Online travel booking is easier than ever. And for us lucky folk in Washington DC with three airports (Dulles, Reagan, and BWI) there are flights everywhere and lots of deals. Below are some useful travel sites.

Travel Reservations

Travelocity – early leader in online reservations with roots back to CompuServe and AOL. Now known for the gnome commercials.

Orbitz – developed by airlines in response to Expedia and Travelocity.

ITA – uses the search system that powers Orbitz, but allows far more complex trips. You have to know how to customize and phrase your searches.

Priceline – offers standard purchases or allows you to name your own price for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Pitchman is now William Shatner.

Expedia – started by Microsoft, bought by Ticketmaster, now independent.

Hotwire – owned by Expedia. Unique in that you purchase hotels based on location and star rating. You only find out the name of your hotel after the purchase.

Kayak – travel search aggregator. Kayak does not directly sell tickets, but links to all the sites that do and makes a small amount of money on click throughs.

Bing Travel- recently renamed from Forecast.com, now owned by Microsoft. This site has flight price trends and predictions to help you decide if you should buy or wait for a better fare. It’s not perfect has helped me on a couple of occasions with suggestions to wait for a better price.

Special Airlines

JetBlue and Southwest airlines are not part of the above travel reservation sites. You can only book with them directly.

Other Resources

The Savvy Traveler Blog – deals and news by Rudy Maxa who often discusses travel on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show on NPR in DC.

Flyertalk – forum for frequent flyers to discuss deals and reward programs. This is where serious deal seekers go to discuss optimizing their points and airline status.

Liftopia – discount ski lift tickets and ski hotel deals.

Have other travel resource recommendations? Email me to let me know.

Blurb from Microsoft:

Early tests show MSE to be very effective at catching threats. It updates itself automatically and without hassle.

It takes over all antivirus functions and is recommended to be run as the ONLY antivirus software on a computer. You should not run it alongside other popular software such as Norton Antivirus, McAfee, or AVG. Presumably this would cause the antivirus software to fight it out on your computer, hurting system resources and confusing one antivirus program, for example, when it finds a virus in the other antivirus’ quarantined vault.

I recommend this for all Windows computers: Windows XP, Vista, and 7.  The only exceptions are pirated versions of Windows since MSE requires Windows Genuine Advantage to run and make sure that your copy of Windows is legit.

MSE has a small footprint with low minimum requirements:

• For Windows XP, a PC with a CPU clock speed of at least 500MHz and at least 1GB of RAM
• For Windows Vista and Windows 7, a PC with a CPU with clock speed of at least 1.0GHz and at least 1GB of RAM
• VGA (display): 800×600 or higher
• Storage: 140MB of available hard-disk space
• An Internet connection is required for installation and to download the latest virus and spyware definitions