Winter’s long snowbound delays in the airport lounge begin to look downright restful as the wild weirdness that is summer travel gets underway.

On this sunny day, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite tips to help keeps those “stuck-in-line behind the Von Trap family blues” at bay:

1) Take your WiFi with you.

For an extra $11 or so a day, Avis now offers the ‘Autonet Mobile Service’. This is a portable WiFi receiver that can be carried anywhere; “from the hotel room to the conference room and beyond.”

Autonet provides you WiFi access for your entire trip. No extra equipment needed - your WiFi card in your laptop is your passport to connectivity. No getting codes from the hotel, hunting for an Internet cafe, or beseeching your clients for some uptime.

It even works IN your Avis rental car. Although they politely ask that you not use it while driving.

2)Use an all-in-one booking service.

Remember in olden times, when you had a corporate travel agent? The kind that would say “Oh, you’re headed to Richardson? I know the best place for lunch…”

These days even when there is one available, it is usually just for ticketing. Where to stay, where to eat, these are things we research and follow-up ourselves. In between checking the local weather, tracking flight times and printing out local maps.

Using an all-in-one service, like Orbitz, really did have me slapping my forehead and wondering why I hadn’t done it before.

In addition to sending travel alerts to your PDA or cell phone (which all airlines do these days), Orbitz also gathers up the weather reports and delays, cool destination podcasts (I love those) and travel guides, global news that could affect your travel, and even maps to airports all in one place.

3) Check the local traffic.

Last year, some of my far-flung family were passing through the Chicago area on their way to Wisconsin and found themselves spending hours at the state border, absolutely paralyzed in holiday traffic.

I felt for them, deeply.

If you haven’t already discovered Traffic.com, you’re in for a treat. It is a free website that saves you from such horrible fates as the one that befell my family by clearly displaying real-time traffic and detours.

One of my favorite functions? It will send you email or text message alerts on the road, so you know when to exit off the highway before giving away a few hours of your life to some gaper’s gridlock.

Bon Voyage!

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