Huffington Post launches travel site

Influential online blog The Huffington Post launched a new travel section July 21, promising to "cover all aspects of travel, from the glorious to the maddening.” The site's founder, Arianna Huffington, announced the new venture on July 20, saying that some of her happiest, most enriching, and enlightening moments have come through travel.

Some of the benefits the site offers are travel news, tips and advice, reviews of hotels, cruises, spas, airlines, photographs, and blog post about traveling. The visitors of the site have the ability to post reviews and send in their own photographs and tips

Using Flickr photos as a travel guide

Researchers at Yahoo!, which owns Flickr, has developed a way to gather photos and construct travel itineraries, based on the location of the photos and the time between each picture, in five cities — Barcelona, London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco.

Yahoo! figured out which photos were from tourists based on the amount of time the users stayed in a city, and then they mapped out “timed paths” based on the pictures. Some of the photos on Flickr include people in them, but the tool itself is designed to provide itineraries, not those photos, even though they are public.

The tool was presented by researchers at a recent technology conference to demonstrate the possibilities of harnessing Flickr’s technology and valuable user-generated content for new applications. Though not available to the public, researcher Munmun De Choudhury said, “that it’s something that could be constructed by a software developer using Flickr’s free interface.” And the next step, she said, “would be refining the algorithms or gathering more data so that users get recommendations based on their preferences — like a love of art museums — or get itineraries for places farther off the beaten path”.

Being a paying guest of the king

Tourists who want to travel like kings can now do so, thanks to a unique new hotel commissioned by Mohammed VI, King of Morocco, called the Royal Mansour. Sparing no expense, the palace-style hotel will use word-of-mouth to advertise to potential guests.

The prices run from $1,928 a night for a one-bedroom riad (a traditional, three-story, Moroccan-style house), to $5,397 for a two-bedroom, or $38,552 for the almost 20,000-square-foot Riad d'Honneur. The experience begins on the tarmac at the Marrakech airport when an arriving guest is whisked out of the line of weary travelers, led to a quiet room and offered sustenance while passports and baggage tags are collected.

Within minutes one is escorted out of the airport into a discreet shiny black Mercedes. Well, fairly discreet. The bags are in the trunk and passports are returned inside the car. All this is done in reverse upon departure, bringing home the notion of what it really means to be staying, as it were, with a king.

The accommodations of the hotel include; lounges, bars, library, restaurants, spas, and 500 hotel employees. The employees arrive, unseen, from beneath. The hotel has a parallel underground city where the staff drive golf carts and can enter each riad through hidden elevators.

O Canada! Tastes from the land of maple leaf are hitting the US food scene

What do ice hockey, cheap prescription drugs and Michael Cera have in common? If you said "O Canada!," you're correct!

You can't talk about Canadian food without talking poutine. And while fries with cheese curds and gravy might sound more like the ultimate 2:00 AM drunk-and-starving dish, the quintessentially Québécois junk food is getting the royal treatment by the two guys most heralded for their non-vegetarian fare.

With a moniker that pays tribute to the source of many of its dishes, it's no surprise that Animal's Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook are putting their stamp on the carnivore's delight. Braised, coddled and loved for hours until it falls off the bone, an oxtail appears amid a thick, intensely rich gravy and melted white cheddar cheese in the restaurant's gourmet interpretation of the dish.

We're pretty sure even Canadians will approve of this upscale version. If you're not lucky enough to be in the City of Angels while craving poutine, a number of cities across the US, including Chicago, Seattle and New York, are also dishing it up these days.

A collaborative sound map of New Orleans

Open Sound New Orleans is a community media project that invites and enables New Orleanians to document their lives in sound. Their intent is to make more accessible the authentic, unedited sounds and voices of New Orleans.

Sharing the sounds of the city helps celebrate and promote the city’s unique culture. But it also serves each contributor – open to everyone – as a simple way to extend their own experience to others and participate in New Orleans' public culture.

The site also hosts a Facebook page as an additional opportunity for locals to connect. More than a way for residents to celebrate their home, the site gives potential visitors a deeper understanding of the town’s rich music history and a unique way to experience a piece of New Orleans.

American Airlines debuts an iPhone app to provide travel info to customers

American Airlines’ new iPhone application’s intelligent data display provides the most relevant day-of-travel information which implies that the application knows who the customer is and where they are going.

In addition to allowing users to access key booking information, the app will push upcoming flight details to the home screen automatically. The settings include a parking reminder, monitoring the standby list, tracking elite status progress, and viewing of personal flight details. There are also direct and easy accesses to several other tools that help customers manage plans and enjoy each trip on American Airlines.

The new iPhone application will be introduced in phases as the airline continues to develop the capabilities of the tool. It is also planning an iPad-specific version in the coming weeks.

Austin City Limits

Austin City Limits displays a great example of how easy and sharable trip planning can be. The website is designed as a calendar for the visitors to easily interact with. They have the ability to choose the day, time, and concert of their desire.

In addition to that they can share it within popular social media websites including Facebook and Twitter. ACL may not be the first multi-day festival to offer concert-goers the chance to customize their music itinerary online beforehand but their version is simple and enjoyable to use.