Putting the Internet Through Its Paces to Find Travel Opportunities

Ever since my wife and I were nearly bumped by a humpback while kayaking in Alaska, I’ve had a strange craving to paddle near whales again, preferably in water that wouldn’t lead to high-speed hypothermia if the boat ever capsized. It’s an urge my wife does not share, and one that most travel publications ignore – perhaps wisely so.

By BOB TEDESCHI NY Times

But the Internet ignores nothing. Thanks to the vast wealth of discussion boards and chat rooms online, one can plumb the depths of the world’s collective gray matter and find travel advice from nonprofessionals you might never find beneath the byline of a professional travel writer, provided you know where to look.

I recently toured a dozen or so Web sites – some having to do with travel, some not – sampling the discourse and the technology while on my quest for whale mavens who could steer me toward more close encounters of the cetaceous variety. I found that searching message boards, more than most other online activities, can erase hours from your life unless you have a high-speed Internet connection and a little direction.

Some Web sites are less active and user friendly than others, some have deeper archives, but none, alas, offers a much more intelligent level of dialog than any other. The watchword, then, is efficiency. On that score, there are a few strong contenders, including Frommers.com and Fodors.com, and two leaders: LonelyPlanet.com and Google Groups, on Google.com.

Most users associate Google with searching, but in 2001 the company acquired the archives of the Usenet discussion boards, which at that time held 500 million messages dating back to 1995. Founded in 1979, Usenet was a trove of discussions on subjects ranging from anarchy to Zen, and Google has sustained the service and put the past 20 years of messages into an archive.

For travelers disposed to siphon bits of knowledge from nonexperts, Google Groups offers a fairly vibrant discussion board. To get there, click on the Groups tab on Google’s home page, then type rec.travel into the search box. That search recently returned 52,600 discussions on 15 subtopics, including cruises, bed and breakfasts, and vacations in various global regions.

These discussion boards are not moderated, so tucked between discussions on, say, hotels in New York or British Columbia, are invective-laden postings on American politics, or suspicious-sounding pitches about cheap vacations. That’s why it is far better to use the Google Groups search box and refine the terms until you find something useful.

Google also highlights your search terms within the text of a given discussion thread – a feature I failed to appreciate until I was on another message board and found a thread with a dozen or so messages totaling 5,200 words.

Another Google benefit is that it lists the author’s e-mail address at the top of each message. I have often contacted letter writers to follow up on their postings, and they have almost invariably been quick to respond, with helpful advice.

One last point on Google Groups: if you don’t find what you’re looking for in the travel category, try searching through all the Google Groups. My query on kayaks and whales yielded little from the Travel section, but I found a useful fact archived in a different part of Groups – in a discussion about the "X-Files" TV series, no less. The note advised against paddling near walruses, because "walruses often mistake kayaks for whales and can easily wreck them with one pass." Marine specialists cast doubt on the walruses’ taste for whales, but their ability to lay waste to a kayak certainly got my attention.

Lonely Planet, the Australia-based series of budget travel guides, offers another lively and easy-to-use discussion board, called the Thorn Tree, which is accessible from a link on the home page. This board, which has operated since 1995, has 65,000 registered users who last year posted 2.5 million messages, while generating an average of 700 new topics each day. Again, your best bet is to use the search engine, which is tops among the discussion boards I encountered. You can search using a keyword or by author, and you can sort the search results by the date they were posted or by the latest reply.

The level of discourse is fairly high and on point, thanks to the presence of moderators, who, along with policing for offensive or inappropriate postings, will pass questions along to other registered users. According to Dave McClymont, the Thorn Tree global coordinator, that activity has picked up in recent years, and there is an ever expanding global community of Thorn Tree users who are in regular contact with each other.

Alas, the Thorn Tree was bare when it came to offering information for my whale quest. But the postings that came back when I searched for "whales and kayak” gave me the sense that I might have luck checking with tour companies on Vancouver Island, or near the San Juan Islands off Washington. I made a mental note of that.

My next stop was at various chat rooms, which some Internet users prefer to discussion boards because they offer immediate gratification. But they can also be lonely, misdirected affairs. One weekday after- noon last month I checked into a travel chat room on America Online, which is known for, among other things, its busy chat areas.

I wasn’t necessarily expecting the 35 million other AOL members to be logged on and ready to talk whales and kayaks, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to be alone. After being welcomed by the computerized moderator, I waited in solitude for a few minutes, then clicked away to some of AOL’s roughly 275 travel discussion boards, which were much more informative. Jeff DeKorte, AOL’s vice president for travel, said members post more than one million travel messages on those boards each month.

None of those postings advanced my virtual whale watch, which left me with one last option in the grass roots travel community: Web sites that offer services for people to create groups focused on a certain topic. Yahoo is the leader on this front, with more than 3,100 travel-related groups, exchanging news and information on countless subtopics.

Travel groups weren’t difficult to find. Clicking on Groups yields a directory of links, including the Recreation and Sports category, which included a Travel link just below. I paddled straight for the link for the 42 whale watching groups – some of them accessible only to group members.

There I used the search box to find mentions of the word "kayak," and saw postings about Sanjuansites.com, which is devoted to the San Juan islands. There on the top left-hand corner of the page was this link: Go Kayaking With the Whales. I was about to hit that site when another link caught my eye. It was a group devoted to a whale camp in Canada. Out of pure curiosity I clicked on it, and read about the camp, which is on Grand Manan Island, in New Brunswick.

Grand Manan is the biggest island in the Bay of Fundy – which, I learned, is a favorite summer gathering spot for many whales. Armed with that information, I found the site of a sea kayak outfitter named Kevin Sampson, and an e-mail address. He’ll be hearing from me shortly.