Skip to main content

Travel Plans

As vacation season approaches, our interest in traveling increases. I addition to my recent trip to India I have made some other trips on the job or on vacations and I collected some interesting websites that can assist in planning trips, cross-country meetings or even dealing with other cultures. Have a nice trip!

First of all, what time is it … there? To avoid calling someone in another country without noticing it is 4:00AM. I strongly suggest consulting TimeAndDate. In my personal page, I have two links to this site: one to the “Personal World Clock” and another to the “Meeting Planner”. It works great when my group is organizing concalls with people in India, in Europe, in Brazil (of course) and in California/USA.

Another preoccupation: how much is it? (or how much it was, when you’re creating your expense reports). I usually recommend oanda website converter. It allows you to convert between many currencies in specific dates and also allows you to print a convenient conversion table for your wallet. If you are traveling in vacations, probably it is a good idea searching on the Internet for the price of food (as well as taxis, museums, shows...). It is a good way to forecast expenses (emailing the hotel can work too) - I failed to do that in the past and it was, let say, an unpleasant surprise.

Of course you should access the weather forecast, for example for São Paulo.

When I was going to Bangalore, India I studied some cultural habits. The information I got on Executive Planet, on International SOS and on many other searches in Google was a lifesaver to me.

If your read until this point in such a long post, you deserve a premium: Yahoo! Trip Planner is a very nice trip planner that can be shared, printed, personalized... I strongly recommend. I used it in the past and will certainly plan my next trip on it - in fact, I already started!

See you there!

Comments

Stock Buster said…
Eduardo!

I like your site's recommendations!
I didn’t know oanda.com, very interesting.

Why you don't write with more frequently? Your are a really international travel man, and I believe that you have a lot o tip to put in your blog...

keeping in touch,
Carlos.
Wronowski said…
Thank you Carlos, I appreciate the feedback. I'll create a mailing list to alert for new messages - I liked the idea of you good blog: http://stock-buster.blogspot.com/

Popular posts from this blog

The Whiteboard Trick

Some time ago I read an interesting article from Scott Ambler where he suggests using whiteboards for initial modeling and later, photographing the whiteboard as documentation. I don’t think he created the technique but it was the first time I saw it and I like it very much. I have been recently working on Bangalore, India, assisting my client in negotiating a new plan for their project with the company we were visiting. My colleague used heavily this trick - people even mock at the “Picture! Picture!” motto. This simple technique was one of the key points in our work. It’s was an aid for everybody’s memory, it permitted a double check to our annotations and it was a proof of the decisions made. I’d like to point some tips: 1. a good digital camera is fantastic for this task but even your cell phone photos can sometimes do the job; 2. the flash of your camera can make some points of the whiteboard unreadable. Try with and without it. 3. you don’t necessarily have to improve your pictu...

An experience in customer care

After some months desiring a DVR (VCR-like equipment with a high capacity hard disk) I found a Sony HDD250 for 20% of the regular price in a prestigious US store. The price was due a small scratch and a missing manual. I bought it! Back to Brazil I downloaded the manual and installed the cables but…the remote control did not work - it was of another equipment. OK, I should have noticed that but… I was VERY frustrated. The wrong side of customer care: 1. I wrote BestBuy. In a canned answer they suggested me to phone the store attendant or returning the equipment. They neither tried to understand my problem. 2. I talked to Sony (I have two of their “universal” remote controllers). Answer: if the code was not in the manual I could not operate the DVR. They suggested me buying a replacement control from a company that …did not sell it. In another demonstration of “customer care”, their product forum has many complaints about not being possible to manually setting the clock - and no answer...