At first, they look like rooms in a palace. However, they are simply stations of the subway network in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Moscow’s metro system is the second busiest in the world (the first being Tokyo), so for a lot of people that means that a part of their daily lives is spent on luxury spaces, underground.
Because it’s vacation time for so many people, because I talked about Zicasso travel planning service yesterday and just because there’s a lot of folks out there that like to do things on their own, here’s a service that will definitely help you with some of the extenuous planning tasks that lie ahead: PlanetEye.
Featuring a powerful and easy-to-use planning tool; compelling, geotagged photography; leading edge mapping technology and extensive travel content from a team of in-house writers and a growing number of professional sources, PlanetEye is designed for travelers who want a new and exciting way to explore where to go and what to do.
Here comes the best part:
At the core of PlanetEye’s travel planning service is the Travel Pack that lets travelers “clip” the interesting photographs, attractions, hotels and restaurants discovered on PlanetEye when they are planning a trip or simply putting together travel ideas.
Wow, you gotta give this a look… I really like this website! Definitely one of my new travel planning secret weapons! It’s a shame I have no trip to plan right now…
Have you ever planned a two-week vacation trip spreading across several countries with multiple airport stops, a lot of hotels to sleep in, car rental and great places to visit. If you have, you probably know how difficult it can get, because there are just so many variables involved. The planning can consume days and it always seems there’s something missing. Of course, you learn a lot about the country and travel logistics along the way, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s the major reason behind pre-planned trips success. This way you can rest assured everything will work the way it’s planned (at least it’s supposed to) by the travel agency.
However, sometimes you really want to plan every detail for the trip and you can’t find any agency doing it. You want the trip of your dreams, which includes seeing the midnight sun on Finnish Lapland, taking a ride across Paris on the Bateau Mouche, visiting the Pope on Vatican, watch the Olympics at Beijing and taking a picture with a koala in Sydney. All of this and a lot more that you’ll remember if you’re really planning a dream travel package for just 2 weeks! Now, that’s a lot of work…
Zicasso aims at solving this kind of puzzle for you. I’ve never really used them, I just found them by chance and immediately loved the concept, as it directly solves a problem lots of people have. And not just with dream trips, as even a casual vacation trip around 2 or 3 countries in Europe can take a lot of your time. Zicasso’s premise lies in sending you up to 3 customized trip plans that can be further refined by an expert. And this is the best part: there’s a real person dealing with your request and that has to be better than those crappy automatic planners some online travel agencies provide (you’ll love them until you find you can do much better on your own). This is the subtle most important detail for me: the real person on the other side. My major questions are: How well does the service scale when they have a lot of customer requests? Do they keep the same level of attention to detail? To me this is the real challenge behind not only Zicasso but other companies using the same approach.
Well, I’ll definitely try them because you don’t necessarily need to buy one of their customized plans if you change your mind for any reason, and I’m really curious to see how well they fare against me + Google + all my other secret weapons of travel planning!
