove them from your pockets before going through the scanner.

3. Double-check your bag for guns and knives. No, we’re not kidding. So far in 2011, more than 1,000 guns have been found in passengers’ bags, according to the TSA. Don’t believe it? Read Joe Sharkey’s spot-on column about it in this week’s New York Times.

4. Do not wrap gifts that might set off security alarms. While wrapped packages get screened like regular baggage, if there is an item inside that TSA finds suspicious, it gets unwrapped. But why risk it? Best to not test the system (and potentially delay those behind in line) and just wrap gifts after arrival.

5. Know before you arrive at the airport whether your tasty treat for the holiday dinner table is allowed through security. Pies, cakes, bread, donuts and even turkeys (raw or cooked) are permitted on board. Sauces, dips, spreads—basically anything that is in liquid or gel form—needs to be put in checked luggage, at least if you have them in containers larger than 3.4 ounces and they can’t all fit into a quart-size plastic bag. Don’t know/remember the 3-1-1 rule? Read here for clarification.

6. Bring snacks. Sure, you can purchase food on board, but lately I’ve noticed planes running out of some supplies even before we’re halfway through a flight. Add potential delays on the tarmac or even at the gate (airport stores often close before late or over-night flights depart), and having snack bars or a bag of almonds or chocolates in your carry-on are great for tempering hunger pains and appeasing cranky travelers with low blood-sugar levels.

7. Bring proper ID, but don’t panic if you forget it. If you have lost or forgotten your ID, you may still be permitted to fly as long as you can help TSA agents verify you are who you say you are by answering a few questions. It happens. Remain calm, provide the information needed, and odds are you’ll likely be able to board. Also, for those who may have missed the change five years ago, passports now are required for all international travel, including Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

8. Choose your seats beforehand. If you’re particular about where you sit on a plane, as soon as you have a reservation, go online and select your seats for each segment of travel. The earlier you do this, the better chance you have of getting that aisle, window or front-of-plane seat you desire, and of sitting with your travel partners.

9. Check-in online. I know this may seem like a no-brainer to regular travelers, but the holidays bring out the occasional flyer, who may not realize that checking-in before arriving at the airport has advantages beyond skipping the line at the counter, particularly if not checking bags. It’s especially helpful in saving precious minutes should you arrive late, such as when your driver takes you to the wrong airport (as happened to this writer recently).

10. Arrive early, both to the airport and your gate. Plan to arrive even earlier than you think necessary. The airline suggests 90 minutes?  Make it 120. Adding at least 30 minutes to your usual routine can help mitigate unexpected delays. If you don’t travel that often, you may not be aware that at many airports you now have to take your checked luggage to a separate baggage handler after you check-in, which during busy times means another long line in which to wait before even getting to security. Planes are boarding earlier too, so if you need to snag precious overhead bin space, get to the gate at least 45 minutes before departure.

Tip No. 10 could be the most important, as it can set the tone for the rest of your journey. Any other suggestions? Share them in comments. And, of course, enjoy the holidays!

Photo: TSA Blog

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Room 77, the hotel search-by-room site that debuted in February, has added booking and comparison-shopping capabilities along with a free concierge service to its offerings.

Starting today, travelers can use Room 77 to simultaneously shop multiple major online travel agencies (OTAs), compare prices across a variety of room types and book at more than 120,000 hotels worldwide.

The company also enhanced its search pages, adding a useful “fees” link for each hotel that shows users the prices of extras, such as valet parking, self parking, Internet connectivity, cribs and pet fees.

The ability to compare various room types at multiple hotels helps travelers more easily find the best values for their stays. For example, they might see that for $25 a night more, they can get a room with better views in the next higher category. Or, they can determine that a suite at one luxury brand is less than the entry-level room at another nearby luxury property, or compare competing properties for the best deal. Results can be viewed in a list or on a map.

In addition, for three- to five-star properties booked through Room 77, travelers get access to a complimentary Room Concierge, which uses Room 77’s proprietary RoomMatch technology to identify the best rooms for each traveler and works directly with hotels to try to secure them.

