What is Northern Europe Travel Planner?

 It Covers the following European countries: Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland + Alderney, Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Monaco. (There is a companion CD-ROM available that covers the Mediterranean countries.) This is the first travel-planning program I've used. For purchasing details, see the end of the review. 

What Does the Box Hold?

System Requirements The minimum system requirements are: Windows 95 or 3.1 Windows PC (NT may require manual installation); A 486DX2-66 PC or better; A fast, double speed CD-ROM drive or better; At least 8 Megabytes of RAM and 16 Megabytes of free hard disk space for installation. For best photo display, the monitor should be set to display at least 640x480 resolution in 65k colors (instructions on the CD explain how). 

Installing the Program

Since the program uses both the hard drive and the CD-ROM, I wanted to install it on my "H: CD-ROMs" drive in the "Reference Titles" folder. Even using the DOS file name, I was not able to successfully install the program to the desired folder. I finally settled for installing it to the "H: CD-ROMs" drive's root folder. That installation was successful. 

As part of my troubleshooting steps, at one point I installed it to its default folder of "C:\PLANWARE" with no problems. I then uninstalled it with its own uninstaller, which worked fine. This program doesn't scatter files all over your hard drive. 
 
 

What's Included in the Program?

Travelers planning vacations can decide on sites to visit using attraction descriptions, admission information, photographs, and maps to select and compile a customized itinerary to take-along. 

 The core of the text and maps comes from the Baedeker's (publishers of guidebooks since 1844) series of guidebooks (18 separate books for this CD-ROM) enhanced by supplementary data developed by PlanetWare researchers. Practical information includes national data, holidays, addresses, packing lists and tips to save money. 

 For those of you interested in statistics, The PlanetWare Northern Europe Travel Planner includes: More than 25,000 attractions and events, More than 8,000 addresses, More than 1,000 walking and driving tours, More than 750 maps and 880 photos, and More than 2 million words of text. 
 
 

Running the Program

Active buttons look rounded while inactive buttons, for the most part, look flat. However, in some areas of the program a button which looks active doesn't do what it says it does. This can be frustrating, especially it you don't remember which major component of the program actually works for that task. 

 You won't find any drop down menus in this program, just buttons and lists. For many screens, this makes it very easy to use. Other times, when the screen has many areas, the buttons can become confusing. Also depending on which path you took to get to the screen determines how some buttons behave. While the program has pop-up tips and information bar messages to help you, reading the help files and practicing with the program are necessary. 

 The Search feature is very powerful and worked quickly on my system. You can set it to begin with a particular country on startup if you're working on a particular agenda. You can search by place name, interest, geographical location using maps, top rated, planned tours, passes and keyword for any unique search. The keyword search will take the longest time especially if you tell the program to search all the text files. 

 Working with the Agenda is the hardest part of the program. Even when you tell it to add a preplanned tour, you still need to go in and add specific information for each attraction included such as what time of day you want to visit and for how long. This takes time and one of the greatest failings of the information becomes apparent. Some tours will give you the total time the tour will take but nowhere does the program give you a recommended amount of time to spend at each site. This failing becomes very noticeable when you look at the options of what you can include on the printout. One of them is "Typical visit durations". It looks like the programmers meant to put the information in but it never happened. 

 You can add information you obtained from other places into the agenda. For instance, you find in the paper or on the Web that a play you want to see will be on in London when you're there but the time's too short to get tickets before you leave. So you can make an entry with the details for the first day you're in England. That way it'll be on your printout so you won't forget to call and you'll have all the information necessary to make the reservations. You'll even know what evenings you have free. 

 While you can print the agenda from within the program, its estimate of the number of pages can be way off. For instance, I did a quick and dirty agenda for a trip to England. I told it to print with only a few of the optional items. It told me it would take 5 pages when in actuality it took 10 pages. Good points about the printout include the title of the trip and the page number on every page. It also summarized all the admission fees at the end since I told it to include them for the attractions. This is a great feature since you can plan ahead for those admission fees or use it to see if a package tour which includes admissions is a good deal. 

