Web site can plan your itinerary
Tripit, www.tripit.com, is a free online service that can help you keep track of and save locations and reservations you book online for your whole trip.
Just forward any online travel confirmations via e-mail to plans@tripit.com, and the site will come up with a completed itinerary, including directions, maps, city guides and weather updates. You can flesh out your itinerary by adding personal notes and photos.
If you like the Caribbean, but want to stay in a more secluded, rustic and less expensive place than the lush megaresorts, here are a couple of small inns in Jamaica you might like.
Hotel Mocking Bird Hill, www.hotelmockingbirdhill.com, is a 10-room inn with an ecological bent and a modest price tag. Rooms begin at $125 until the week before Christmas, when they go up to $165 for high season. The second is Jamaica Heights Resort, www.jahsresort.com, which has rooms with private balconies that overlook the Blue Mountains as well as the undulating coastline. Decor is colonial style with four-poster beds and lace mosquito netting. Rates run from $75 to $125, with breakfast an additional $12.50.
If you are heading to Paris during the off-season and are looking for a good-value hotel with character, try the Hotel Chopin, www.hotelchopin.fr, which opened in 1846 and is accessed by ducking through a historic, glass-roofed pedestrian arcade. It's near the Opera and the Louvre and a Metro stop is half a block away. Rooms are small but charming and include breakfast. Rates (double) start at 90 euros per night (about $130), and singles start at 60 euros (about $85). The Web site is in French, but the photos posted give you a good idea of the place.
The hotel does not offer online booking, so you need to call to book at (011) (33-1) 4874-7824 or fax them at (011) (33-1) 4247-0070.
American Airlines, www.aa.com, is decreasing the number of miles needed for short trips. Click on the AAdvantage button for information. You can redeem 15,000 miles for a short trip of less than 750 miles each way, instead of swapping 25,000 miles. The flights must be nonstop. The program is in place until Feb. 29.
Asia Transpacific Journeys, www.AsiaTranspacific.com, offers trips with a culturally authentic, people-to-people slant. Thanks to the fact it also has a nonprofit foundation that funds projects such as its Clean Water Initiative, where locals learn how to make ceramic water filters, taking one of the company's tours allows travelers to give back to the cultures they visit.
In print
"The Best American Travel Writing 2007," edited by Susan Orlean, $14.00, is in the Best American Series put out by Houghton Mifflin. This is a collection of the author's choice of the best travel articles and essays published in American periodicals in the last year.
There are some thrilling and frightening stories here, and a few with cultural insights, but there are also many long, uninspired pieces that are hard to finish, including one on drug use in Djibouti that makes one wince.
I prefer last year's volume in this series, edited by Tim Cahill, "The Best American Travel Writing 2006," which included some thoughtful memoirs and hilarious action pieces.