If you are really particular about how you travel and where you stay - not just which airline and/or class or which hotel brand, but to exactly pick out where you want to sit and where you want to  sleep, check out these websites.

Seatguru  launched in 2001 by frequent flyer Matthew Daimler - He started with a single color-coded interactive airplane seating chart. Having experienced firsthand the vast differences between airline seats, he was determined to collect this useful information and share it with other travelers. Now seatguru.com covers more than 300 airplane seatmaps from more than 45 different airlines and was purchased by Trip Advisor in 2007.

Seat 61 is not strictly comparable but a unique site dedicated to train travel around the world - if you want to know something about trains in Inner Mongolia to the palace on wheels in India, this is your ultimate resource.

Tripkick - and now tripkick.com promises to do for the hotel industry what seatguru.com has done for airlines - early days yet with the site covering some US regions, but it has every chance of taking off.

Even for the seasoned traveller, India has always been a hard country to negotiate, particularly when it came to budget travel. More like a lottery as far as getting accommodation right was concerned - you won occasionally but lost most of the time. Sometimes amazing value and at other times you’d get a complete wreck of a hotel room for an inflated price.

At the top end though, travellers usually had ample choice and could choose from the best luxury hotel brands. And whilst these hotels never came cheap, one usually got what one paid for.

But now, things look set to improve - with the fast growth in the tourism and hospitality sector, there are signs of rapid change and new hope for the budget traveller. 

The Indian middle class has started travelling more - with more leisure time, a higher disposable income and globalisation all contributing. And they are no longer satisfied by generations of run down lodges and hotels which were hardly ever renovated, the unfortunate hallmark of Indian budget travel over the last many years.

The larger hotel companies were the first to recognise this requirement - Ginger, a TATA enterprise, has twelve hotels already with another 6 hotels coming up. They offer good value rooms with the latest technology including self check-in options. Some of the other new brands in this sector include Lemon Tree, Hometel & Premier Travel Inn. 

Another company which introduced a unique new concept to India six months ago is HOME-LIKE HOTELS. The company which was launched in November 2007 works on identifying unique, independent, boutique properties which offer great value across the length and breadth of the country. Once identified and approved based on their criteria, the company then makes the selected hotels available as part of the HOME-LIKE collection.

This offers a clear win for the traveller as they avoid the uncertainty of booking through travel portals like yatra.com or travelguru.com which list every hotel without qualifying them under set criteria.

Currently the HOME-LIKE HOTELS collection features over forty carefully selected boutique hotels in over 25 destinations. They aim to have over 100 hotels available for travellers to book from, by the end of the year. More information on their hotels and destinations is available at http://www.homelikehotels.com/

The key difference between HOME-LIKE HOTELS and the traditional model is the unique character of the individual hotels. They avoid some of the bland standard features that all chain hotels invariably have.

Welcome news indeed for the budget traveller - with the price range for most of these hotels ranging between 2000 and 5000 INR (approximately £25 to £60) a night, the choice for travellers looking for an authentic Indian experience has just gone up.

So is this all achieved by compromising service and what gives to make these all so reasonable priced? Not service apparently - similar hotels usually maintain an employee per room ratio of about 0.5. In India it could be as high as 1.5 in most hotels.

The future certainly should hold a whole new India experience!

Google’s new travel policy puts no specific mandate and employees travel when and how they wish but there is a capped fare list for every destination. If travellers went over the list price, the overspend would come out of their next trip. If they went under it, they could use the surplus sum on any future trip.

Sounds too good to be true? Some procurement managers must be really rolling their eyes - but as far as empowering employees in terms of their travel but keeping control, it could be a happy medium.

According to Google Travel Management, 60% of the bookings still went through its agent Carlson Wagonlit Travel,  especiallyfor complex trips.  And they believe that the policy encouraged and rewarded smart buying behaviour and helped control spending.

