Traveler 2.0

Online travel booking tips from today's Wall Street Journal

The Thursday edition of the Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal section had several good tips for frequent travelers. Here are a few: 

* If you fly coach and prefer the aisle seat, you might want to either pay for early boarding or pay to check your bag. Airlines are fine-tuning the boarding process. Several, such as United and Delta, are now boarding passengers by window first, followed by middle and then aisle seats. So if you're an aisle seat ticket holder, you'll probably find less room available in the overhead bins.

* American Airlines passengers should preprint boarding passes or download them to a smartphone. American is using a new randomized boarding process, and checking in online may give you a better chance of being assigned to an earlier boarding group at the airport vs. those who check in at the airport.

* Mobile apps for travelers can help you snag a great last-minute hotel or rental car deal. For example, the Journal's Timothy W. Martin writes that "Some hotel chains, eager to fill empty beds, offer special discounts to travelers who book while in town," which a GPS-enabled smartphone or tablet enables you to do.  

Google Docs Go Offline

Just received a MacBook Air loaner today from Apple. I wasted no time charging the battery and taking this slender, silvery piece of computing heaven to a local Internet cafe to work.

I'll write more about the MacBook Air later, as I'm planning to travel with it from San Francisco to the East Coast in May. My goal: To see what kind of cross-country traveling companion the MacBook Air is.

Instead, this post is about Google Docs.

A cool new feature is the ability to work on your Google documents offline as well as online, which I did on the MacBook Air. This is particularly beneficial for a Google Doc user traveling by plane without Internet access. Now, you can work on your Google docs in flight. Changes made to the documents are stored on your local hard drive and are automatically uploaded when you make your next Internet connection.

Google Docs is still a long way off from besting Microsoft Word or other Office applications in terms of features. But for relatively basic--and free--office productivity tools, Google Docs is now a viable alternative for frequent flyers.