AARP relaunches travel website, adds interactive features

This isn’t your grandma’s AARP site.

Besides a booking engine that’s powered by Expedia, the newly relaunched AARP Travel is full of useful tips as well as suggestions on destinations tailored to specific interests.

Its interactive Trip Finder feature is designed to match travelers’ desires with suitable locations at home and abroad. Check a few boxes and the site suggests four getaways.

During a test drive, I clicked on the images for “Sightseeing” and “Charming Towns” for a couples vacation in May. The results identified Big Sur; Vienna, Austria; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Bali as places that would fit my needs. (I would, however, have put Vienna and St. Petersburg in the “Bustling Cities” category.)

Map Explorer provides interactive, street-level maps pointing out attractions, restaurants and hotels.

On the My Trips page, users can save and organize their travel ideas, as well as relevant articles.

Visitors to the site will also find helpful advice from travel expert Samantha Brown, the AARP “travel ambassador.” Her suggestions are common sense but helpful: For example, she urges out-of-towners seeking a great place to eat breakfast to ask workers on the night shift.

There are no age restrictions for using the site, but AARP members will, in some cases, be eligible for discounts.

The organization’s 50-and-older members are expected to be prime users. Such boomers travel overnight to destinations at least 50 miles from home an average of six times a year, the organization says. Eight out of 10 of them use the Web both to plan and book their trips.