High Tech Surfing for Travel

The days of difficult travel arrangements to the South Pacific, leaving many potential visitors to sink into armchair tourism, are nearly at an end. Now it's time to replace that armchair with the consumer's latest allies in the travel challenge: the computer and the Internet.

Here you will find reviewed some of the major sites which are positioning themselves as travel advisors specifically for visitors to the Pacific region. From governmental visitor bureaus to commercial gateways we look at the most popular, and some not-so-popular, sites to see who's ahead in the Internet travel marketing game.

Travel Agents

The high level of service normally expected of travel agents specializing in the Pacific Rim is, unfortunately, not equaled by their Web sites. No service we reviewed provided full online booking abilities for flights, car rental and accommodations. Most of the sites, such as Islands in the Sun (www.islandsinthesun.com), McCoy Travel (www.mccoytravel.com), Pacific for Less (www.pacific-for-less.com) and The Pacific Navigator (www.pacificnavigator.com) continue to provide the colorful brochure-style sites without adding very much else. There is no easy opportunity to call or email them from Web page forms to begin a more personal approach to travel planning. One of the better sites in this category is PacificTravelGuide.com (www.pacific-travel-guides.com) which still takes the brochure approach while adding some interesting offerings on alternative accommodations.

Some brochure oriented sites focus on particular tour packages, such as Destination World (www.destinationworld.com/fiji) offering only a taste of various tour oriented package deals like the Fiji Hidden Heritage Tour. GINZ (www.ginz.com) offers more standard packages such as a Club Med Bora Bora package. South Pacific Island Travel (www.spislandtravel.com) offers diving vacations providing information on wrecks that can be explored and 30 different "live-aboard" packages on some unusual and magnificent vessels in a variety of locations around the region.

A bit more advanced than some of the brochure sites are a couple of notable travel agents. Both Tipani Tours (www.tipanitours.com) and Island Hopper Vacations (www.islandhoppervacations.com) offer a very nice interface for booking your accommodations in the Pacific. This interface, created by a third party travel Web site developer Tour Evolution (www.tourevolution.net) gives up-to-date information on room prices and availability and a slew of detail from quickly-recognized icons about rooms to 360º video tours of accommodations.

Travel Industry Organizations

Travel Industry Organizations such as the Pacific Asia Travel Association (www.pata.org) and the South Pacific Tourism Organization (www.spto.org) provide such services as business information for tracking tourism trends, conferences for travel professionals for education, networking and cross marketing opportunities. One of these opportunities is a Web site. Currently none of these sites is very useful to travelers. For example, under accommodations for Cook Islands, a travel agent site might typically list 20-30 possibilities, but the SPTO site only gives five choices and the PATA site, only one. At this time these sites are still too new to be of much help to travelers.

Travel Guide Web Sites

Travel guides have been a staple resource for travelers, both the armchair variety and the actual variety, for at least a century. However, it is important for the producers of these guides to limit information on their websites so that they can continue in their primary profession: selling hard-copy guide books.

Chief in this category is a site from David Stanley, writer of the Moon Guides to the South Pacific. His South Pacific Organizer (www.southpacific.org) is a wonderful Internet gateway to the South Pacific, offering quick overviews of important travel information for destinations on central topics like weather and "getting around." He also offers well organized sets of links to airlines and much less common information like traveler's tales sites and local radio sites. This is the most extensive list of Web links related to travel in the South Pacific and is a must peruse for anyone considering a Pacific journey.

Jasons Travel Guides (www.pi-travel.co.nz) has a site that is focused on the use of a search engine to access a database of information. Focusing on commercial interests, it offers over a thousand choices of businesses offering places to stay, ways to travel and things to do in the South Pacific, without the ability to directly book with these companies.

Rounding out this category, Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/loc-aus.htm) offers a site with only concise general information on destinations, whereas Rough Guides (travel.roughguides.com/australasia.html) has a site with basically travelogue entries and little else.