“No matter where you book a hotel today, your actual room is still a gamble. Room 77 stacks the odds in the traveler’s favor by combining the power of our room IQ with advanced search technology and unprecedented service to get you the right room at the right hotel for the right price,” said Brad Gerstner, founder of Room 77.

Once a hotel has been selected, the new booking pages list the average nightly rates plus taxes and fees for each room type at the property, along with prices for various room types found at Room 77’s partner sites, some of which include Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotels.com, CheapTickets.com and Booking.com.

Travelers who choose to book through Room 77 get the added benefit of the Room Concierge, on qualifying properties. Here’s how it works (or you can watch the attached video):

On the booking form, before finalizing the reservation, travelers can select both primary and secondary room preference (quiet, views, size, easy access or connecting rooms), then supplement those attributes with personalized requests, such as specific room numbers, floor preference, cribs, distance to elevator or whatever else they think of.

Room 77 uses its RoomMatch technology and other information to identify the best rooms to match those preferences, appends the requests to the bookings sent to the hotels, then follows up to ensure they were received, and works with the hotels secure the best matches and confirm the room assignments.

Within 48 hours prior to arrival, a guest will receive a message with the status of their room request and, when possible, a confirmation of specific room number. Room 77 also sends additional hotel information, including suggested rooms and additional hotel-specific tips to increase their odds of getting a preferred room at check-in if one isn’t confirmed before arrival.

“It’s really a blend of science and service that defines the process,” said Kevin Fliess, general manager and vice president of product at Room 77. “We’ve analyzed over 750,000 individual hotel rooms and know where the good and bad rooms are in the hotel. We then use that technology and data to generate a very specific room request—then do a little follow up (the service).”

According to statistics from a Room 77 survey:

• 75 percent of travelers who book online report that they have been disappointed in their hotel room, often because of view, noise and location.
• 93 percent of travelers who book hotels using online travel sites believe they get an average or worse room in a hotel due to the fact they use these sites.
• In beta testing, more than 90 percent of travelers who have used Room 77′s Room Concierge service report that they were assigned a room that met or exceeded their expectations.

One thing to note: The search results pages show the lowest day rate available for the length of stay for each hotel. A vast majority are dollar rates, however for a few international hotels, the number may represent a figure in a foreign currency, however when you select the property and get to the booking page, the site automatically does the conversion and all sales are currently made in U.S. dollars.

Photo: Room 77

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The best sources for trusted travel recommendations tend to be from those who know us best—our friends and family—combined with vetted research and content from select publications and websites. But gathering that information can involve several steps, and potential missteps.

Today, Uptake.com has re-launched its travel-resource site—the company’s new tagline is “Travel like you’ve been there before”—and introduced a new service, Travel Q&A, that aims to harness social networks, targeted user-generated content and travel resources to make the trip-research process easier and help users find the travel information that’s most relevant to their needs.

“We’ve designed the new Uptake to reflect natural travel-planning behavior. When people plan vacations, they pour over travel reviews and sift through star ratings, but ultimately they prefer advice and recommendations from people they trust the most who have been to that destination before,” said Yen Lee, president and co-founder of Uptake.com, and formerly of Yahoo! Travel.

Travel Q&A uses Uptake’s patent-pending “destination mining” technology to access users’ Facebook friends and analyze structured data (such as hometown, current city, college and check-ins) as well as unstructured data (status updates, photos and comments) in order to find individuals who are best suited to provide personalized travel recommendations on designated destinations.

Users can supplement their Travel Q&A answers with information found through two other key elements of the site: Uptake’s large travel library of vacation experiences, with more than 1.8 million destination ideas, hotels, restaurants, activities and attractions culled from 30,000 travel websites, and its significant body of users. Since launching about four years ago, Uptake has become one of the most-visited travel sites, with roughly four million unique visitors each month.

Here’s how the new tool works:

A user posts a question on Uptake, and provided they’ve allowed the site to access their Facebook account, Uptake then lists those friends who have content that match the destination queried about. Users have the option to select all who appear in those results, a designated few, or their entire friend list. Their travel question then posts to their friends’ walls—all through Uptake, without having to switch over to Facebook.

