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05 May 2007
INTERNET INSPIRED TRAVEL
In the last ten or fifteen years the advance of the internet has enabled most extraordinary changes in the way we travel. We can book our own hotels in foreign places without having to speak the language, we can plan routes, research destinations, and see what our accommodation will look like before we ever get there, and we can share our experiences and benefit from others’ thoughts without even having to meet them.
The internet has not only benefited the traveller directly but it has enabled travel companies to slash their operating costs and undercut their rivals, gains that have been passed on to tourists, nowhere more so than the airline industry. Budget airlines’ practices have spread to the rest of the travel industry and costs are now lower for trains, ferries, car hire...
John McCarthy talks to Samantha David who uses her computer, to travel and meet people, in four areas of her life: work, family, friendship and romance; Writer and Broadcaster Judi Herman has been using the internet to rent apartments, private and commercial, all over the world for her holidays; and Travel Writer Tom Chesshyre, who has just spent the last two years flying to little known towns favoured by the internet driven budget airlines, talks about the impact it has had on the areas and the people who live there.
Presented by John McCarthy
Photo: Tallinn airport in Estonia
This week's guests:
Samantha David is a journalist and novelist who moved to the Cevennes in France in the early nineties around the time that the internet travel revolution was just starting. Since then she has used her mouse to click her way to a variety of relationships and rather than leaving it as a meeting in cyberspace has packed her bags and travelled to make it face to face. Her novel Imarried a Pirate is a fictionalisation of a real journey to meet someone she’d first contacted on the web.
I married a Pirate
Publisher: Myrmidon Books
ISBN-10: 1905802080
ISBN-13: 978-1905802081
The Complete Guide to Living in France
Publisher: Archant Life
(details on Samantha David’s web site)
Tom Chesshyre is Travel News Editor of the Times and became interested in budget airline destinations: those places which many holiday makers from Britain will only pass through, without much thought, on their way to somewhere else. He has written up his experiences in those airport towns in a book called How low can you go?
How low can you go? Round Europe for 1p Each Way (plus Tax)
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN-10: 0340937858
ISBN-13: 978-0340937853
Judi Herman is a writer and broadcaster. Judi broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio Four, the World Service of the BBC and various local stations including BBC Three Counties Radio.
Volunteer cathedral guide: ARC - Acceuil, Rencontre, Communauté
Homelidays
Holiday Houses (New Zealand or Australia)
Owner Direct
BritishExpats
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the content of external sites | | | | | | PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES | | | | |
 John McCarthy is a widely travelled journalist and presenter with a particular interest in the Middle East. | |
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