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A VIRTUAL CONCIERGE AT YOUR SERVICEStuck in a strange city? The Net can get you up to speed fastThis is one busy guy. J. Carter Brown is the director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He's also chairman of Ovation, a cable-TV channel devoted entirely to the arts. And then there are the 20-odd art-foundation, university, and prize boards that he sits on as a trustee or member. So Brown does tend to be on the move. During a typical week in October he zipped around the Northeast, going from Washington to New York to Pittsburgh and back to Washington. Thank heavens, then, for the World Wide Web. For busy executives such as Brown, the Internet offers valuable resources that can smooth the path. And they are always just a click away. When Brown is on the road to New York, for example, he uses local guide Web sites from The New York Times (NYT) and Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Sidewalk to look up restaurants and museum events. For a trip farther afield to Kansas City, Mo., he browsed the CultureFinder site to get the scoop on local shows. And he's tapping into Operabase.com for a trip at the end of November to Paris. Using the Web to keep up on the arts is all in a day's work for Brown. ''I use these sites all the time,'' he says. ''There's nothing static about the arts world.'' Brown's work may seem like play to some, but his words ring true for executives in just about any field: There's no standing still in the Internet Age. Last-minute flights, reservation changes, and keeping up with a deluge of E-mail, faxes, and voice mail are facts of life for the exec on the go. But a whole set of online services dedicated to easing travel is out there for those who know where to look. And these sites can quickly transform a Web browser into a digital concierge. Traveling typically starts with reservation services. Travel sites were one of the first to catch fire online, and a number of them cater specifically to frequent business travelers. Among the top are TheTrip.com Inc. and Biztravel.com Inc. Biztravel (www.biztravel.com) was rated the No. 1 travel service for business travelers out of 19 sites surveyed by researcher Gomez Advisors, while TheTrip.com, which also caters to consumers, was rated No. 2 for business users. What's compelling about Biztravel.com is how it comes up with its recommendations. Flight, hotel, and car-rental itineraries are created based on members' tastes, such as aisle vs. window seats, as well as membership in frequent-travel programs. Because it tracks more than 40 frequent-travel programs, Biztravel.com can pick out the best combination of car-rental, flight, and hotel arrangements to maximize the number of points for a trip. In TheTrip.com's favor is its ease of use and the tons of information, such as city maps and guides, that the site provides about each destination. LOOKING LIVELY. Guides are exactly the sort of thing someone unfamiliar with a city needs. The problem is finding one you can trust or a site with attitude. Since Microsoft recently revamped its Sidewalk service to concentrate more on electronic commerce than entertainment, CitySearch is left standing as one of the best bets for wide-ranging information on entertainment and restaurants in 15 metropolitan areas. And of course, general-interest portal sites such as Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) and Excite Inc. (XCIT) also serve up local listings such as movies and weather. The downside to these kinds of services is their plain-vanilla look and feel. But there are some lively alternatives, especially on the Web sites of local newspapers. This summer, The New York Times launched NewYorkToday, a stellar site that can be personalized and uses the paper's treasure trove of entertainment and restaurant reviews (www.newyorktoday.com). The Washington Post (WPO) has a nice layout under its Style section online that's full of reviews, addresses, and maps. There's a visitor's guide, too. Or try a quirky site such as CultureFinder, which offers the inside scoop on entertainment happenings. The service is a hub of listings from 1,500 arts organizations in more than 550 cities for a grand total of 180,000 performances, including jazz, opera, classical music, plays, and more. The site (www.culturefinder.com) also has reviews and news and is just the service for people who are landing in a city and looking for something to do at the last minute. KITSCH WATCH. Landing unprepared can happen more often than not. That's why it pays to bookmark a list of what may seem like kitschy sites that can prove more useful than you think. The Weather Channel's Weather.com site is just the thing for people who either don't have the cable channel in their hotel room or don't want to watch TV and wait through listings for Florida weather when all one cares about are the skies in Texas. Online maps can also be critical in strange cities. The best services, such as MapQuest at www.mapquest.com and MapBlast! at www.mapblast.com, are licensed to sites at different companies, such as CNN and Infoseek Corp. (SEEK), but it's just as easy to bookmark the map sites themselves. A really impressive map is Microsoft's Terraserver, which has the entire layout of the globe from satellite shots. Chip Austin, the CEO and president of Bertelsmann's BOL.com, says Terraserver is a favorite of his, since he likes to get aerial overviews of cities (www.terraserver.microsoft.com). Austin lives in New York, though he works there only two days a week while shuttling between Britain and Germany. International travelers such as Austin can find a bonanza on the Web. Many sites offer information in English. But there's also a bounty of international sites including portals, such as the French language Voila.fr from telecommunications giant France Telecom (FTE) or Germany's Fireball.de. Other easy-to-use services from Instant Passport and the U.S. State Dept. (travel.state.gov/passport_services.html) make getting the right travel documents much simpler and faster. Once on the ground in foreign cities, executives can turn to ATM locators on sites from Visa International and MasterCard International Inc. (www.mastercard.com/atm/ and www.visa.com/cgi-bin/vee/pd/atm/main.html) to avoid wandering around unfamiliar streets. Services such as Oanda, which offers data on 164 currencies and is published by market-forecast technology developer Olsen & Associates Co.'s Internet unit, makes gazing into bank windows to get exchange rates a thing of the past (oanda.com). But beyond travel and reservation planning, one of the most worrisome problems is keeping up with E-mail, appointments, and the right business documents while on the road. The solution most executives use is dialing into a corporate network from a laptop. But that can be complicated, and it doesn't necessarily give you access to all the information you need on your desktop back at the office. TIME-SAVERS? New services such as Visto Corp. are trying to do away with that bother by offering virtual Web address books. Launched 11 months ago, Visto (www.visto.com) lets you copy address and calendar information, E-mails, and other files from your PC to the Web. That keeps all the data together and lets users share calendars, files, or spreadsheets with friends or colleagues. Other handy services are available. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) recently bought a service similar to Visto called PlanetAll (www.planetall.com), and Yahoo! offers a simple Web-based calendar. Travelers also can use Atrieva Corp.'s backup service to place files onto the Web for later retrieval (www.atrieva.com). Of course, the upside to the Web is also its downside: It can keep travelers wired all the time. That could mean a little less time for aimless meandering through unknown cities. Then, again, it could make things run more smoothly, freeing up time for the harried traveler.
By Heather Green in New York RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Nov. 5, 1998 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1998, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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