The benefit of using this service and not just posting the question to users’ walls is that it ensures friends see the question, with the added bonus that their friends also can see it and respond. At the same time, the query goes up on Uptake, where anyone can respond.

I tested the new tool by asking for London hotel and restaurant recommendations. Six of my Facebook friends were deemed a match. I know many more have been to London, but the information on Facebook is only as good as what gets posted, and not everyone completes their demographic fields, nor allows their information to be crawled. As a result, friends of mine who currently live in London did not show up as matches, and I couldn’t add them individually to the list of people that I wanted to ask without choosing to post on everyone’s walls.

Nonetheless, by querying just my six matches, I received four responses within a few minutes to two hours—three from my friends, one from someone who had seen the question on Uptake. I received email notices whenever someone responded, and I could easily get to my Travel Q&A page with a link on the right side of the Uptake homepage under Recent Activity. It should be noted, however, that replies from Facebook friends need to be posted using the application link in order for them to appear on the Uptake question page and for the user to receive notification.

Still, it’s great that you can quickly find a targeted group of friends who likely can provide valuable insight about destinations. Despite a few minor glitches—one friend commented that there was a hitch with the Facebook permission screen, and they never received a confirmation that their permissions were received—I have to say that compared to other travel research tools I’ve tried over the past few years (and there have been many—millions of venture-capital dollars have gone into building companies and tools hoping to capture the travel-planning market) Travel Q&A is one of the easiest to use, and it provided quick, relevant responses that I found valuable.

And I’m not just saying that because I work for the company. Those who know me know that I don’t hold back when I think something doesn’t work very well. Plus, those friends who answered my question separately commented that they thought the Travel Q&A tool looked interesting, and that they already recommended it to others. That’s a pretty good response.

Check out the new Travel Q&A for yourself at Uptake.com and let us know what you think.

You love travel. You love nature. You now have three days left to help determine the destinations that will make up the New 7 Wonders of Nature—until 11:11 a.m. GMT (6:11 a.m. EDT) on Nov. 11, 2011.

Finalist: Iguazu Falls, view from the Brazil side

The New 7 Wonders of Nature campaign was launched in 2007 by the Swiss-based New7Wonder organization after the success of its New Seven Wonders of the World contest, in which more than 100 million people around the world voted for what they deemed to be the seven most impressive modern sites on the planet.

The 28 finalists for the New 7 Wonders of Nature contest represent all continents except for Antarctica. The campaign started with 440 entries. After nearly 18 months of voting, only one national nominee per country plus multinational nominees were allowed to proceed to the next stage. After six months of voting for the 77 semifinalists, the New7Wonders’ panel of experts, under the leadership of Dr. Federico Mayor, former Director-General of UNESCO, chose the 28 finalists, which were announced on July 21, 2009.

The Grand Canyon is the site in the United States to make the list. The El Yunque forest in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, also is a finalist.

Floating is a breeze in the salty Dead Sea

Others making the cut to 28 range from popular places such as the Amazon River, Iguazu Falls on the boarder of Brazil and Argentina, the Dead Sea in Israel and Jordan, Halong Bay in Vietnam, and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and Papua New Guinea, to more obscure sights (at least for typical travelers), like the mud volcanoes of Azerbaijan, the Sunderbans delta in Bangladesh and India, the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon, and Bu Tinah Island in the United Arab Emirates.

Over the years there have been multiple “seven wonders” contests held by various groups. Tourism boards for the destinations that make it into the finals tend to love these campaigns as they provide free marketing opportunities for them. Many have been going all out promoting voting for their nominees on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

To vote online for up to seven of your favorite nature sites, visit new7wonders.com. For those who prefer to vote via phone, click here. Winners will be announced later in the day after voting ends on Nov. 11.

A catalyst behind the creation of New7Wonder was the fact that of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one still exists—the Great Pyramid of Giza.) Following the nature contest, the next focus for the organization is cities.

Photos: D.M. Airoldi

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