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My Kid, the Travel Agent
Access Magazine · May 28, 2000

Still don't know what to do this summer?

High school freshman Mark Huelsman understands. The 15-year-old from Cincinnati wanted to vacation where he could practice his Spanish. His mother, Kathy Huelsman, was looking for a getaway where she wouldn't have to spend too much on extras like transportation and hotel surcharges. She visited a travel agent. Unfortunately, she didn't get a good one. "The agent just gave me a brochure but didn't seem very interested in helping me," she says.

"I went home really disappointed." That's when Mark logged on to the Internet. Hoping to find cheap fares, he checked out Delta Air Lines and other airline sites, then tried online agents such as Travelocity.com. But the available itineraries were too expensive or inconvenient.

Then he found a Web site called Respond.com where visitors can electronically send queries to travel consultants without obligation to buy.

Within a few hours, Mark and his mother had found the perfect trip: a five-day Commodore cruise from New Orleans to Mexico. "I couldn't believe how easy it was," Mark says. "It was much more convenient than visiting a travel agent."

Adds his mother: "I couldn't have done it without my son's help."

Thanks to the Internet, kids are now able to help plan family vacations more than ever. Savvy young Web users can do the research that's necessary to find new destinations and activities the whole family will like. Using search engines and travel sites is one of the best ways to find that dream vacation.

Though kids are less likely to have a say about the timing of their trip or where they stay, nearly two-thirds of parents check with their offspring before selecting a destination, according to travel consultants Yesawich, Pepperdine & Brown.

"Where to go on vacation used to be a decision a parent made in consultation with a travel agent," says Krista Pappas, director of travel at Gomez Advisors, a company that rates e-commerce sites. "But today children have access to an incredible amount of destination-rich information, and that's good. If kids are instrumental in the decision-making process, vacations will be more fun."

Pappas ought to know. Her children - Lia, 13, and Dimitri, 8 -both have used the Internet to plan travel. They have selected a summer camp online and planned itineraries to visit their family in Greece. One of her daughter's favorite sites is Preview Travel. If you use the "Where do you want to go?" search engine, the site yields "a lot of valuable information" about a place, Lia says.

Lia used Preview Travel, a site that caters to grown-ups. Other young people are doing the same thing: surfing to sites used primarily by older folks. Many travel-related sites are kid-friendly. The graphics are colorful and fun, the design is uncluttered and intuitive, and the content is easy to understand.

The big kidcentric sites such as Yahooligans! are not providing much in the way of kid-friendly travel resources. Yahooligans! users can search for travel links, but the site does not have special sections for young people interested in travel.

Eleven-year-old Kyle Stroman of Indianapolis, for instance, turned to adventure travel site GORP.com - that's shorthand for Great Outdoor Recreation Pages - and helped put together an itinerary for his family's summer vacation in Colorado Springs, Colo. The trip features horseback riding, mountain biking, hiking, rock climbing and rafting. Kyle says he liked GORP.com because it wasn't hard to find what he needed, "and it had so many pictures." His parents liked it because each online vacation package offered more detail - including an exhaustive itinerary, information about climate and travel suggestions - than the catalogs that they're used to getting from tour operators. His mother, Terry Stroman, says she's not very Internet literate and is grateful for Kyle's input.

Not everyone finds a travel deal online. Jessica Sevy, 13, of Lehi, Utah, wasn't happy with the results of her search for a reasonably priced hotel near the beach on Florida's east coast. She clicked on MapQuest.com and Yahoo! Travel to see what she could find. But there wasn't anything that matched what she was looking for, the teen says. "I'm still working on it." Among her challenges: finding a hotel with available rooms that fits the family budget.

The online travel business appears unsure how to deal with young users. Kids represent a considerable amount of buying power -around $140 billion, according to Census Bureau figures - but most travel Web sites are skittish about gearing material toward children for fear that they'll upset some parents.

The feds are watching. The Federal Trade Commission last year released a set of rules in conjunction with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which went into effect last month. (See www.ftc.gov/kidzprivacy for more information on the FTC's privacy protection program.) Under the COPPA regulations, companies that collect information on their Web sites from children under 13 must obtain parental consent before collecting a child's personal information and additional permission before disclosing that information to other parties.

To alleviate privacy concerns, the best arrangement is for parents to visit travel sites first. If a site looks useful, set up an account, then give the kids access to the login information. Many sites ask just for a name and e-mail address.

Wired youngsters are developing decidedly grown-up tastes when it comes to travel sites. Lauren Meriano, 13, from Wilmington, Del., is partial to Expedia, a site she used to plan a trip to visit her sister in Waterbury, Conn., this summer. "We didn't have a plan before we started," remembers the eighth-grader. "Expedia was easy to use, and it gave us a lot of very detailed information."

Her father, Arthur Meriano, was thrilled that she could coordinate the journey from the computer. "The input that children have now, based on real information they can get on the Internet, is a contributing factor in making a vacation successful," he says.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. Inside Interactive Travel appears biweekly on this site and on Gomez Advisors' GomezPro site.