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Shop-a-rama: Get more miles
Airlines have long offered their own “shopping mall” websites to give you frequent flyer mile kickbacks when you place your online orders through their links. There’s a competitor, though: Shop4Miles lets you search for specific products across a range of sellers, and then earn miles on either Alaska, Delta, or United. It’s a hybrid of a comparison shopping site and a mileage mall. Bring on the bonus miles!

The guru defeats the scorecard
The field of websites devoted to choosing the best airline seats just got smaller, as two controversial seat selection websites are now defunct. It appears that SeatGuru won its lawsuit against the people behind LoveMySeat and SeatScorecard. The suit, filed last year, argued that the newer sites stole SeatGuru’s copyrighted content and represented it as their own. Looks like crime doesn’t pay: LoveMySeat.com and its duplicate site SeatScorecard.com now both auto-forward to SeatGuru.com. (For what it’s worth, I reviewed the different seat selection sites nearly a year ago, before any of the legal fracas had started.)

Transit and Taxis, mapped
I was peeking around the Google Labs and found a pair of interesting travel related sites in a beta-test. (They’re not new, per se, but if I may borrow from NBC’s simultaneously obnoxious and brilliant tagline for airing reruns, if I haven’t seen it, it’s new to me!) First is Google Transit, a site that helps you plan trips on mass transit systems. Much like driving directions, the system guides you from point A to point B. Many cities’ transit systems have a similar system in place already (for example, here’s Chicago’s trip planner), but Google is trying to become a one-stop shop for multiple transit systems. In the future, it will apparently offer a price comparison between driving and using mass transit. (Fare information is missing completely at this point — that’s a major gap.) The number of cities included at this point is fairly limited, but if your travels take you to Portland, Oregan, Honolulu, Seattle, or (wait for it) Duluth, Minnesota, you’re in luck.

Second, Google Ride Finder, which tracks taxis in major cities. Only large cab companies are included, seemingly, and I assume they’re tracking GPS locations. I’m not sure of the lag time between the info on the site and the actual physical location of the taxi. I saw a cab indicated on my street, so I looked out the window. No dice. Still, a neat idea.

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