 If you’re reading this, you’re clearly wired. Perhaps you limit yourself to perusing travel Web sites’ blogs, but if you’re like most of us, you likely throw some e-mail and social media into the mix, too. Whether it’s sharing photos from your current travels on Facebook or tweeting about a harrowing airport experience, we’re curious how long you can go without staying connected.
In a recent Facebook poll, we asked this: What’s the longest you can go when traveling without checking your e-mail/Facebook/Twitter/social media outlet of choice?
Given that the vehicle for the poll is Facebook, it’s amusing that the general consensus among those who commented is that they can forego online communication when a vacation is involved. (It’s also worth noting that several respondents mentioned cruises, where it can be difficult — and particularly expensive — to get Internet or cell phone service.)
“Social media, likely not a problem,” says Wynne Gavin. “E-mail? Now THAT would be hard, but since that’s the way I’d keep in touch and let people know I was ok, it’s moot.”
Steven Long says he sticks it out through his whole trip: “… through the entire cruise! I do not need Facebook to live!”
Lavida Rei takes it a step further, claiming she could go “forever” without it if she really wanted to.
What’s your take? How do you keep in touch while traveling? Weigh in below.
 How to Escape While Staying Connected
– written by Ashley Kosciolek
 When vetting flights and possible layovers, I take my options for connecting airports very seriously. What’s the distance between connecting gates? How speedy is immigration? Can I find something halfway decent to eat and a quiet, clean spot to sit and wait?
The availability of ultra-hip technology never entered the picture for me, until I recently discovered two airports where it’s actually fun to have a layover.
LaGuardia International Airport, New York City
Mention LaGuardia, and you can pretty much be guaranteed a grimace, wince or groan. But perhaps no longer. LaGuardia has Botoxed its image with the installation of 2,500 iPads throughout Terminals C and D. Tall tables with stools (like those you’d find in a bar) are anchored with iPads that are free for anyone to use.
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Scroll the Internet, post on Facebook, play games, monitor your flight — even order a fancy cured beef panini and a beer and have them delivered directly to your table from a nearby eatery. The iPads are a great way to kill time.
(Good news for Minneapolis and Toronto: They’re both scheduled to see similar iPad installations in the coming months.)
Changi Airport, Singapore
Changi is a techie’s dream. The airport won the 2012 World Airport Award for best leisure amenities from Skytrax, a British airline data compiler that runs an annual airport passenger satisfaction survey in 160 countries. The Wi-Fi is free and signals are Speedy Gonzales fast. More than 500 free Internet stations are sprinkled throughout the concourses and gates.
But what’s happening in Terminal 2 is the main attraction. The terminal houses an entertainment center where you can distract yourself with Xbox 360′s, Playstation 3′s and other gaming stations. There are also free, 24-hour movie theaters (in Terminal 2 and also in Terminal 3).
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And if all of that isn’t cool enough, the airport has 3D and 4D motion simulators that show eight movies with “visual, sound, motion and environmental effects.”
A long layover has never been more fun.
– written by Elissa Leibowitz Poma
 Plane tickets, hotel reservations, copies of your passport and credit cards: Would you trust your most sensitive travel documents to a cell phone app? We were skeptical, so we tested it for ourselves.
We first checked out Web site www.personal.com, where we created an account and added “gems” — categories under which you can upload and save everything from contacts to bank statements. (For our purposes, we tested out the travel gem, where we stored passport copies, trip itineraries and flight information.)
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Overall, we found the site a little tricky to use — there are still some pages we can’t figure out how to get back to — but the cell phone app, available for iPhone and Android, proved a bit easier to navigate. The app allows you to easily access your important information on the go, even while abroad, without incurring crazy international fees. The best part? It’s free to download.
So, how secure is it? Personal.com’s Web site promises all information is encrypted, and your account is also protected by a username-and-password login combination. There are ways to share gems, but much like Facebook, users have to request to share information with other users before it can be seen by others, and each user has the right to deny said requests.
As part of its newest software updates, Apple has released a program called Passbook, which, through various applications, offers functions similar to those afforded by Personal.com. We haven’t had much time to test it out, but it seems these sorts of paper-saving features are becoming more common.
Overall, we’re still unsure how safe these services are — especially if a phone containing sensitive documents were lost or stolen — but they sure do make traveling a lot more convenient.