Airlines

The ability of airline Web sites to deliver functionality is no longer directly proportional to their bottom line. The most functional sites are Hawaiian Air (www.hawaiianair.com), Aloha Airlines (www.alohaairlines.com) and some surprising sites from Air New Zealand (www.airnewzealand.com/gateway.jsp), Air Pacific (www.airpacific.com) and Air Tahiti Nui (www.airtahitinui-usa.com). All of these sites not only have online up-to-date information, but do-it-yourself flight booking as well as rental car, hotel and package vacation bookings where available. It is integration of function of this sort that are the future of travel in the Pacific.

Online booking for flights alone is available with Air France (www.airfrance.com/us) and Qantas (www.qantas.com.au). At this time, only email or phone contact is available for bookings with Solomon Airlines (www.solomonairlines.com.au), Air Calin (www.aircalin.nc/index_en.htm), Air Fiji (www.airfiji.net), Air Vanuatu (www.airvanuatu.com) and Royal Tongan Airlines (www.royaltonganairlines.com).

Tourism Bureaus

This mixed lot of Websites reflects the infancy of Internet presence for governmental tourist bureaus. Most of these sites seek to give cultural and historical information on their respective homelands mixed with some opportunities for local businesses to generate tourism income.

The New Caledonia Tourism site (www.newcaledoniatourism-south.com/) is not only the best designed site of the lot, it is probably one of the better designed Internet sites of any kind. Available in English, Japanese and French, this site uses advanced layouts and high gloss professional photography to rival any Las Vegas resort Web site. Each accommodation has pictures, maps, links and about 300 words of detailed description. It is packed with links to its local businesses, resorts, conference centers, cruises and you name it. What it lacks is the ability to book any of these facilities online.

The Cook Islands Tourist Corporation (www.cook-islands.com/) took a completely different approach. As you begin to look into the unassuming accommodations section, you notice that there are highly detailed, well-planned sections for each accommodation, some offering video tours and a kind of online booking. Titled "Look Before You Book," this system is a travel planner which collects your travel itinerary and accommodations choices and organizes them for use with a travel agent.

Some of the better travel bureau sites include the not-to-be-missed, Flash powered, well designed sites from the Marshall Islands Visitors Authority (www.visitmarshallislands.com/

main.htm), the Mariana Visitor Authority's site (www.mymarianas.com), with nice design and an accommodation search engine, the Fiji Visitors Bureau (www.bulafiji.com), which offers an easy-to-use interface with very organized groupings of information, the Samoan Tourism Authority (www.visitsamoa.us/

home.cfm) offering lots of governmental information and well designed drop-down menus. The Guam Visitors Bureau Site (www.guamusatour.com) is straight-forward and clean with a wealth of Web links to accommodations, shopping, and dining. Even tiny Niue, through its Niue Tourism Offices site (www.niueisland.com/newpage7.htm) has an old-school, but easy-to-use design leading to encyclopedic information on the island and it's people. Honorable mention goes to some fairly good, simple sites with accommodation info put together by Air Kiribati (www.kiritours.com), Papua New Guinea (www.pngtourism.org.pg) and Palau (www.visit-palau.com).

Many of the other sites are still in need of some revision. The Federated States of Micronesia (www.visit-fsm.org) is nicely designed, but has only little in the way of information (accommadations listings normally only include the address and phone) and no interaction. The American Samoa Office of Tourism site (www.amerikasamoa.info) has a nice Flash introduction, but its design, two four-inch columns, makes most of the information run off the right side of the screen. It includes listings for lodging, shopping, dining and other information, but these occur as little more than brief lists at this point. The Tahiti Tourisme site (www.tahiti-tourisme.com) is surprisingly poorly designed and difficult to read, with only a tiny window between the top and bottom. The Solomons (www.solomons.com/ttourism.htm) and Tonga (www.vacations.tvb.gov.to) both have minimal web presences with only the most basic information. Sites for Nauru and Tokelau were either absent or non-operational at the time of this writing.

Although the travel agents, airlines and tourist bureaus of the Pacific Islands are beginning to take advantage of the latest technological advances in Internet travel, there is still a long way to go before you can comfortably sit back, bask in the tanning rays of your computer's monitor and engage in a thorough do-it-yourself travel plan. For now, it seems, you can get your information from the Internet, but you may still need to get your bookings by phone or from your friendly local travel agent.

Michael Mercede is the former President of Tahlequah Telecommunications. He is now a consultant living in Honolulu.