A Guide to Mapless Travel

When I was a kid, the ritual of planning a car trip began with a visit to the local AAA office for maps, routes, and guidebooks. Today, you need go no farther than your PC.

Today's trip-planning software for Windows is excellent--easy to use and packed with information about routes and attractions and accommodations along the way. I checked out four programs, all CD-ROM based and updateable from the Internet. All are worthy contenders, but Microsoft's Expedia Streets & Trips 2000 emerged as the clear winner in nearly every category. (For European drivers, Microsoft offers AutoRoute Europe and AutoRoute Great Britain, which I did not test.)

READABLE. My main point of comparison was to plan visits from my home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. to my two sons in Cambridge, Mass., and Austin, Tex. All four products came up with reasonable routes and at least adequate driving instructions. If you have a portable global positioning system (GPS) receiver and a laptop, all will use GPS data to plot your position as you drive. All except TravRoute's RoadTrips Door-to-Door can connect to the Internet for up-to-date information on roadwork and other potential delays. The programs differ in ease of use, quality of maps, and listings of hotels, restaurants, and attractions.

Streets & Trips is simple to use, allowing easy door-to-door routing. Its maps, both on-screen and printed, are detailed and highly readable--no small trick. It is the only one of these products to integrate detailed street maps into a trip-planning program, and its turn-by-turn detail maps are excellent. (DeLorme and Rand McNally offer separate street atlas software.) Like all the programs, its listing of hotels, especially in big cities, is incomplete. But it does better on restaurants, seemingly knowing about every greasy spoon in Cambridge's Central Square.

The program is not perfect. Its database contains minor errors, such as misidentifying Interstate 99 in Pennsylvania as I-94. Two other flaws are more serious. While the other programs all download driving directions to either 3Com Palm or Windows CE handhelds, Streets & Trips can send directions and maps only to handhelds based on CE. In typically Microsoft-centric fashion, it leaves Palms in the cold.

If you're a fan of Rand McNally's venerable Road Atlas, you'll probably like TripMaker because each driving instruction is keyed to a printed map by page and coordinates. Unfortunately--perhaps because Rand McNally assumes that everyone will have a copy of the book in the car--its driving instructions are by far the weakest of the four. It fails to give exit numbers for freeways and unhelpfully describes turns by compass direction rather than left or right. It also only provides city-to-city, rather than address-to-address, routing. TripMaker has decent lodging information drawn from the Mobil Travel Guides, but restaurants are much weaker, with few locations of national chain outlets shown.

CLUNKY DESIGN. DeLorme's AAA Map 'n' Go is a similar product in most ways. It, too, offers minimalist driving instructions, though at least it supplies exit numbers. Its accommodations information comes from the AAA tour books, which, like the Mobil guides, are much stronger on lodgings than eateries. Curiously, while both Map 'n' Go and TripMaker use Internet construction data in planning routes and show potential trouble spots on the screen, neither lists this info with the directions. Unless you have a laptop in the car, you'll be left wondering just how long you might be creeping along.

RoadTrips Door-to-Door is the only product with driving directions to rival Microsoft's. They are clear and detailed. The printed version highlights potential points of confusion by using italics. And, as its name implies, it offers door-to-door routing. Unfortunately, it lags well behind Street & Trips in ease of use, amenities, and map quality. Its general design is a bit clunky. Hotel and restaurant listings must be downloaded from TravRoute's Web site and are far inferior to the other programs'. Its detailed maps often suffer from overlapping labels.

Any of these products can help you plan a summer vacation or a business trip. But Expedia Streets & Trips stands well above the crowd. The only real improvement needed is for Microsoft to shed its tunnel vision and add support for Palms.

BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM

TABLE: Four Routes to Trip Planning

AAA MAP 'N' GO 5.0
DeLorme/$30
www.delorme.com

EXPEDIA STREETS & TRIPS 2000
Microsoft/$40
www.microsoft.com/expedia

TRIPMAKER DELUXE 1999
Rand McNally/$45
www.randmcnally.com

ROADTRIPS DOOR-TO-DOOR 1999
TravRoute/$40
www.travroute.com

DATA: PUBLISHERS