Have you used applications like this? If not, would you consider it? If so, how was your experience? We welcome your comments below.
– written by Ashley Kosciolek
 My brother — a total tech geek — recently posted a picture on Facebook of his hotel bedside table during a trip. It was cluttered with gadgets recharging via the power strip he packed. My other brother countered with a bedside shot of his own, a bottle of wine and a new wine opener that he obviously hadn’t yet mastered, as the cork was bobbing in the half-empty bottle. I was appalled — by the technophile brother’s pic, not the oenophile brother’s pic — until I realized I often travel with just about as many gadgets. My electronics and their accoutrements seem to swallow more than their fair share of my carry-on’s real estate.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if my hotel provided me with a recharging station, so I could at least leave power cords at home? Aloft properties, such as the one in Brooklyn, have a plug and play connectivity station that charges all your electronics in addition to linking to a 42-inch LCD TV. And according to CNN.com, the Ecclestone Square Hotel in central London features in-wall docking and charging points for your electronic devices.
The Opus Vancouver hotel goes one better: It provides guests with the use of an iPhone, as reported by USA Today. This is especially cool if you’d otherwise have to pay for international roaming fees on your own phone. Plus, the important numbers for the hotel (concierge or housekeeping) are already programmed in. And they wipe the iPhone clean when you check out to protect your privacy and security. The Opus also offers an iPad 2 in every room, loaded with an iPad virtual concierge.
The Peninsula Hotel in Tokyo lends iPods to guests. The devices at the Peninsula can guide guests on walking tours of the Imperial Gardens and other city sites.
You could also use these loaner devices to take photos and upload them to social media sites where your sibling will try to one-up you.
Would you prefer to use electronics supplied by your hotel, or would you never leave home without your own gear?
– written by Jodi Thompson
 In response to the sad news of Steve Jobs’s passing, the Internet has been inundated with write-ups about the iconic innovator. I spotted one article in particular that provides an interesting commentary from a traveler’s perspective: How Steve Jobs Helped Make Apple Become a Major Disruptor in Travel, by Kevin May.
May tells how Apple shook up the industry by pressuring travel brands to develop mobile apps and mobile-friendly versions of their products. He writes, “What Apple has given consumers is a new means to experience travel — not the actual going away bit, but how they research products, interact with brands, use devices in-resort.” We’ve published lists of trip-transforming travel apps that were, a decade ago, just a twinkle in Jobs’s eye. That awesome ATM finder or the currency conversion app you can’t globetrot without wouldn’t exist if Jobs hadn’t dreamed up the interface for it.
This probably isn’t exactly news to the tech-savvy traveler. Actually, considering the renown of Jobs and his inventions, nor is it news to the technophobe traveler who prints his itinerary on a typewriter. But here’s the exciting part: The biggest and best fruits of Apple may be still to come. Writes May, “For the best part of 18 months, Apple has been busily filing technology patents in the U.S. for essentially what is a series of tools for handheld devices, known as iTravel. These range from search and booking and location information tools, to hotel and airport concierges and cruise trip services.”
Picture this: You arrive at the airport, skip the check-in queue and head straight for security. Your passport and driver’s license are at home in a desk drawer. You don’t need to stand in line to get your boarding pass because it’s already on your iPhone, ready to be scanned — along with your hotel reservations, your itinerary and even your electronic identification. Patently Apple published a summary of a patent filed by Apple in 2010 that would allow travelers to accomplish just this. The patent even foretells the possibility of airport security checkpoints that use “automatic identity verification,” such as facial recognition technology or retina scans coupled with electronic ID’s stored on handheld devices, to speed travelers through security.
It’s exciting, inspiring stuff. Jobs may be gone, but he lives on through his technology, and through the already incalculable impact he’s had on the way we travel.
– written by Caroline Costello
 In “Super Sad True Love Story,” Gary Shteyngart’s fictional novel set in the near future, bar patrons use advanced smartphone-like devices to detect the best-looking person in an establishment and rate all patrons on a numeric scale of attractiveness. Such an app, thank everything that is holy, does not exist. Yet. But a similar kind of app is rolling out across the U.S., and it could, surprisingly, offer some advantages for travelers.
11 Essential Travel Apps
SceneTap, a free app for iPhone, Android and the Web, uses facial detection cameras to determine the male-to-female ratio of people in select bars, as well as calculate the average age of everyone inside. It’s kind of like Big Brother — that is, if Big Brother were a sleazy rake seeking gender-specific bar patrons of a certain age.
