Website Of The Week – Condé Nast Traveller

http://www.cntraveller.co.uk/

As with its printed counterpart, the quality of Condé Nast’s Traveller Online cannot be faulted. There is a wealth of information to be found within Traveller Online and the site is unusually easy to navigate. There is a refreshing minimalism in the site’s design which allows each section to be clear and still visually effective.

Traveller Online has six basic sections, which are accessed from the homepage. The City Guide is updated monthly and offers a comprehensive guide to “some of the world’s finest cities”, allowing the user to view a scene in the city in full 360° panoramic splendour (this requires the right PlugIn which can be downloaded from the site). The city’s history, sights, restaurants, recommended hotels and events calendar are all included. An interview with someone for whom the city holds significance enriches the section further.

The Traveller Daily section offers seemingly unconnected (but nevertheless interesting) stories from around the world: not quite international news, more general interest. Departures gives one person’s opinion on a area of the world, offering cost and location ‘inside knowledge’. The website is further backed up by a Traveller bookstore from which book searches, synopses and online purchases can be obtained.

In fact the only real criticism of Traveller Online, as with the printed title, is that it aims way above the travelling opportunities of most of the population. The online version fares better in this respect as it is not surrounded on all sides by glossy adverts for over-priced airlines, hotels and cruise operators: it feels more like a travel encylopaedia than an up-market magazine. For anyone planning a trip further afield than Cleethorpes or Skegness then, Traveller Online is certainly worth a browse.