Main Source: Business Travel Europe

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Salzburg’s hidden gem is not so hidden any more according to a good friend and local resident who took me there last week. Overlooking the river in central Salzburg, The Dachterrasse (Roof terrace) at the Hotel Stein has fabulous views in all directions and is absolutely not to be missed if you are in Salzburg.

And this recommendation comes from someone who actually spent 9 months in the city and never discovered it then….can’t believe that this fuzzy mobile phone picture is convincing, but here it is anyway

They aren’t hotels really - but following on from Yotel’s pod-like rooms which can booked by number of hours in busy transit areas like airports, Nemorelax pods can be reserved for as little as 30 minutes.

Each pod features a Stressless recliner chair from Norwegian furniture maker Ekornes encircled by a cocoon of sound-isolating materials. In addition to sleeping or making private phone calls, travellers can watch a movie on the pod’s touchscreen monitor, listen to music on the sound-on-demand system or get some work done on the fold-away work table.

Each Nemorelaxer offers free wifi connectivity, and loaner laptops are available at no extra charge. Nemorelaxers will be set up in suites of 6 or more in central airport locations with an on-site, staffed desk. Wake-up services will also be available.

Netherlands-based Nemorelax is currently talking with international airport and transit authorities, and its first Nemorelax Suite in Europe will open soon.

The question is, can things get any smaller or accomodation (of sorts) get any smaller? We’ll have to wait and see.

Source: www.nemorelax.com and www.springwise.com

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Travel Management reports on a study by PWC which shows that 38 new hotel brands have been introduced over the last three years - with most of them targeting younger travelers for whom technology is indispensable.

For the complete article which includes a list of the new brands click here.

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The Intercontinental Hotel Group is taking their corporate responsibility to a new level and using the power of Web 2.0 to design the most environmentally friendly hotel.

Visitors to the website can review a hotel design, check the new environmentally friendly features and contribute new ideas to improve them - the interactive site allows users to wander through the hotel reception, go to a meeting room or lets you into a bedroom and points out what is new. And this is where you get involved - one gets to rate on a scale of one to five as to how good an innovation it is and add further comments.

The key areas in focus are

• Energy conservation
• Recycling
• Water Conservation
• Destination conservation

Definitely worth a visit to check out a great collaborative approach as well as to get some very good ideas in the above areas.

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U kash offers a new solution to make cash less transactions over the internet - and judging by the level of interest at their booth at Internetworld ‘business for the digital age’ (Earls Court, London), they could be on to something here.

So how does this work? Customer takes cash to the nearest ‘charge outlet’ and gets a receipt for the cash amount they want to spend. In the UK, and in some other countries in central Europe, this is possible through newsagents and convenience stores just as one tops up a mobile. Once you have this receipt the consumers simply enter the Ukash value and unique 19 digit number at the payment page - just like entering a credit card number - which is then validated in real time. If change is required a new 19 digit number and value is issued online to the consumer.

So what arethe major advantages for consumers? - Anonymity and protection from identity fraud. The downside being the charging and keeping change issues, plus if you lose the receipt without writing the number down, it is the same as losing cash.

And the retailers? U kash quote some key ststistics in the UK market and this is the reason they beleve it will work.

• 16% of the adults in the UK do not own a payment card
• 2.8 m consumers in the UK are unbanked
• 1 in 5 consumers in the UK are refused credit
• 72% of the credit card holders do not use their cards to transact online

I can only think that these figures will only be higher in the emerging markets - and according to their Commerical Director Andrea McGeachin, they are intending to expand into Asia as well. There is of course the fundamental dependency on the number of outlets which exist in a country to buy Ukash before using it online. But this could be solved soon by their plans to join forces with Vodafone to allow customers to buy Ukash through their mobile.

Hotels which face resistance to online bookings with cards would do well to take note and give the consumer one more option to get that next booking….

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A tour around the Independence of the Seas, the largest cruise liner ever to sail from the UK. From the BBC