The app, which launched last month, presently functions just at bars in Chicago. But the folks at SceneTap are working hard to bring their app to a drinking hole near you. SceneTap spokesperson Andrew Cross told me in an e-mail that more than 250 bars and nightclubs around the U.S. have signed up to join SceneTap. And the company is in the process of researching international markets.
Now, here’s why I might actually use SceneTap. In addition to serving up the creepy age and gender stats, the app shows how many people are in a bar, and lists relevant food and drink specials. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve showed up at a historic pub listed in my guidebook, only to encounter a sweaty pack of patrons pushing out the door, half of whom were likely led there by the same mass-produced guidebook. Crowds spook me. So when this happens, I usually turn around and go someplace less interesting. I think it’d be useful to know how packed a place is before taking two tubes and a bus to get there.
What’s your take on SceneTap? Is it a useful travel tool … or an app for tools?
– written by Caroline Costello
 Every Wednesday, we’ll feature one practical travel tip here, on our blog. Get our clever weekly tips and other travel resources in your inbox by subscribing to our blog (top right) or signing up for our newsletter.
So you’re going overseas and you’d sooner cut off a limb than leave your smartphone behind. (We understand. There’s nothing like a little Angry Birds to while away a long flight.) You probably already know that you can call your carrier and have an international calling/data plan temporarily added to your account to cover the dates of your trip. But Ed Hewitt identifies one potential pitfall:
“When you make a connection overseas, you are typically not connecting to your own carrier’s service, but to a third-party carrier, which then bills your carrier, which bills you. Some of these carriers will not bill your account in an entirely timely manner, such that data connections made in July might show up on your August bill. As such, you will want to make sure the dates for your data package extend long enough after your trip to cover these late-billing companies, and you will want to watch your account to make sure all charges have been applied before turning off your international package.”
If you remove your international package too soon, any subsequent overseas calls or downloads could be charged at your cell phone carrier’s normal (read: exorbitant) rates.
Don’t assume that your carrier’s international plan is your best option. Hewitt offers his own secrets for avoiding calling and data charges in Traveling with a Smartphone: Cut Costs Overseas.
– written by Sarah Schlichter
 Is your obsession with the “Real Housewives” franchise interfering with your hygiene? Has your spouse ever referred to your Blackberry as “that tramp”? Do your travel photos consist mostly of images of you posting travel photos to Facebook? If you answered “yes,” a digital detox package could help.
According to the Wall Street Journal, legions of hotels are offering digital detox packages to cure gadget-obsessed guests of their technology addictions. These packages encourage travelers to dump their smartphones, laptops and other vestiges of modernity in the lap of the hotel concierge (or, in a less dramatic move, to just leave them at home), in exchange for certain perks.
How do the hotels manage to wrench perfectly good iPads out from under the restless thumbs of wired travelers? They sweeten the transaction with discounts — and the occasional copy of “Anna Karenina.” Writes the WSJ, “Typically, they ask travelers to surrender their electronic devices upon check-in. In return, concierges provide them with old-fashioned diversions, from board games to literary classics. (Most, but not all, also yank TV sets and telephones from ‘detox’ rooms.)”
Here’s an example: The Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel is offering a special promotional rate for guests who turn over their electronic gizmos at check-in. The hotel’s “Zen and the Art of Detox” package includes accommodations and kayaking lessons for nightly rates starting at $199. Before you get to your room, the hotel staff will remove the TV, phone and iHome dock station, and replace such contraband with “literary classics.” If you leave the hotel during your stay, a staff member will follow you and pelt you with Jane Austen novels whenever you come within 500 yards of an Apple store or a Starbucks with an Internet connection.
Are we so obsessed with megapixels and apps that we need someone to drag the flat-screen out of the hotel room and confiscate our phones before we can relax?
I must add, removing the phone from the hotel room could be a safety hazard. If someone breaks in or you choke on your dinner, how do you call for help? Are you supposed to ring some kind of antique service bell? I suggest bending the rules a bit and smuggling an extra smartphone into your room in case of emergency. (Try baking it into a cake — this seems to work in prison movies.)
What’s your take? Would you book a digital detox vacation package, or is this kind of thing just a silly marketing ploy?
– written by Caroline Costello
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