Check out these new e-books from our friends at Rough Guides: Rough Guides Snapshots, a unique way to access local and reliable guidebook content for specific areas of the world. These standalone regional guides feature places like The Northern Territory (Australia), Dubrovnik (Croatia), Fes and the Middle Atlas (Morocco), among many others.

Each Snapshot contains all the travel tips, expert background, trustworthy reviews, practical information and detailed maps that you’d expect from Rough Guides.

Rough Guides E-Books

The travel research and planning site Uptake.com has launched a new Travel Q&A feature, allowing users to login via Facebook and get recommendations, photos and other input from friends on potential travel destinations.

Uptake's New Travel Q&A Feature

What makes Uptake’s approach different, and maybe even better, than other social travel sites such as Gogobot.com is that Uptake accesses all your friends’ information about a particular destination, not just check-ins and places people have lived. You’ll get access to friends’ photos, comments and status updates about your destinations of interest, which results in much more information being shared. And as we all know, the more information the better when trying to plan a trip.

To try Uptake’s new Travel Q&A feature for yourself, visit Uptake.com, log in, and let the sharing begin!

We wanted to say thanks to MakeUseOf.com, for featuring TravelMuse today as one of their site picks.

According to them, “TravelMuse makes it easy to plan your next trip by helping you save information from any Web site offering relevant travel recommendations and also giving you the tools to organize all your research in one place.”

Read all about how to create a comprehensive trip by clipping points of interest to your trip, scheduling them into an itinerary, and saving your trip to review later or share with others.

And of course they loved our handy custom printable PDF guides for any trip you create – how could they not?

Thanks, MakeUseOf.com, for featuring us!

Boeing’s newest and highly-anticipated aircraft, the 787 “Dreamliner” finally took off for Tokyo last week. It is scheduled to make its first commercial flight on October 26, with Japan’s All Nippon Airways (ANA).

The Dreamliner provides unprecedented fuel efficiency and travel comforts, and many industry experts expect the aircraft to revolutionize commercial flight.

Photo credit: Boeing

The Dreamliner is faster, lighter and more eco-friendly, thanks to new fuel-efficient technology and an external structure of composite materials instead of aluminum.

Travelers will experience more natural light from wider windows, a wider variety of in-flight entertainment, and higher humidity to alleviate dry eyes and headaches. The plane also sports larger drop-down luggage bins, and buttons to adjust light coming into the cabin, in place of window shades.

Experts consider the new 787 to be the prototype of air travel in the future, and that future may be here sooner than you expect. According to Boeing, there are 821 planes on order so far, which means you might be booking your own flight on a 787 in the not-too-distant future.

Google flight search launched last week, and it’s already become the buzz of the travel industry and travelers everywhere. It’s fast, fun to use, and easy to get the results you’re looking for.

Try this for inspiration: enter your departure city and the dates you’re thinking about traveling. Voila! Cities pop up with prices for flights on those dates. Click a destination and instantly get flight times and details, then narrow down by airline, frequent flier program, flight length and more.

The only thing you can’t do — so far — is book your flight. Head on over to your favorite airline website for that. And if you want to research an international flight, you’re out of luck — at least for now. But we’re sure it’s coming soon, along with lots more helpful travel features we’re sure they’ve got up their sleeve.

Google Flights