 Instead of printing the agenda to the printer, you can print it to a file. It doesn't print it to a printer file but to a text file that you can open in any word processor and edit to suit yourself. If you have a high-end program, you can even add maps and photos from the CD-ROM once you've identified them. 

 I found the photographs stunning although there are very few for some countries. In fact, some countries have none at all. For example, I could find none for Luxembourg. For a product that says it helps you to "find thousands of highly rated attractions or lesser-known gems" I find this curious. I've visited Luxembourg and there are fabulous views to be had of its fortifications. I was also disappointed by the few pictures of the Netherlands, most of which were of Amsterdam. Since I was stationed there in the early 80's I was looking for more than are there. No pictures of the shipyards or the great damns and barriers built to keep out the sea and reclaim land were included. The program doesn't permit you to print out the photos from within itself. However, since they're in bitmap format, you can access them from a graphics program and print them from there. 

I was very disappointed in the maps. They were very small and I had a hard time reading the place names and other writing on them. There is no zoom feature to get a closer look. Finding the map you want, opening it in a graphics program and resizing it will not work since they're in bitmap format. (The words become very blurry so it doesn't solve the problem.) It looks like they just scanned the maps in from the books since they appear to be the same size as those I've seen in many guide books. Since you can't print them out from within the program, I think larger, easier to read maps would improve the program. 

 The practical information section is very well done. The Holidays listing includes the dates through the year 2022 and days for the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in addition to all the European countries. Many Muslim as well as Christian holy days are included as well. There are extensive lists of addresses and telephone numbers for tourist offices around the world as well. Click buttons to display the telephone numbers in three dialing formats: international, long distance within country and local. The travel tips section provides information that will help with travel anywhere. 

 The Help Section is not a Windows help file. It is arranged well and it's fairly easy to find information in it. However, there is no direct method of printing the files out within the program. You have to copy the information to a word processing program and print it from there. They do tell you how to do this however. The good point about this is you can cut and paste, add to, and format the material to make it easier for you to read before you print it. For example, you could change the font size to 14 or 16 it you have trouble reading small print. 

 I discovered a few things about the program as I worked with it that I wish to share with you. If you start the program without its CD-ROM in the drive, it shows you its own dialog box that tells you what to do. It offers you the choice of inserting the CD-ROM and retrying, changing the drive letter, or inactivating the CD-ROM for the current session. You would choose the last choice if you just want to work on your travel agenda without adding new sites. (This dialog box can serve as a model for other programs.) 

 When I visited the web site (http://www.planetware.ca/), I found a support page with upgrade patches for various versions of the program. When I looked in the usual places (Help file, text files on the CD-ROM, etc.), I could not find the version number. I took the opportunity to call Planet Ware's toll free number. The woman who answered the telephone told me they put the version number on the CD-ROM itself. When I looked, I found that I have version 2.1. I didn't think to look at such an obvious place. You can also find lists of features, top-rated sites, information about the Mediterranean companion CD-ROM, order forms and a program demo at the web site. 
 
 

Other Features: 

What isn't included?

Bottom Line

Since I've never used another travel planner, I can't tell you how it compares to other programs. I would still consult other sources for things to do and see, as every guidebook has its own bias. 

 If you have children in elementary or middle school, this program can also serve as a geography reference when they have reports to do. 
 
 

Vital Statistics

 To purchase Northern Europe Travel Planner directly from PlanetWare you can: 

 Jacquelyn Sykes retired from the Army in 1990 after 20 years in Military Personnel. Her first use of computers was in High School Geometry in 1965. She wrote simple math programs on paper tape, which ran on a minicomputer. Her first computer was an Atari 800. She currently co-edits The Comm Panel: The Official Newsletter of Star Trek: San Antonio. She has been an Alamo PC member for over 3 years.