www.eurotrip.com have a good forum geared for budget travellers and backpackers - and frequented by them.

There probably is an age gap too on the populace of these forums.

If you have access to AOL, I've found their boards very chatty and informative. And fewer stupid questions and trolls!

AOL members are allowed to have several names on their account, so even if you don't have one of your own, perhaps a friend or relative would add you as a user on theirs.

ttt

But it remains true that to access the AOL boards you have to pay a fee, right? if AOL is not your ISP?

I can't see wanting to do that. I've taken enough guff about saying that I would be willing to pay a voluntary ("vanity") fee to be able to register here.

Best wishes,

Rex

www.slowtrav.com

interesting and helpful. not as lively.

www.lonelyplanet.com

addresses a different kind of traveler. more footloose and fancy free. enamored of backpacks and hostels, a little bit.

Frommers.com

I second the AOL travel boards. Fodors is the only other one I've seen that is as helpful and friendly.

best board (with lot of international users and less trolls) is www.virtualtourist.com

Thanks!
I tried most of them, but none seems as active and as wide range as the Fodors forum.
Being a very experienced world wide traveler I still get so much good advice from nice people on this forum. I cannot believe that there are no other similar sites.
Any more suggestions?
AA

There are Internet Newsgroups on just about every subject imaginable. For example: rec.travel.europe and rec.travel.usa-canada

toping

TTT

As regulars here know, I admire this forum. But I must admit that on central and eastern Europe the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum is much stronger, with resident Romanian and Serbian contributors, and notes on places like Kaliningrad, Kosice and Moldova that are seldom mentioned here. I think that what Fodors reflects is good word of mouth publicity for the places open to anybody in days before 1990, and ignorance of north American travel agents of the world beyond Prague and Krakow. It is a shame. There are delightful provincial towns and cities from Tartu to Plovdiv, cheap and friendly. Many of them are a train journey of a day or a night from Frankfurt or Venice airports.

The level of courtesy on the Fodors site is well above that on the Lonely Planet site.

Ben Haines, London

I just discovered, and really like www.igougo.com

I find AOL very clicky and not very helpful. Same people all in love with what they have to say. I think most of them would be voted to the pompous ass club here.

Grasshopper, it's true, some of the travel boards on AOL are really obnoxious -- I gave up on the London board, for instance. But others are great -- the New York City board is exemplary!

I have found this to be true of AOL boards in general -- I've been in boards on gardening topics, health, etc. etc. Some are just awful, full of bullies, and some are wonderful.

The best by far, no comparison really, is Fodors, this very site. Easy to access, easy to read, easy to respond, friendly people on the most part, lively interesting threads, some funny, some touching. I am hooked.

I agree, Nancy, so am I. Hooked, I mean.
AA

I did one of those free trials with the AOL cds you get in the mail. I searched their travel forums and found them extremely poor especially from an informational standpoint. They have lousy format and navigation, no long term archives, and the user base is limited to AOL users only. Don't waste your time or money unless you happen to already have them as your ISP.

Sandman, you are of course entitled to your opinion, based on your brief free sample of AOL service, but my opinion is based on 5 years of membership and using them for planning several trips.

Many new users have trouble selecting formats (e.g., threaded or not) and the messages ARE archived, with an instantly updated search function (unlike Fodors). Since AOL currently has 34 million members worldwide, who automatically access its travel boards, the size of the user base is a non-issue; all those folks get sent to the same travel boards, unlike other ISPs, where users might find Fodors and might not.

The quality and detail of information varies from one geograhic area to another, based on the interests and participation of AOL members, but the same is true for Fodors -- it's much easier to get info both here and on AOL on Paris/London/Rome than on Prague/Budapest/Kiev.

any more suggestions?

I have just recommended this site in another post. www.holidaytruths.co.uk
I have been a fodors addict for a couple of years but recently found this site. It is a HUGE site.And also you have to register. Have a look at that site and see how fodors would also benefit if they introduced registration.

All of the forums mentioned above have some good points and some terrible features.

Fodors here seems the most active, so when a post is made, several people might quickly respond. However, Fodors has a terrible feature in that it is impossible to find answers to your post after a few hours. We are left with scrolling down through hundreds to find responses. And, of course, because the keep going down the list, you will never get new responses after a few hours because no one is scrolling down to read, and respond, to messages over a few hours old.

This forum, COULD be the best of all, if it were set up like Lonely Planet or Virtual Tourist.

have just looked at holidaytruths and it certainly is a great site. Loads of different forums- I can see me spending hours at a time there!

Traveltalkonline.com
travel-board.com
travelhall.com

Flyertalk.com has fun boards, obviously geared to flying and frequent flyer programs, but not exclusively. They have an "omni" forum which IMO could be a model for Fodors - don't censor politics or humor, just give them their own home.

I am researching a trip to Ireland and am finding the one at IrelandYes.com good and lively. It is only about Ireland though.

topping